Chapter 28

THE GEO-HISTORY OF LONG-DISTANCE TRADE IN TIBET 1850–1950

Wim van Spengen

This article represents in an abridged form the original research eventually published in the most detailed economic history of Tibet, Wim van Spengen’s Tibetan Border Worlds: A Geo-historical Analysis of Trade and Traders (2000). Due in part to the limitations of Tibetan-language source materials, relatively little has been written about the economy of Tibet. This article takes advantage of the burgeoning Western (English, German, French) travel literature from the mid-nineteenth century onward to analyze Tibetan trade. The method of analysis draws on the work of Fernand Braudel, which introduces the idea of regional economic-worlds (économies-mondes) and defines each of these in terms of an internally cohesive set of relations, a “movementspace” (espace-mouvement). Van Spengen applies these concepts to the Tibetan plateau and delineates a distinct network of trade relations in connection to the regional economic-worlds of China and British India. By viewing the Tibetan economic space in relation to these neighboring economic-worlds, he is able to trace variations in products, markets, and routes, thereby placing Tibet in the context of world economic history as well.

It is the purpose of this study to identify the main structural characteristics of long-distance trade within the particular geo-historical setting of Tibet during the period 1850 to 1950. It is this historically transitional period, which forms the background to our discussion of long-distance trade within the Tibetan culture world at large.1 The choice for the period concerned is justified because it covers the final days of disintegration of Central Tibet as an ecclesiastical state based on a long-distance trade in luxury goods. But it is also the time of the rise of Tibet as a politically defined national state under the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. In addition, the period under review shows the decline of foreign merchant communities and the corresponding rise of Tibetan trade initiatives in outlying regions as a response to wider processes of geo-political change. The “frontier” character of Tibet gave way to contending imperialist spheres of interest, ultimately leading to a Chinese-dictated Indo-Tibetan boundary in the Himalayan region. In fact, this “frontier” character forms the structural geo-historical background against which the following discussion of a changing Tibetan trading region has been set. Even so, change has not been uniform for a variety of geographical and historical reasons. It is the stated purpose of this study not to overlook those differences.

The thus defined broad geo-historical setting will be conceptualized with the help of Braudel’s major analytic category of économie-monde, as developed in his Civilisation Matérielle.² An économie-monde, according to Braudel, is an economically autonomous part of the world, essentially capable of being self-sufficient. It is a major espace-mouvement in terms of its trade flows and perhaps its civilization. In an Asian setting and application, Braudel, somewhat surprisingly, distinguishes only one économie-monde, which marches under the rather illogical name of Extrême-Orient, because it comprises the sub-regional economies, or rather the économies-mondes, of both India and China, the Malayan world acting as a pivot of exchange.³ Tibet in this view is thought to have been linked to the long-standing Chinese “wing,” as were Korea, Indo-China, Yunnan and Mongolia.⁴ The Indian “wing,” although a great national market, is thought of as less integrated than the Chinese one, and in Braudel’s view appears more clearly on the international scene with the rise of British India.

The idea of fluctuating prosperity of an économie-monde in response to a long-term secular trend, although in itself insufficiently understood, is an attractive complementary feature of Braudel’s theorizing, as it allows for the historical dynamics of regional organization to be incorporated in our analysis. The prosperity, for example, of the Tibeto-Himalayan economy in the seventeenth century, was undoubtedly linked to the flourishing of the adjacent Indian and Chinese économies-mondes. When by the beginning of the nineteenth century an overall decline had set in, especially in China, Tibet too, gradually lost its economic vigor, only to be drawn slowly into the orbit of a rising and gradually better integrated British-Indian économie-monde. Within this particular geohistorical setting, Tibet developed into an economic-geographic transitional zone, linked up in Braudelian terms with the fortunes of its neighboring économies-mondes.⁵

THE TRADITIONAL BARTER COMPLEX

Geographically speaking, Tibet consists of a mountain-fringed mosaic of greater and lesser plateau, gently sloping towards the great river trenches in the southeast of the country. Its highest stretch of mountainous tableland is the desolate Changtang, located in the north-central part of Tibet. On this high tableland roam a few hardy nomads, but the major nomad countries are to be found in the broad band of grassland which runs along the rim of the Changtang from Amdo in the northeast via Central Tibet to the Indian border in the southwest. Areas of settled agriculture and sedentary farming generally follow the lower lying river valleys in the south and the southeast of the country. But in many of the higher areas elsewhere in Tibet, as well as those in the Himalaya, pastoralism both in its full-blown and mixed forms are part and parcel of the local economies.

Nomadism and related activities in Tibet are still insufficiently documented, although we do have a number of written reports and monographs of varying quality at our disposal.6 From these, as well as from a number of erratic references across a disparate set of complementary sources, we have to distil the meaning and importance of Tibetan nomad life and its role in the traditional barter complex.

“The chief economic wealth of Tibet lies in its nomad cattle-breeding districts. Deprive Tibet of its cattle-breeding regions and the country would starve.”⁷ This shrewd observation by a Russian Tibetanist, who crossed the Changtang in 1925, highlights the importance of Tibet’s nomad countries. And indeed it was the wool production based on extensive yak and goat keeping that made a viable enterprise out of the high-altitude Tibetan economy at large. The one problem which Tibet’s herders shared with many other nomads in the world was that they needed foodgrains to supplement their meat and milk based diet. The sedentary farmers of the drier Tibetan West however, were not always capable of producing enough food to supplement the nomad’s diet with the necessary grain. Fortunately, the Tibetan nomad economies themselves were seldom lacking in productive capacity and were generally able to produce a surplus of animal products, in particular wool. These could be exchanged for larger consignments of foodgrains, if necessary even from beyond Tibet’s borders. In addition there was the salt for which there was ample demand in the cis-Himalayan region and eastern Tibet. The general picture of exchange is completed by large imports of tea from China which found their way all over Tibet. Thus, the traditional Tibetan barter complex rested, with considerable regional variations, in the exchange of wool and salt for foodgrains and tea, the latter of which may be regarded as a daily necessity within a Tibetan context.

As pointed out before, nomad countries in Tibet are mainly to be found along the southern and eastern rim of the Changtang. These pastoral pays are not of equal prosperity, due to a variety of reasons. Combe, who edited the observations of “a Tibetan on Tibet” (viz. Paul Sherap, or Dorje Zodba), gives a brief overview of the nomad countries Dorje was personally acquainted with, and though impressionistic, the few pages convey the image of a number of widely disparate nomad societies.8 First of all, there are differences in resource base, the eastern and northeastern nomad countries generally enjoying higher precipitation, and consequently having better grazing grounds than their counterparts in western Tibet.⁹ But whether a nomad country made a more prosperous impression or not also depended on its external relations. The differences in wealth noted by Dorje Zodba in the 1910s and 20s must have been at least partly related to their location vis-à-vis potential buyers of nomad products, or to their capacity to control crucial transport routes. Contrary perhaps to popular wisdom, an economy founded on pastoralism is not infrequently an economy of relatively high involvement in the market.¹⁰ According to Khazanov, there are two different forms of nomad interaction with the outside world. Firstly, there is direct trade and barter with both agricultural and urban societies. Secondly, there takes place mediation or participation in the trade between different sedentary societies, in the form of transport and middleman services.¹¹

The first form is mainly an example of “vertical trade,” that is the local exchange of animal products of the plateau-dwelling nomads for the grain of the valley-resident farmers. It is this trade to which a Tibetan nomad still referred when the American anthropologists Goldstein and Beall conducted research in the Pala nomad country of western Tibet in 1987:

“You see,” he said, “we live off the products of our animals. Every year our sheep provide wool, skins, meat, milk and butter which we use for food and clothes as well as for bartering with villagers to obtain barley, tea and so forth.”¹²

The inclusion of tea in an otherwise home-produced set of trading articles as referred to in the above citation, shows once more the important position of tea in the barter complex under discussion.

The second form of nomad trade is less dependent on the productive capacity of nomadism per se, but more on the power of transportation offered by its yaks, dzos (a crossbreed), goats and sheep. The control over pack-animals in combination with a favorable location astride distinct ecozones, as well as a thorough knowledge of routes in difficult terrain, made the nomads and semi-nomads of Tibet’s border areas often into middlemen-transporters in a transregional and cross-cultural trade. If the right combination of animal control, favorable location, ecosystematic complementarity and sufficient demand existed, long-distance caravan trading and the supplying of caravan traders were sometimes more profitable for the nomads than was the direct exchange of pastoral for agricultural products. In addition, a specialized animal trade developed in some border areas, which provided a sort of mixture between the two forms mentioned above. Examples of the latter were the large-scale trade in Amdo-bred cavalry horses for the Chinese army at the Gansu horse fairs,13 as well as the annual sale of tens of thousands of sheep to Nepal at the time of a major Hindu festival.¹⁴

The nomad way of life is one of inherent mobility. The necessary shifts of nomad camps to assure continuous and good grazing feature prominently in daily and seasonal routines. But as pasture-grounds, in particular around the fixed winter encampments, had the character of non-alienable land owned by specific clans or tribes,¹⁵ movements tended to be restricted in space. Moreover, groups of herders that were living nearer to the settled agricultural areas stood in varying degrees of dependency to monasteries and feudal chiefs, the liens involved being ever so many restrictions to the free movement of nomad subjects.¹⁶ Even the independent Golok nomads of the upper Huanghe or Machu basin in eastern Tibet were subject to the supreme moral authority of the lamas and depended for the barter of their animal products on the regional monasteries in the neighboring valley-areas.¹⁷ In a wider sense then, their movements too, were necessarily structured, not to say restricted. Beyond this world of local exchanges lay the regional networks of nomad and related middlemen trade. Especially in the drier parts of western Tibet, insufficient grain could be grown to feed the nomad populations outside the valleys. Consequently, a whole system of Trans-Himalayan grain imports had developed over the centuries which were paid for by salt and wool.

THE SALT FOR GRAIN BARTER

The salt trade had its productive origin in the lakelands of Central Tibet and the Tsaidam basin. Latter-day research has discovered forty-six kinds of salt minerals in the saline lakes, among which fourteen are borates.¹⁸ The borates, in the form of raw borax or tincal, commanded a good sale in Europe, in particular during the first half of the nineteenth century. The demand by the European porcelain industry was met almost exclusively by the Tibetan trade, but the discovery of borax in the Italian province of Tuscany, as well as its chemical production later on in the century, brought to an end this lucrative trade.¹⁹ As some of the nomads must have been involved in the first stages of this long-distance trade, it may have brought a certain wealth to their communities, which however declined at the eclipse of their monopoly. The borax-digging at Puga in Ladakh, for example, was already past its heyday in 1847.²⁰ The export of borax from Tibet to China however, continued unabated.²¹

What was left was the export of non-borate salts for daily use in the Himalayan border lands, insofar as they could compete with imported sea salt from the south. Salt from the Tsaidam basin in Northeastern Tibet was brought to the eastern Tibetan province of Kham, where it formed one of the staple trades. The salt was brought down by the nomads from Amdo and exchanged for the barley of the densely-settled agricultural valleys along the Yangzi (Drichu) and Yalung (Dzachu).22 Southeastern Tibet obtained its supplies of salt from the brine wells on the banks of the Mekong at Yenching or Tswakhalo,²³ but its sphere of influence being small, it had to compete with salt coming down from the Tsaidam basin and the Nakchuka area, which harbored at Nakchu a kind of transit market for the products of many Central Tibetan nomad countries. Salt, then, was an important trade product for the nomads, as they alone possessed the transport capacity and the spatial mobility making possible the exploitation of salt at its places of production.²⁴

The general picture that arises is one of a number of salt-producing regions where nomads fetched the salt and brought it down to seasonal markets, monasteries and villages. From there it was transported onwards to a series of frontier fairs along the Sino-Tibetan and Himalayan borders. In exchange for the salt, several grains found their way into Tibet, in particular its western parts where the climate showed less clemency than in its eastern reaches. The main food imports in western Tibet consisted of barley and to a far lesser extent wheat. Rice, for the higher classes, was imported from Tsayül and Pemakö, both low-lying regions in southeastern Tibetan territory. But as these were far away from the main centers of population, additional rice of a superior quality was brought in from Assam, Bhutan and Nepal.²⁵ Trade in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands was of a different character. The trade between Tibet and China was largely monopolized by merchants from the eastern Tibetan province of Kham. These were either private traders doing business on their own account or on behalf of monasteries.²⁶

THE TEA AND WOOL TRADE OF TIBET

For more than a thousand years already Tibet is the land of great tea drinkers.27 Tea for the Tibetan market was almost exclusively grown in the Chinese province of Sichuan, where the prefecture of Yachao was the collecting center of a number of tea-growing districts.²⁸ The trade at Yachao was controlled by Chinese tea firms,²⁹ which prepared the tea for export to Tibet by packing quantities into coarse rectangular bricks.³⁰ From Yachao the tea was carried to the Sino-Tibetan frontier town of Daqianlu by way of human porterage, as the terrain to be crossed was too mountainous to allow for the use of pack-animals. The porterage was performed by “a very nationality of porters,” the so-called Giama Rongbas (from Gyelmo rong?), who inhabit the cultural fringe land between the two towns.³¹ From Yachao, the tea carriers saw their loads over a distance of some two hundred kilometers to Daqianlu [Dartsedo], where the tea generally changed hands from Chinese to Tibetan traders. With old-established firms, business was put through without a written contract, but the use of paper, being introduced from China, gained in importance in the early decades of the twentieth century.³²

Daqianlu, familiarly known as the Shanghai of Tibet,³³ yet harboring a mere five thousand inhabitants,³⁴ was a veritable node of trade routes.³⁵ Although Chinese-ruled since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the town had been able to retain its Tibetan atmosphere, as it really lay well within the Tibetan culture region which was thought to extend right up to the Dong river a few kilometers to the east of the town. Daqianlu was the major break-of-bulk point for a variety of goods leaving and entering the eastern Tibetan province of Kham, human porterage as a mode of transport at this point being replaced by pack-animals and vice versa.³⁶

Tea too, was subject to this operation. Thus the Tibetan purchaser removed the less durable Yachao wicker-work and repacked the tea in relatively small brick-like loads, a number of which were tightly sewn together in a yak-skin cover, especially the better quality teas destined for the Lhasa market.³⁷ In addition, Chinese and Tibetan duties had to be paid at Daqianlu for fixed quantities and qualities of tea entering and leaving the town.³⁸ After that the tea was ready for its onward journey into the highlands of Tibet.³⁹

The tea trade of Tibet was in the main an inward-looking affair. Tea steadily came to pervade even the remotest districts, though sometimes by enforced sales to the local populations.⁴⁰ In contrast, the wool trade was largely an outwardly directed phenomenon, based on an externally generated demand and involving relations far beyond the grasp of the ordinary nomad farmer. In particular after 1890, wool increasingly found its way to Europe and America, where the coarse Tibetan sheep wool was used in the carpet-making industry. But before this international “boom” trade gained full shape in the early decades of the twentieth century, the fame of the Tibetan wool rested in another supra-regional circuit, that of the shawl-wool or pashm of western Tibet.

Pashm is the fine wool of a particular type of goat, whose main habitat is to be found in the region between Lake Pangong on the Ladakh border and Lake Manasarovar near the sacred peak of Kailash.41 Together with musk, a natural perfume, it was one of the two products for which Tibet was known to the outside world since the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, this fine Tibetan wool commanded a regular sale in Kashmir, where it was manufactured into woolen products of high quality, in particular shawls. With the coming of the British in India, the Kashmir-oriented framework of trans-Himalayan trade came under pressure from the South. In 1812, the intrepid traveler William Moorcroft reached Gartok in disguise, and after a few days succeeded in procuring eight loads of the passionately desired shawl-wool in a neighboring village. To break the Ladakhi monopoly on Tibetan wool, the import of pashm along the newly established Sutlej route through the British-protected state of Bashahr was silently encouraged. After 1815, Rampur, the capital of Bashahr, began to develop into a real transit-trading center of shawl-wool, while Kinnaur, towards the Tibetan border, emerged as a smuggler’s nest of pashm wool.⁴²

The wool trade of northeastern Tibet, which tapped the nomad countries that were to be found in the Tsaidam basin, the Kokonor Lake region, and the Upper Huanghe or Machu reaches, only seems to have become important and of sufficient scale to be noticed by outsiders by the 1890s.⁴³ During the eighteenth and the greater part of the nineteenth century, most of the wool from this area was traded with the non-Chinese residents of the Xining region, wool never having been popular with the Chinese. But with the growing Chinese hold over Xinjiang after the defeat of Yakub Beg in 1877, and the reluctant opening up of China to western interests in the second half of the nineteenth century, a reorientation of the northeastern wool trade of Tibet took place in an eastward direction.⁴⁴ As the Gansu borderlands were predominantly inhabited by Chinese Muslims (or Hui), the growing number of Sino-Tibetan contacts in this area meant first and foremost a Tibetan-Hui encounter, in time creating a multi-faceted Tibetan-Hui economic and cultural interface.⁴⁵ Through these Hui intermediaries, the Tibetan wool eventually reached Tianjin on the northeast China coast, from where it was shipped to Europe and America.⁴⁶ By 1895, the wool had already assumed some importance in the economy of northeastern Tibet,⁴⁷ and by the 1920s, World War I and its post-war economic boom had provided a tremendous stimulus to all participants in the wool trade. The heyday of Chinese wool exports occurred in the mid-1920s⁴⁸ but afterwards the trade declined, firstly as a result of the disturbed nature of the Ningxia and Gansu states in the late 1920s, and secondly by growing Japanese influence in Manchuria in the 1930s, which discouraged foreign capital. The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 gave the coup de grace to the Tibet-Tianjin wool trade, eliminating the eastern half of the trade route up to Baotou on the Middle Huanghe.⁴⁹

With the increased demand for wool in the second half of the nineteenth century, two developments in the wool trade of northeastern Tibet took place. Firstly, the growing importance of a few wool collecting market towns and monasteries along Amdo’s Gansu frontier, and secondly, the growing number of Hui (Chinese Muslims) venturing into the Tibetan nomad lands to buy the wool on the spot for the lowest price. The first development became visible in the rise of Tankar [Tongkhor], a Tibetan frontier town to the west of Xining, as a wool collecting center.50 The great monastic towns of Kumbum and Labrang too, through the development of their neighboring trade villages, provided the necessary infrastructure for the growing trade of wool.⁵¹ In addition, Jyekundo, near the southern border of Amdo, emerged as a great wool collecting center.⁵² But as the distance from Jyekundo to Tankar (and Xining) was considerable, and the intervening stretch of country subject to Golok robbery,⁵³ the wool from Jyekundo also found its way out of Tibet via the Sichuan frontier markets of Songpan and Daqianlu. From there it was transported to the wool mills of Shanghai,⁵⁴ that is to say until about 1918, after which renewed hostilities in the Sino-Tibetan borderland disrupted this very lucrative trade.⁵⁵ Tankar, however, remained by far the biggest wool exporting market of northeastern Tibet, because of the transport advantages it enjoyed.⁵⁶

The Tibet-Tianjin wool trade rested, at least partly so, in the possibility of cheap river transport down the Huanghe to Baotou, a burgeoning break-of-bulk point on the northern loop of the Middle Huanghe near the Ordos desert. Here the wool was repacked and subsequently transported by camel to Tianjin, and after 1923 by rail to Peking.⁵⁷ The river transport between Lanzhou and Baotou was a monopoly of the Hui, but it is the Tibetan side of their trade which deserves closer scrutiny in the context of this study.

There is an extremely interesting chapter in Ekvall’s Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border,⁵⁸ describing the economic and cultural interaction between the Chinese Muslims of West Gansu and the nomadic Tibetans of Amdo. The Hui venturing into Tibetan territory were mostly Muslims from Xining, Hezhou, and especially Taozhou.⁵⁹ In fact, the Hui came to occupy the supreme role of economic middlemen and cultural brokers between the widely disparate Tibetan and Chinese societies involved. In this respect they resemble the Sharba of Songpan,⁶⁰ and also their Bhotia confrères of Kumaon along the Indo-Tibetan border. Their success as middlemen can be partly explained by their location on the Sino-Tibetan border, and partly by their knowledge of Tibetan, which gave them a tremendous advantage in borderland commerce.⁶¹ Having access to both Chinese manufactures and Tibetan nomad products, they could work an exchange, which greatly enriched themselves, and at the same time guaranteed a further strengthening of Hui-Tibetan trade contacts.

The wool brought back from these trading ventures into Tibetan territory, was either sold to Chinese representatives of foreign export firms resident in Tankar or the big monasteries of Kumbum and Labrang,⁶² or brought down to Lanzhou, or even Baotou by the Hui themselves, in the hope of maximizing their profit margin. This could well be done, as the river transport on the Huanghe was largely a Muslim monopoly and fruitful schemes of collaboration existed between the buyers and transporters of wool.⁶³

The collapse of the Tibet-Tianjin wool trade at the end of the 1930s, due to geo-political strife and outright war, had only limited repercussions on the Tibetan nomads. Their wool exports could be partly re-channeled via Songpan and Daqianlu, and even when the latter route had become impracticable because of civil war in Sichuan, as well as renewed Sino-Tibetan frontier fighting, part of the wool produced in the northern nomad countries found its way to foreign markets via Lhasa and Kalimpong.⁶⁴ Until 1930, some of the wool also reached Russia by way of a relatively undisturbed Xinjiang.⁶⁵

The reorientation of the Tibetan wool trade to the South emphasized a locational shift of long-distance trade through the Central Himalayas which had already become noticeable from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. By the turn of the twentieth century, Kalimpong had definitively replaced Kathmandu as the entrepot of Trans-Himalayan trade, even to the extent that Newar merchants from Kathmandu shifted their locus of activity to Kalimpong.66

By 1944 wool comprised over 90 percent of Tibet’s annual exports, some destined for the American east coast.⁶⁷ The international wool trade had come to dominate the Tibetan economy to the extent that the Tibetans were greatly at a loss when World War II cut the export to foreign markets. In the decade before the war, the southward-bound wool trade via Kalimpong had become an arena of competition for the Marwari from India and a class of newly arisen traders from central and eastern Tibet. One of the most powerful among the latter was Yarpel Pangda Tsang from Kham, who had become the Tibetan government’s major trade agent.⁶⁸ The fortunes of Pangda Tsang rested in particular in the wool trade, though Marwari competition had by no means been broken. Already in January 1932, the thirteenth Dalai Lama had written a letter to the American journalist Suydam Cutting, strange to say, one of the few contacts of Tibet with America, in which he pointed out the importance of passing by Marwari middlemen trade at Kalimpong:

From now onward if Pangda Tsang could deliver the wool at a fixed price to the buying agents of the big American wool merchants at Kalimpong (trade town of northern Bengal) without having to pass through the hands of the Malwaris (woolen merchants of Kalimpong) and thereby doing away with the middlemen’s profit, it would be of great advantage to the government.⁶⁹

Cutting succeeded in establishing a few trade contacts and for a couple of years some of the wool from Tibet found its way directly to the American market. But the war cut off the export and the Tibetans were temporarily without this source of revenue. Thus it should come as no surprise, that when the Americans Ilia Tolstoy and Brooke Dolan visited Tibet in the autumn of 1942, they were approached by Pangda Tsang, asking them when the United States would again buy Tibetan wool.⁷⁰

Almost imperceptibly we have moved in our analysis from the traditional barter trade in salt and grain to the growing importance of a long-distance commerce in tea and wool, the latter in particular being subject to the vagaries of the world market and the geo-political predicament of its transport lines. Growing trade in the wake of the Younghusband expedition tended to emphasize the British-Indian connection, a process being reinforced by the internal chaos in China in the 1920s and 30s, when the overland trade bound for Tibet, except that for tea, was diverted via Calcutta and other Indian centers.71 The locational shift of the Tibetan wool trade is but one example of this process of spatial reorientation. This largely externally induced process also brought changes in the long-distance trade of luxury goods, a one-time important pillar of Tibetan prosperity. It is to this trade and to the versatility of its fairs and markets that we turn now.

THE LONG-DISTANCE TRADE IN LUXURY GOODS

Behind the above, almost self-evident caption of this section lie hidden two conceptual problems: what is long-distance trade and what do we understand by luxury goods? These questions are important, because in a Tibetan context, trade beyond the local exchange of daily necessities has, in variable degrees, always formed an important pillar of the Tibetan economy. It seems likely that many areas in Tibet would not have been economically so viable as they were without extensive involvement in long-distance trade.

But when may this trade be called long-distance, and who was actually involved in it? Within the context of this study, long-distance trade has been defined as that form of commercial activity which involves the crossing of international boundaries, or the penetration into a non-familiar culture or society, or both.

This section focuses in particular on the flexibility of traders along the large-scale and genuine long-distance extremity of the continuum mentioned above. The trade on this end was usually in non-essential, luxury products, generally low weight for value, easily transportable, and high in price. To this category belonged traditionally much sought-after commodities like amber and musk, but also coral and turquoise, supplemented by silk from China and indigenous cotton from Nepal. With the rising importance of the British-Indian économie-monde, these were partly replaced by cheap Indian-made textiles, as well as a whole array of modern European goods for the use and entertainment of the richer classes in Tibet. The almost chronic disturbances in a fading imperial China and the birth pangs of the new republic, reduced Tibetan contact with the Chinese économie-monde considerably, but of course the proximity of eastern Tibet to China could and can never be nullified or neglected in terms of potential economic integration. However, the historically specific trade situation that arose from these circumstances with regard to Tibet in the first half of the twentieth century, was one of an increased orientation towards the south, i.e., India, where the Pax Britannica guaranteed a safety of roads and the unrestricted movement of goods, except for salt. In particular after the Younghusband expedition of 1904, trade steadily increased and became of a more intentionally organized and large-scale nature.

PILGRIMAGE, FAIRS, AND TRADE

Within a Tibetan regional setting, the mobility of the nomad was generally matched by the mobility of the pilgrim. Pilgrimage as a devotional and penitential exercise had always been an important aspect of the Tibetan culture world and restless was the search for merit to fulfill one’s destiny. Many were the places where natural energy and magical powers were thought to enrich the pilgrim’s karma, and mountains, monasteries and caves were the object of many a protracted journey.72 Near these power-places sprang up a brisk trade, carried on by a host of mendicant monks and itinerant traders. Punctuated by the religious calendar of a particular place or establishment, the fair or mela attached could well develop into an important seasonal market place characterized by the harmonious blend of commercial enterprise and spiritual devotion. Periodicity of the more secular oriented markets was naturally influenced by population density and aggregate demand. It was also subject to the seasonal going of trails, winter being the preferred time of trade and travel. Some of the more important markets specialized in a limited number of goods and products like tea, wool, and horses. Favorably located break-of-bulk points between major ecozones sometimes developed into small trading towns, which acted as entrepots and control centers of caravan traffic. Sometimes too, a hierarchy of seasonal melas at different altitudes existed in certain transitional areas.

In discussing the traditional trade of Tibet, the prominent place of pilgrimage deserves further elaboration. What makes pilgrimage relevant in the context of this study is its close relation to economic activity, in particular trade. Though it is impossible to tell whether pilgrimage created trade or vice versa, it seems undeniable that the large flows of pilgrims generated by Lhasa and a few other centers contributed to the growth of a network of international exchange, spanning the length and breadth of Central Asia.⁷³ But regional centers of pilgrimage too, drew numerous worshippers.

Lhasa as the supreme focus of pilgrimage in the Tibetan Buddhist world, harboring its highest incarnation, the Dalai Lama, attracted pilgrims from all over Tibet and even beyond. Particularly at the times of a major festival, such as the great Mönlam Prayer following the Losar or New Year celebrations, the population of Lhasa, which was ordinarily perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand, swelled to four or five times this number.⁷⁴ Trashilhünpo too, the seat of the Paṇchen Lama near Zhigatsé, drew tens of thousands of pilgrims, single audiences at major celebrations bringing together six thousand pilgrims and lookers-on before the great Living Buddha.⁷⁵ Numbers of pilgrims to other famous places of pilgrimage, such as the sacred mountains of Kailash, Kawakarpo, and Takpa Siri also ran into the thousands, especially during the years of “High Pilgrimage,” which occurred in twelve-year cycles.⁷⁶ All these must have generated considerable flows of pilgrims, creating a culturally defined espace-mouvement, which however was also characterized by concomitant forms of commercial activity, ranging from the peddler’s hawking to the prince’s caravan trade.

The high mobility of people in the context of pilgrimage, the scale at which it took place, as well as the vast distances covered by the pilgrims, all contributed to the likelihood of trade. Pilgrims were sometimes away for over two years77 and had to barter their way to Lhasa and other places. The pilgrimage of farmers and herders was often combined with petty trade⁷⁸ their cattle being used as walking merchandise. In addition, they might have saved some of their agricultural surpluses while still at home, which were now carried in the form of bundles of tea, parcels of gold dust, and silver talents.⁷⁹ Devotees generally managed to combine religion with a little business and the shops of Lhasa and the fairs of Kailash definitely felt their presence.⁸⁰

At times of great religious festivals, supra-regional fairs under the protection of the monasteries saw the gathering of numerous trading pilgrims. The demand generated by the seasonal clustering of large numbers of pilgrims also brought together traders from all over Central Asia and adjoining countries. In addition, fakirs, mendicants, and charlatans tried their luck, performing their tricks and selling their magical medicines.⁸¹

Of course, not all of these fairs were of the same importance. In fact, there was a whole hierarchy of greater and lesser sacred places with their corresponding fairs, structurally perhaps not unlike the geographer’s Central Place system. Sacred places of different levels had corresponding pilgrim fields, creating a kind of nested hierarchy ultimately encompassing the entire population of Tibet and its culturally related border worlds.⁸² In practice, such a set-up meant that some fairs were held less often than others, were of longer duration, and offered a greater variety of goods, in addition to a high or even temporarily increased degree of sacredness of the locality involved. The twelve-year “High Pilgrimage” and corresponding Khumb mela near Kailash is a good example of the latter.⁸³ Let us briefly cast a glance now at two very specific Tibetan items of luxury trade, that were often to be seen at places of pilgrimage: medicinal herbs and precious stones.

Temporary and chronic illness has always been part and parcel of the condition humaine, and pilgrims too, did not escape that predicament. Weakened perhaps by insufficient food on their long journey across high passes, quite a few of them were afflicted by strange ailments that needed to be cured. As the mountainous areas of the Himalayas and eastern Tibet yield many an officinal herb of proven effect, herb collectors and medicine sellers plied their trade successfully at the crowded fairs. Monasteries too, were sometimes centers of herbal medicine preparation.⁸⁴ At the fairs, herbs also changed hands from collectors to wholesalers, who transported greater quantities to the lowland markets of India and China.⁸⁵ This trade had already a long history and may be traced back to the seventeenth century.⁸⁶ Especially the rhubarb trade developed into a long distance commerce of stable profit and great range. We shall briefly return to this trade in a following section.

The step from herbal medicines to precious stones such as traded at the fairs of Tibet, is less than one might think at first sight. In a world full of symbolism as traditional Tibet undoubtedly was, gem-stones had their own meaning attuned to the need of the hour. One of them was the healing power stones were thought to possess, and consequently their appreciation as medicine ranked next to their valuation as ornaments. Turquoise, for example, the widely appreciated gem-stone of Tibet, was in high demand in both qualities.87 In addition, coral, pearls, amber, rubies and jade found their way into Tibet, the low weight for value quality making them a preferred item for the itinerant traders plying the fairs. Precious stones came from Afghanistan, India, Burma, and Turkestan,⁸⁸ but less so from the Himalayas.⁸⁹ If they could afford it, Tibetans spent fortunes on ornamentation.⁹⁰ Consequently, precious stones commanded a glorious sale, and not only in pilgrim centers.

Tibetan pilgrimage came to extend beyond its immediate cultural domain from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. An exception to this general statement was the Kathmandu valley in Nepal, which had already been visited for centuries by Tibetans, especially in wintertime.⁹¹ Since the era of the seventeenth-century Malla kings, when free circulation across the Himalaya was still the rule, Tibetans increasingly had come to create their own niche in valley society, a position best visible near the stupas of Bodnath and Swayambunath.⁹² The German scholar Kurt Boeck, in his well-illustrated book on his journey to India and Nepal in 1898, gives an interesting impression of what he calls the Tibetan village of Bodnath.⁹³ According to him, Tibetans visited the Kathmandu valley in wintertime to exchange salt, yak tails, and woolen blankets for grain, and in addition were dealing in gold dust, turquoise, agate, rubies, and other precious stones, together with medicinal herbs.⁹⁴ They still did so recently at the time of the Tibetan New Year.⁹⁵

Apart from these pilgrimages and trading ventures into the Kathmandu valley, journeys to places well outside the Tibetan cultural sphere of influence, in particular India, did become fashionable in the course of the nineteenth century.⁹⁶ The holiest place to visit for the Tibetans was Bodh Gaya, where Buddha attained enlightenment under a pipal tree. As the Indian plains are scorching hot in summertime, these journeys of pilgrimage too, took place during the winter season, over time accelerated in pace and volume by the beginnings of railway transport in the Ganga Plain, and the increasing orientation of Central Tibet towards a rising British-Indian économie-monde. These journeys of pilgrimage, especially in its extended form throughout the northern plains and the Indian Himalayas, were instigated by the rich who gained merit by paying poor people to go on pilgrimage for them. From the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, they came to regard Kalimpong in the Sikkim Himalaya as their main point of departure. However, it also became the refuge of stranded pilgrims, who, venturing into the plains, had lost all their money and now tried to make ends meet by selling off their personal belongings.⁹⁷ The more successful traders and pilgrims on their way to Bodh Gaya, often passed through Calcutta, satisfying both their natural curiosity for things beyond the Tibetan ken and their passion for trade.⁹⁸

To avoid a one-sided picture, it should be mentioned here that similar developments took place in eastern Tibet, though on a smaller scale. With the rise of Daqianlu on the Sino-Tibetan border, quite a few Tibetans, ventured into China, especially to the great pilgrim mountain of Emei Shan in southern Sichuan99 and even beyond.¹⁰⁰ Urga in Mongolia too, as the seat of a primary Living Buddha, became the object of pilgrimage and trade for Tibetans from Amdo, as well as for monastic trade missions from all over Tibet.¹⁰¹ The two-year stay of the Dalai Lama in Urga (1904–1906) may temporarily have emphasized its renown as a center of pilgrimage.

Thus, pilgrimage to sacred places, whether by private pilgrims or monastic missions, had a definite economic effect becoming visible in the commercial activities accompanying major religious festivals. In fact, these fairs as they were commonly called, may be defined as annual gatherings of buyers and sellers at a particular place and time for the purpose of trade, often following a religious function, and accompanied by forms of amusement and entertainment. However, when the scale of the trade increased, fairs often assumed a more secular character, in which the exchange of goods came to dominate the religious celebrations.

FROM THE SACRED TO THE PROFANE

In the period under investigation, the “long” century between 1850 and 1950, fairs gradually shed their aura of being predominantly religious festivals. The larger the fair, the greater the attraction for full time traders, who in the course of the nineteenth century came to consider monetary profit to be the leading motive for their attendance. For them the fairs were not places of karmic restoration, but arenas for economic competition. In order to maximize profits they sought to realize optimal locational conditions by turning footloose, visiting theaters of commercial exchange, even when these were not, strictly speaking, the product of a religious festival. Specialized itinerant traders became a regular feature of fairs that were more a response to the changing geo-historical conditions of long-distance trade than the slavish following of the pilgrim crowds near incarnated buddhas or sacred mountains. In particular the Himalayan border regions became the scene of a whole series of frontier fairs that reflected the growing orientation of southern Tibet on a rising British-Indian économie-monde.

The distinguishing feature of fairs as commercial gatherings was their theoretical openness to all trade and traders, irrespective of their provenance. As such they could flourish in times of limited political interference and in areas outside effective governmental control, “frontier” conditions that were satisfied in the “long” nineteenth century of Tibet and its borderlands. But if we look at the geographical distribution of fairs, it is also clear that they were commonly held in fringe zones of different ecozones and culturally disparate économies-mondes. Though Tibet cannot properly be called an économie-monde, both the ecozonal and the cultural fringe argument hold in regard to the location of its fairs. The European parallel, in particular with regard to the great medieval fairs of France and Germany, is interesting, but cannot be given any space here.102

The above theorizing fits well in with Braudel’s characterization of India and China in terms of the development of their fairs.¹⁰³ India, according to Braudel, is the land of fairs par excellence.¹⁰⁴ Perhaps this may be explained by the decentralized nature of its political organization over much of its history, in contrast to China, where fairs only seem to have flourished in times of disintegration of the Chinese central polity. From the moment onwards that fresh political unity was achieved, and the Chinese bureaucracy restored to its former efficiency, fairs in the interior of China declined, but remained intact in a few frontier zones.¹⁰⁵ This distinction between India and China may well explain the relative preponderance of fairs along the Himalayan border of Tibet, and their paucity along the Sino-Tibetan one. Consequently, the presence of itinerant traders and peddlers, on which the fair as a commercial phenomenon rested, was far more pronounced in Tibet’s southern reaches than in its eastern ones, at least for the period under discussion.

Fairs along the Sino-Tibetan border were far less common than in the Himalayan region. This does not mean that commercial exchange was unimportant. In fact, the volume of Tibet’s China trade had always been greater than its trade with India, and on top of that, more institutionalized. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century already, Daqianlu and Xining had grown as the major break-of-bulk points between China and Tibet. Trade was in the hands of Chinese merchants, though with the crumbling of Chinese power in the second half of the nineteenth century, Tibetan traders were able to make successful inroads into this monopoly.¹⁰⁶ Fairs comparable to those in the Himalayan border world were only to be found near places of supra-regional exchange like Kumbum, mentioned earlier in this chapter, Jyekundo,¹⁰⁷ or Ragya,¹⁰⁸ the latter being but a relatively tiny affair. Although annual tribal fairs did exist on the Sino-Tibetan border,¹⁰⁹ large ones seem to have been the exception rather than the rule. In fact, these borderlands had developed into a smuggler’s paradise for tea, musk, opium, and modern weapons, a sort of Sino-Tibetan “Wild West,” in which Songpan, and in particular the neighboring hamlet of Matang, occupied a prominent place.¹¹⁰

The slow extinction of fairs in the Himalayan region and their virtual disappearance along the Sino-Tibetan border in the period under review, had everything to do with the rise of a more professionalized trade circuit, focusing on urban markets and a few through-going transport routes, like the one across the Jelep La to Kalimpong, or the main Tibet-China road via Daqianlu. Fairs dwindled insofar as they were meant to provide a wholesale market for specialized traders. The latter increasingly shifted their activity to the towns, where the grander scale of the business precipitated new forms of a capitalist-oriented trade in the hands of a few trading families or firms. Wholesale trade came of age, and developed quite independently from the traditional trade circuits centering on the fairs and local markets. The bigger itinerant traders established themselves as resident merchants, who through their commercial agents tried to develop direct lines of exchange with a few merchants or institutions on the other side of the border.

To make the picture of Tibet as a trading region complete, we still have to focus on the transformation of traditional, long-distance trade in luxury goods by foreign traders to a more open, yet increasingly government-controlled trade. And as the government of Tibet had close links with the bigger monasteries, it should come as no surprise that these are relevant to our discussion.

THE ECCLESIASTICAL STATE AND TRADE

It is quite likely, though not proven beyond any doubt, that the rise of the Gelukpa order in Central Tibet, and its consolidation into a kind of ecclesiastical state in the seventeenth century was at least partly related to the wealth generated by long-distance trade.111 In fact, the whole issue deserves a separate investigation, which goes beyond the limits set for this study. According to Snellgrove and Richardson,¹¹² the great monasteries of central and eastern Tibet, already from the fourteenth century onwards, grew rich on their China trade, which, disguised as “tribute missions” to the emperor’s court, served no other purpose than the trade in luxury goods.¹¹³ These “government”-controlled trade missions were really large caravans equipped by the leading monasteries of Tibet, who in doing so succeeded in amassing more wealth than was probably good for them. In addition, the heyday of the seventeenth century Gelukpa administration, saw the flocking of hundreds of foreign traders to Lhasa, of whom Kashmiri, Newari, and Chinese were the most important.¹¹⁴ Lhasa, as the center of the Tibetan Buddhist world, also received a kind of tribute missions, for example the lapchak from Ladakh,¹¹⁵ which connected Central Tibet to the Afghan and Kashmir-Yarkand trade circuits. As outlined elsewhere, trade was partly of a transit nature, which explains perhaps the 197 Kashmiri trading houses in Lhasa in the eighteenth century.¹¹⁶ The location of Central Tibet between major civilizations and ecozones, made it into an ideal transit-corridor at a time when railways and cheap transport by sea had not yet arisen. Moreover, the highlands of Tibet were a distinct ecozone in themselves, from which many a special product could be procured. Trade was of a luxury nature, goods of low weight for value like musk, rhubarb, gold and precious stones, dominating the scene.

Musk, a natural perfume derived from the indigenous musk-deer, from times immemorial had served to put Tibet on the mental map of Asian and even European long-distance traders. Medieval Arab sources mentioned it in connection with Tibet.117 Marco Polo too, knew of it,¹¹⁸ and William Finch, an early seventeenth century merchant, drew attention to it in his 1611 report.¹¹⁹ The French traveler Tavernier tells us of musk from Tibet being sold at Patna as early as 1692,¹²⁰ and Bogle refers to it as one of the principal commodities, together with gold dust, with which the Tibetans paid for their imports from Bengal.¹²¹ Musk over the centuries, remained a very lucrative business, even attracting agents from European firms to the Tibetan borderlands. In the second half of the nineteenth century, markets for musk developed in Xining, Daqianlu, Lijiang and Darjeeling, part of the commodity offered being in transit from Lhasa.¹²²

Rhubarb, valued as a drug, also played an important role in long-distance trade, especially towards China, where the Chinese held a virtual monopoly over its export to Europe in the eighteenth century.¹²³ But in Tavernier’s time, a century earlier, rhubarb was also brought to Gorakhpur and Patna in northern India.¹²⁴ In the nineteenth century, Muslim traders from Xining exported quantities of rhubarb to Kiakhta on the Russo-Mongolian border,¹²⁵ Xining being the chief depot for the rhubarb trade in northeastern Tibet.¹²⁶ Daqianlu was another major center of the rhubarb export in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands.¹²⁷

Gold too, was an important item in keeping the balance of Tibetan trade upright. Over the centuries, the gold of Tibet had acquired a mythical reputation, but a Tibetan El Dorado did not exist, and quantities mined were relatively small.¹²⁸ Gold digging and washing took place at several localities in northwest and eastern Tibet,¹²⁹ the gold being transported to Lhasa and Zhigatsé¹³⁰ and a few of the larger monasteries along the major trade route with China, like Litang,¹³¹ and Batang.¹³² Actually, very little of the Tibetan gold found its way to India,¹³³ rather, Indian silver rupees were coming in, so as to pay for the wool exported to Ladakh and Kashmir. However, gold did flow out of Tibet into China, Tibet’s major trading partner until the early twentieth century. According to Shuttleworth,¹³⁴ 30,625 pounds sterling in Tibetan gold entered Daqianlu alone for the year 1913.¹³⁵

The precise extent to which monasteries were involved in trade will probably always remain a relative mystery. Where Tibetans chose to write down their life experiences, these had not, with few exceptions, to do with economic affairs. Moreover records which may have existed at one time, were largely destroyed after the Chinese takeover. Which leaves us with the writings of outsiders, mainly travelers and a few scientist-explorers. It is to one of the former that we owe the following immortal observation, which, as a mirror of the time in which it was written, i.e., the late 1930s, succinctly summarizes the relation of the sacred to the profane: “the monks of Tibet, though cloistered from the vulgar world, have a nice sense of business.”¹³⁶

This situation was the outcome of a long historical process, in which the conditions and demands of everyday life, as well as the continual growth in power of the monasteries, had necessarily led to a considerable softening of the originally strict monastic observance.137 This in turn created the ideological basis for a further involvement in trade, even to such an extent that it became institutionalized within the monastic organization.¹³⁸ Incarnations turned secular insofar as they could make big money,¹³⁹ but perhaps there is some stereotyping involved in painting the monasteries and the Living Buddhas as the greatest traders of Tibet.¹⁴⁰ After all, there were big and small monasteries, rich and poor gönpas,¹⁴¹ and among the monks “all the graduated shades of poverty and wealth that you see in mundane cities.”¹⁴² Nevertheless, it is true that monasteries were important economic centers,¹⁴³ some of which had deteriorated into dens of exploitation for local villagers and visiting pilgrims.¹⁴⁴ It is quite likely, however, that reform measures under the stern rule of the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1895–1933), counteracted the worst excesses.¹⁴⁵ Anyway, monasteries had grown rich by their legitimate functions, and sometimes by their illegitimate actions. Their pivotal position in Tibetan society made them into “immense reservoirs, into which flowed, by a thousand channels, all the wealth of these vast regions.”¹⁴⁶ Their strong financial position made them engage in money-lending,¹⁴⁷ as well as trade,¹⁴⁸ and there was a tendency for the bigger monasteries to monopolize certain products and trade flows, which led to occasional clashes with private traders and among themselves.¹⁴⁹

From the 1880s onward, there was a definite tendency among the higher classes to grow more and more luxurious in their style of living.¹⁵⁰ This was inevitably brought about by the foreign trade of Tibet and the arrival of goods of foreign origin. The latter were increasingly brought to Tibet by the Tibetans themselves. Actually, the rise of a British-Indian économie-monde in the course of the nineteenth century tempted Tibetan traders to try their luck beyond the immediate Tibetan pale and a class of widely traveled Tibetans came into existence.¹⁵¹

During the period of Bell’s direct diplomatic involvement with Tibet (1910–1921), a growing number of Tibetans went abroad.¹⁵² This was definitely facilitated by the outcome of the Younghusband expedition of 1904. Political obstacles for commerce across the Himalaya were removed, and a few British-controlled trade marts established inside Tibetan territory.¹⁵³ In the course of the process, the Indo-Tibetan trade via Darjeeling shifted to the newly arisen town of Kalimpong, which was more suitably located for the caravans coming down from the Jelep La and the Natu La.¹⁵⁴ The most important items of trade were in the hands of a few families, whose agents resided in Kalimpong and elsewhere. Although there were some wealthy private traders in Lhasa, most of the trading families served in one way or another the interests of the Tibetan government and the monasteries on which its power rested.¹⁵⁵

A good example is the Pangda Tsang family “consortium,” which had branches in Calcutta, Shanghai, and Peking.156 Its origin dated back to the privileges received from the thirteenth Dalai Lama after the Chinese occupation of Lhasa in 1912. In a few years, Pangda Tsang created a trading imperium that extended across the length and breadth of Tibet. In due time, he had his elder son, Yarpel, sent to Peking with the intention of setting up a commercial agency, while two others went to eastern Tibet, in order to tap the Southwest China trade.¹⁵⁷ In India the network included Kalimpong and Calcutta.¹⁵⁸ In fact, the Pangda Tsangs belonged to those traders who controlled large sections of the Tibet-China trade as earlier referred to. Other trading families from Kham were Sadu Tsang, “the all-embracing merchant,”¹⁵⁹ Gyanak Tsang, and Andru Tsang, the later resistance-leader against the Chinese in the 1950s.¹⁶⁰ With the rising tide of disturbances along the Sino-Tibetan border in the 1930s, most of these corporate trading families settled in Kalimpong.¹⁶¹ Yarpel Pangda Tsang, after the death of his father, quickly developed into the most important trader of Tibet, effectively being for years the government’s commercial agent in the British-controlled trade mart at Yatung,¹⁶² and later in Kalimpong.¹⁶³ Basically, the fortunes of Pangda Tsang rested on the wool trade as described earlier in this study. It was Yarpel Pangda Tsang who asked Brooke Dolan and Ilia Tolstoy on their visit to Tibet in 1942 when the United States would buy wool again.¹⁶⁴

The 1930s and 40s saw a proliferation of the Lhasa-Calcutta trade via Kalimpong.¹⁶⁵ Apart from the big shots in the Tibet trade mentioned above, many a smaller trader succeeded in earning a decent livelihood. And if the regular trade failed, there were always the many sidelines by which he could try to make ends meet. Gambling and smuggling were among the most common strategies to overcome temporary misfortune.¹⁶⁶ The sale of imitation stones or adulterated musk provided yet another.¹⁶⁷ And then there was of course the opium, and Tibet was not a newcomer for that matter.¹⁶⁸ The Tibetans did a brisk trade during World War II, especially when the Burma road to China had been cut, and a transit trade developed to Lijiang in northern Yunnan by way of Kalimpong, Gyantsé, Lhasa and Chamdo.¹⁶⁹ After the war, trade and commerce continued to flourish, and as such may be regarded as the most dynamic aspect of the Tibetan economy in the years just prior to the Chinese take-over.¹⁷⁰

THE GEO-HISTORY OF TIBETAN TRADE: AN INTERPRETATION

Let us briefly recapitulate. Traditional trade in Tibet and its borderworlds rested on the local and regional exchange of salt, wool, grain and tea. In addition to this barter complex, there was a long-distance trade in luxury goods like musk, medicinal herbs, and precious stones, which initially focused on monastic fairs and supra-regional places of pilgrimage. On top of that, and perhaps increasingly so with monastic and government control over its mining operations, gold too, by virtue of its low weight for value, served as a long-distance bridging trade commodity, in particular in its quality as payment for the numerous tea imports from China into Tibet.

With the growing impact of the British-Indian économie-monde in the nineteenth century, the long-distance trade in wool acquired new dimensions. Locationally speaking, it shifted from Ladakh to the Indo-Tibetan borderlands further eastwards and institutionally it was being organized on an ever grander scale. Over time it became monopolized by rising border groups of Bhotia traders. The resulting trade networks centered in particular on the Bhotia villages of Garhwal and Kumaon. The partly self-imposed geo-political isolation of Nepal, to the detriment of its one-time supreme trade route via Kathmandu, equally expressed itself in the rise of a number of Bhotia communities as long-distance traders along Nepal’s northern border. The trade of these Bhotia communities flourished in particular during the second half of the nineteenth century, but suffered from the opening of British-controlled trade marts in Tibet after the Younghusband expedition and the opening of the Chumbi valley route to Central Tibet via the Sikkimese Jelep La.

In addition to this locational funneling via a few routes, trade became increasingly controlled, not to say monopolized, by a few bigger merchants, who had settled in the newly arisen towns of Darjeeling, and especially Kalimpong. These merchants were not only members of age-old trading communities like the Kashmiri and Newari, but also concerned a class of newly arisen Tibetan traders hailing from Kham, who had managed, with the support of privileges received from the Tibetan government, to monopolize the wool trade across the Central Himalayas. They had left their eastern Tibetan trading fields, not because the Chinese économie-monde had suddenly ceased to exist, but because political disturbances and geo-political strife made for very unsettled conditions all along the Sino-Tibetan border in the 1930s.

Thus, the trade relations of Tibet underwent a definite spatial reorientation. The Chinese wing of Braudel’s super économie-monde lost out to a rising Indian wing during the period 1850–1950. The pull of the Indian économie-monde made itself more clearly felt when the rise of a British colonial empire in India made possible an enhanced internal coherence of movements by a bout of road and railway building during the second half of the nineteenth century. China lagged behind in this respect, but after the revolution of 1911, transport networks in the latter country too, slowly improved. The increased mobility of goods and people which showed as a result, allowed for an intensification of old and new forms of economic activity, especially in the form of market places near zones of cultural and ecological transition, as well as at specific break-of-bulk points. Tibet in this view was a kind of transitional zone, which, though culturally speaking an espace-mouvement, cannot be considered the same in economic terms. On the contrary, its internal movements and external relations were mainly conditioned by the fragmentary nature of its polity and its location vis-à-vis neighboring économies-mondes. Its reorientation towards the South was therefore only a derived, and partial one, if only because the regional population clusters in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Amdo and Kham could and can never escape their locational proximity to China.

NOTES

1. The present study is essentially a shortened and revised version of chapter 4 of my Ph.D. thesis, “Tibetan Border Worlds: A Geo-historical Analysis of Trade and Traders,” University of Amsterdam, 1992.

2. F. Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIe siècle [Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15th–17th Centuries], 3 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), 3:12.

3. Braudel, Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15th–17th Centuries, 3:451.

4. Braudel, Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15th–17th Centuries, 3:14.

5. This view has been further worked out in W. van Spengen, “Géographie politique, géographie historique braudelienne et régionalité culturelle du Tibet” [Political Geography, Braudelian Historical Geography, and Cultural Regionality of Tibet], Géographie et Cultures 7 (Fall 1993): 55–74.

6. A. Tafel, Meine Tibetreise: Eine Studienfahrt durch das nordwestliche China und durch die innere Mongolei in das östliche Tibet [My Tibet Travels: A Study Tour Through Northwestern China and Inner Mongolian in Eastern Tibet], 2 vols (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1914); G. A. Combe, A Tibetan on Tibet (1926; reprint, Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1975), 100–117; George N. Roerich, Trails to Inmost Asia: Five Years of Exploration with the Roerich Central Asian Expedition (1931; reprint, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo, Nauka, 1967), 35–149; R. B. Ekvall, Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 48–82; R. B. Ekvall, Fields on the Hoof: Nexus of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968); F. Kingdon-Ward, “Tibet as a Grazing Land,” The Geographical Journal 110, nos. 1–3 (1948): 60–75; M. Hermanns, Die Nomaden von Tibet. Die sozial-wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Hirtenkulturen in A mdo und von Innerasien: Ursprung und Entwicklung der Viehzucht [The Nomads of Tibet. The Socioeconomic Underpinnings of the Shepherding Culture of Amdo and Inner Asia: The Origin and Development of Animal Husbandry] (Wien: Verlag Herold, 1949); N. Norbu, A Journey Into the Culture of Tibetan Nomads: Bod ’brog gi shes rigs (Arcidosso: Shang-Shung Edizioni, 1983); G. E. Clarke, China’s Reforms of Tibet, and Their Effects on Pastoralism (Brighton, Institute of Development Studies, Discussion Paper, No. 237, 1987); and M. C. Goldstein and C. M. Beall, Nomads of Western Tibet. The Survival of a Way of Life (London: Serindia Publications, 1989).

7. Roerich, Trails to Inmost Asia, 39.

8. Combe, A Tibetan on Tibet, 103–115, end map.

9. Kingdon-Ward, “Tibet as a Grazing Land,” Tibet and Its Birds, ed. C. Vaurie (London: H. F. and G. Witherby Ltd., 1972), 11, 19.

10. A. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 202.

11. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 202.

12. Goldstein and Beall, Nomads of Western Tibet, 49.

13. Ekvall, Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border, 56; cf. H. Serruys, Sino-Mongol Relations During the Ming, Vol. 3—Trade Relations: The Horsefairs (1400–1600) (Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, 1975), 86.

14. H. Harrer, Sieben Jahre in Tibet [Seven Years in Tibet] (Wien: Ullstein, 1952), 56; M. Brauen, ed., Peter Aufschneiter: sein Leben in Tibet [Peter Aufschneiter: His Life in Tibet] (Innsbruck: Steiger Verlag, 1983), 38, 44.

15. R. B. Ekvall, “Some Differences in Tibetan Land Tenure and Utilization,” Sinologica 4, no. 1 (1954): 46–47.

16. M. C. Goldstein, “On the Political Organization of Nomadic Pastoralists in Western Tibet: A Rejoinder to Cox,” Himalaya Research Bulletin 8, no. 3 (1988): 15–17.

17. A. Guibaut, Ngolo-Setas, deuxième expedition, Guibaut-Liotard au Tibet, 1940 [Ngolo-Seta: The Second Guibat-Liotard Expedition in Tibet, 1940] (Paris: J. Susse, 1947), 219; B. Chakrabarty, “The Unknown Country of Golok-Setas,” Tibetan Review 17, no. 5 (1982): 18–20.

18. G. Shi Yang and L. Bing Ziao, “Borate Minerals on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau,” Geological and Ecological Studies of Qinghai-Xizang Plateau (Beijing: Science Press; New York: Gordon and Breach, 1981), 1724–1725.

19. C. W. Brown, “‘The Goat Is Mine, the Load Is Yours’: Morphogenesis of ‘Bhotiya-Shauka,’ U.P., India” (Ph.D. diss., University of Lund), Lund Studies in Social Anthropology No. 1, 1984, 117–119.

20. T. Thomson, Western Himalaya and Tibet: A Narrative of a Journey Through the Mountains of Northern India, During the Years 1847–8 (1852; reprint, Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1979), 66.

21. A. Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1905), 27.

22. E. Teichman, Travels of a Consular Officer in Eastern Tibet: Together with a History of the Relations Between China, Tibet and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 175.

23. C. H. Desgodins, Le Thibet d’après la correspondance des missionaires [Tibet, from the Correspondence of Missionaries] (Paris: Librairies Catholique de l’Oeuvre de Saint-Paul, 1885), 343–344.

24. The best outline on the salt trade in western Tibet has been given by the Austrian engineer Peter Aufschneiter, who lived and traveled extensively in the area during and shortly after World War II. See M. Brauen, Peter Aufschneiter; cf. Van Spengen, “Political Geography, Braudelian Historical Geography, and Cultural Regionality of Tibet,” 75.

25. C. R. Markham, Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (1876; reprint, New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House, 1971), 119; W. W. Rockhill, “Tibet: A Geographical, Ethnographical and Historical Sketch, Derived from Chinese Sources,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no. 1 (1891): 11–33, no. 2, 237, note 2; S. G. Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, vol. 8, part 1 (Dehra Dun: Office of the Trigonometrical Survey, 1915), 18; C. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia, 1603–1721 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924), 249; C. Bell, The People of Tibet (1928; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 118; B. N. Aziz, Tibetan Frontier Families: Reflections of Three Generations from Dingri (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), 96–97.

26. Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet, 29; O. Coales, “Economic Notes on Eastern Tibet,” The Geographical Journal 54, no. 4 (October 1919): 244.

27. Cf. Van Spengen, “Political Geography, Braudelian Historical Geography, and Cultural Regionality of Tibet,” 79.

28. E. C. Baber, Travels and Researches in Western China, Royal Geographical Society Supplementary Papers, vol. 1, part 1 (London, John Murray, 1882), 193; A. Hosie, Three Years in Western China. A Narrative of Three Journeys in Ssuch’uan, Kuei-chow, Yün-nan (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1890), 93.

29. T. T. Cooper, Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce in Pigtail and Petticoats: Or, an Overland Journey from China Towards India (London: John Murray, 1871), 171; Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 277; F. M. Bailey, China—Tibet—Assam. A Journey, 1911 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), 33.

30. Baber, Travels and Researches in Western China, 194; F. W. Bailey, “Journey Through a Portion of South-Eastern Tibet and the Mishmi Hills,” The Geographical Journal 34, no. 4 (April 1912): 334.

31. Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, part 2, 233; Cooper, An Overland Journey from China Towards India, 187.

32. Combe, A Tibetan on Tibet, 142–143.

33. H. Stevenson, “Notes on the Human Geography of the Chinese-Tibetan Borderland,” The Geographical Review 22, no. 4 (October 1932): 616.

34. D. C. Graham, “A Trip to Tatsienlu,” Journal of the West China Border Research Society 2 (1924–25): 34.

35. J. H. Edgar, “Notes on Trade Routes Converging at Tachienlu,” Journal of the West China Border Research Society 4 (1930–31): 5–8.

36. Baber, Travels and Researches in Western China, 196; A. von Rosthorn, On Tea Cultivation in Western Ssuch’uan and the Tea Trade with Tibet via Tachienlu (London: Luzac, 1895); Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, vol. 2, 233; W. Limpricht, Botanische Reisen in den Hochgebirgen Chinas und Osttibet [Botanical Journey in the Highlands of China and Eastern Tibet] (Dahlem bei Berlin: Verlag des Repertorium, 1922), 143; A. Migot, Tibetan Marches, translated from the French (London: The Travel Book Club, n.d., ca. 1957), 89.

37. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 278; Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, part 2, 233; Combe, A Tibetan on Tibet, 143.

38. Baber, Travels and Researches in Western China, 195; Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 277, 280.

39. See M. H. Duncan, The Yangtze and the Yak. Adventurous Trails in and out of Tibet, (Alexandria, Va./Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1952), 67, figure 18; for a more detailed discussion on the distributive trade in Tibet, see Van Spengen, “Political Geography, Braudelian Historical Geography, and Cultural Regionality of Tibet,” 80.

40. Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, part 2, 388.

41. E. C. Ryall, “Explorations in Western Tibet, by the Trans-Himalayan Parties of the Indian Trigonometrical Survey,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 1 (1879): 446.

42. A. Gerard, Account of Koonawur in the Himalaya (1841; reprint, New Delhi: Indus Publishing Company, 1993), 116.

43. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 111.

44. J. Fletcher, “A Brief History of the Chinese Northwestern Frontier,” in China’s Inner Asian Frontier: Photographs of the Wulsin Expedition to Northwest China in 1923, ed. M. E. Alonso (Cambridge, Mass.: The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1979), 38.

45. J. N. Lipman, “The Border World of Gansu, 1895–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1981), 117–119.

46. J. Scott, “A Short Journey Through Northwestern Kansu and the Tibetan Border Country,” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 21, part 1 (January 1934): 18–37.

47. Cf. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 90.

48. Lipman, “The Border World of Gansu, 1895–1935,” 116.

49. Cf. S. Cammann, Trade Through the Himalayas: The Early Attempts to Open Tibet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 43ff.

50. S. C. Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple: Narrative of Four Years’ Residence on the Tibetan Border, and of a Journey Into the Far Interior (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1901), 134, 230; Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 1, 181; Coales, “Economic Notes on Eastern Tibet,” The Geographical Journal 53, no. 4 (April 1919): 242; Fletcher, “A Brief History of the Chinese Northwestern Frontier,” 30.

51. For Kumbum, see Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 90; W. Carey, Travel and Adventure in Tibet: Including the Diary of Miss Annie R. Taylor’s Remarkable Journey from Tau-chau to Tachienlu Through the Heart of the Forbidden Land (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 155; Li An-che, “Our Pilgrimage to a Sacred Kountain,” Asian Horizon 2 (summer 1948), photo and caption following page 40; for Labrang, see K. Futterer, “Land und Leute in Nordost-Tibet” [Land and People in Northeast Tibet], Zeitschrift der Gesellschajt für Erdkunde, Berlin 35, no. 5 (1900): 326; Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 2, 313; E. Fürholzer, Arro! Arro! So sah ich Tibet [Aro! Aro! The Tibet I Saw] (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, 1942), 199, photo; Fletcher, “A Brief History of the Chinese Northwestern Frontier,” 28; see also G. T. Tsybikov, Un pèlerin bouddhiste au Tibet [A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet] (Paris: Éditions Peuples du Monde, 1993), 33–49.

52. Teichman, Travels of a Consular Officer in Eastern Tibet, 92.

53. Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 2, 152.

54. Teichman, Travels of a Consular Officer in Eastern Tibet, 97.

55. Combe, A Tibetan on Tibet, 141.

56. Coales, “Economic Notes on Eastern Tibet,” 242.

57. G. Köhler, “Die Bedeutung des Huang Ho innerhalb des nordwest-chinesischen Verkehrsnetzes” [The Importance of Huang He Within the Northwestern Chinese Traffic System], Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 96 (1952): 85–89.

58. Ekvall, Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border, 48–62.

59. Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 2, 248; J. F. Rock, The Amnye Machen Range and Adjacent Regions. A Monographic Study, Serie Orientale Roma, 12 (Roma: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1956), 65.

60. Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 2, 309.

61. Ekvall, Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border, 51, 61.

62. Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 1, 181, 347n; vol. 2, 313.

63. Lipman, The Border World of Gansu, 1895–1935, 120.

64. A. W. Radhu, Caravane tibétaine [Tibetan Caravans], adapté en français par Roger du Pasquier d’après les mémoires inédits de l’auteur (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 167–168. [Editors’ note: Available in English as: Abdul Wahid Radhu, Islam in Tibet: Tibetan Caravans, trans. Jane Casewit, ed. Gray Henry (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1997).]

65. W. Bosshard, “Politics and Trade in Central Asia,” Journal of the Central Asian Society 16, part 4 (1929): 447–448.

66. R. Uprety, Nepal-Tibet Relations, 1850–1930 (Kathmandu: Puga Nara, 1980), 166–167.

67. Brown, “The Goat Is Mine, the Load Is Yours,” 115.

68. H. Stoddard, Le Mendiant de l’Amdo [The Beggar from Amdo], recherches sur la Haute Asie, vol. 9 (Paris: Société d’ethnographie; Nanterre: Service de publication du Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, Université de Paris X, 1985), 77–78.

69. C. S. Cutting, The Fire Ox and Other Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 177–178.

70. I. Tolstoy, “Across Tibet from India to China,” The National Geographic Magazine 90, no. 2 (August 1946): 178.

71. Macdonald, The Land of the Lama, 125.

72. A. M. Blondeau, “Les pèlerinages tibétains” [Tibetan Pilgrimages], in Sources Orientales, vol. 3—Les pèlerinages (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), 203–245; K. Dowman, The Power-places of Central Tibet: The Pilgrim’s Guide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988); V. Chan, Tibet Handbook (Chico, Calif.: Moon Publications, 1994). See also G. T. Tsybikov, Un pèlerin bouddhiste au Tibet [A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet], translated from the Russian (orig. ed. 1919) and critical ed. by Bernard Kreise, preface by A. M. Blondeau (Paris: Éditions Peuples du Monde, 1993).

73. Blondeau, “Tibetan Pilgrimages,” 212.

74. C. Bell, “A Year in Lhasa,” The Geographical Journal 63, no. 2 (February 1924): 95; cf. the eighteenth-century Capuchin missionary figure of 80,000 inhabitants as quoted by D. Snellgrove and H. Richardson, A Cultural History of Tibet (Boulder: Prajna Press, 1980), 224.

75. S. Hedin, Trans-Himalaya. Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910–1913), vol. 1, 304; see also plates 111 and 112.

76. C. A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the Indian Borderland (1906; reprint, Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1974), 283; Duncan, The Yangtze and the Yak, 132; Blondeau, “Tibetan Pilgrimages,” 210; for further details see Van Spengen, “Political Geography, Braudelian Historical Geography, and Cultural Regionality of Tibet,” 91–92.

77. Cf. Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 2, 253.

78. Pedro Carrasco, Land and Polity in Tibet (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), 213.

79. Markham, Bogle, and Manning, Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, 83.

80. Sherring, Western Tibet and the Indian Borderland, 159, 283–284.

81. See for example the eyewitness report on the Kumbum mela by Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple, 115.

82. Cf. S. M. Bhardwaj, Hindu Places of Pilgrimage. A Study in Cultural Geography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 6–7, for an example from the Indian Himalayas.

83. Sherring, Western Tibet and the Indian Borderland, 28; Hedin, Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet, vol. 1, 191.

84. Cf. Harrer, “My Life in Forbidden Lhasa,” 162.

85. A. Heim, Minya Gongkar: Forschungsreise ins Hochgebirge von Chinesisch Tibet [Minya Gongkar: Expedition Into the High Mountians of China’s Tibet] (Bern-Berlin: Verlag Hans Huber, 1933), 65, and figure 45 facing page 56.

86. Finch 1611, as quoted by A. Stein, “Routes from the Punjab to Turkestan and China Recorded by William Finch (1611),” The Geographical Journal 51, no. 1 (January 1918): 173; Tavernier 1692, as quoted by S. Lévi, Le Népal. Etude historique d’un royaume hindou [Nepal: Historic Study of a Hindu Kingdom] (Paris: Ernest Leroux, Annales du Musée Guimet, tome 17, vol. 1, 1985), 94; F. B. Hamilton, An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal and the Territories Annexed to This Dominion by the House of Gorkha (1819; reprint, New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House, 1971), 86.

87. M. N. Walker-Watson, “Turquoise—the Gemstone of Tibet,” Tibetan Review 18, no. 6–7 (1983): 17; cf. W. Filchner, Kumbum Dschamba Ling: Das Kloster der hunderttausend Bilder Maitreyas [Kumbum Jamba Ling: The Monastery of One Hundred Thousand Maitreya Images] (Leipzig: F. A. Brocjhaus, 1933), 413.

88. Ryall, “Explorations in Western Tibet,” 450; E. Kawaguchi, Three Years in Tibet (1909; reprint, Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1979), 453–454; A. B. Calhoun, “Burma—an Important Source of Precious and Semi-precious Stones,” Engineering and Mining Journal 127, no. 18 (May 4, 1929): 708 ff.; H. H. P. Deasy, In Tibet and Chinese Turkestan (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), 156; for amber, see C. Jest, “Valeurs d’échange en Himalaya et au Tibet: l’ambre et le musc” [Exchange Values in the Himalayas and Tibet: Amber and Musk], in De la voûte céleste au terroir, du jardin au foyer (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1987), 228–230.

89. A. M. Heron, “The Gem-stones of the Himalaya,” The Himalayan Journal 2 (April 1930): 21.

90. W. Gill, The River of Golden Sand: The Narrative of a Journey Through China and Eastern Tibet to Burma, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1880), 2:107.

91. Hamilton, An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal, 212–213; H. A. Oidfield, Sketches from Nepal (1880; reprint, New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House, 1974), vol. 1, 11; Snellgrove and Richardson, A Cultural History of Tibet, 202.

92. D. Wright, History of Nepal (1877; reprint, Kathmandu: Nepal Antiquated Book Publishers, 1972), 27; Lévi, Nepal: Historic Study of a Hindu Kingdom, vol. 2, 319, 332, 336.

93. K. Boeck, Durch Indien ins verschlossene Land Nepal: Ethnographische und photographische Studien Blätter [Through India to Isolated Nepal: Ethnographic Studies and Photographic Plates] (Leipzig: Verlag von Ferdinand Hirt und Sohn, 1903), 293–301; see also the frontispiece of the same book.

94. Boeck, Through India to Isolated Nepal, 294.

95. A. W. Macdonald, personal communication, Paris.

96. Blondeau, “Tibetan Pilgrimages,” 218–219.

97. Blondeau, “Tibetan Pilgrimages,” 219.

98. Richardus, The Dutch Orientalist Johan van Manen: His Life and Work (Leiden: Kern Institute, 1989), 41.

99. Cooper, An Overland Journey from China Towards India, 176; Baber, Travels and Researches in Western China, 42; Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet, 9; Hackmann, Walks on the Borders of China, Tibet and Burma, 9.

100. See for example M. Cable, F. Houghton, R. Kilgour, A. McLeish, R. W. Stuart, and O. Wyon, The Challenge of Central Asia (London: World Dominion Press, 1929), 95: “Yunnanfu Where There is a Tibetan Colony of Resident Traders.”

101. C. Tsybikoff, “Journey to Lhasa,” The Geographical Journal 23 (1904): 96; F. Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods (London: Edward Arnold, 1922), 235.

102. But see A. Allix, “The Geography of Fairs,” Geographical Review 12 (1922): 532–569; H. Pirenne, Histoire économique et sociale du moyen âge [Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages] (1933; reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 83–89; F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II [The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II], 2 vols., seconde édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966), 1 347–350; Braudel, Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15th–17th Centuries, vol. 2, 63–75.

103. Braudel, Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15th–17th Centuries, vol. 2, 104–109.

104. Braudel, Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15th–17th Centuries, vol. 2, 106–107.

105. Hypothesis put forward by E. Balazs as quoted by Braudel, Material Culture, Economy and Capitalism: 15–17th Centuries, vol. 2, 109.

106. Desgodins, Tibet, from the Correspondence of Missionaries, 337; H. Bower, Diary of a Journey Across Tibet (1894; reprint, Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1976), 282.

107. See the lively description of the annual fair at Bkra shis dgonpa by F. Grenard, Tibet: The Country and Its Inhabitants (London: Huchinson and Co., 1904), 128–130.

108. Rock, “The Unexplored Amnye Machen Range,” 162, see also photo on 157.

109. Duncan, The Yangtze and the Yak, 100.

110. Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 333, 424; Tafel, My Tibet Travels, vol. 2, 248.

111. Cf. M. Gaborieau, Récit d’un voyageur musulman au Tibet [Story of a Muslim Traveler to Tibet] (Paris: Librairie Klincksieck, 1973), 17–18.

112. Snellgrove and Richardson, A Cultural History of Tibet, 156.

113. Cf. J. K. Fairbank and S. Y. Têng, “On the Qing Tributary System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 6 (1941): 135–246.

114. Gaborieau, Story of a Muslim Traveler to Tibet, 14–36; T. T. Lewis, “The Tuladhars of Kathmandu. A Study of Buddhist Tradition in a Newar Merchant Community” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1984). Markham, Bogle, and Manning, Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, 258–291.

115. L. Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, c. 950–1842 A.D. (Roma: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1977), 161–162; Radhu, Tibetan Caravan; J. Bray, “The Lapchak Mission from Ladakh to Lhasa in British Indian Foreign Policy,” The Tibet Journal 15, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 75–96.

116. L. Boulnois, Poudre d’or et monnaies d’argent au Tibet (principalement au XVIIIe siècle) [Powdered Gold and Silver Coins in Tibet (Prinicaplly in the Eighteenth Century)] (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1983), 129, after Chinese sources.

117. S. Hedin, Southern Tibet: Discoveries in Former Times Compared with My Own Researches in 1906–08 (Band I–IX) (Stockholm: Lithographic Institute of the General Staff of the Swedish Army, 1917–1922), vol. 1, 50–52.

118. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, after the complete Yule-Cordier edition of 1903/20, reprinted (New York, Dover Publications, 1992), 45.

119. Stein, La civilisation tibétaine (Paris: l’Asiathèque, 1987) (édition definitive, réédition revue et augmentée de l’édition de 1962; Paris: Dunod), 173.

120. As quoted by Lévi, Nepal: Historic Study of a Hindu Kingdom, vol. 1, 93.

121. Markham, Bogle, and Manning, Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, 6, 115, 183.

122. Rockhill, Diary of a Journey Through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892, 71; F. Weiss, “Die Provinz Yunnan, ihre Handels- und Verkehrsverhältnisse” [Yunnan Province, Its Trade and Transportation Conditions], Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalischen Sprachen 14 (1912): 41; Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, vol. 1, 22, vol. 2, 330; J. W. Gregory and C. J. Gregory, To the Alps of Chinese Tibet (London: Seeley Service and Co., 1923), 205; Sagant, “Ampleur et profondeur historique des migrations népalaises” [The Extent and Historical Depth of Nepalese Migrations], L’Ethnographie 120, no. 77–78 (1978): 112; see also Jest, “Exchange Values in the Himalayas and Tibet,” 230–237.

123. S. Cammann, The Land of the Camel: Tents and Temples of Inner Mongolia (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1951), 32n.

124. Lévi, Nepal: Historic Study of a Hindu Kingdom, vol. 1, 94; cf. V. Jacquemont, Correspondance de V. Jacquemont avec sa famille et plusieurs de ses amis pendant son voyage dans l’Inde (1828–1832) [Correspondence of V. Jacquemont with His Family and Several of His Friends During His Voyage in India (1828–1832)] (Bruxelles: Wouters, Raspoet et Cie, Imprimeurs-Libraires, 1843), nouvelle édition, vol. 1, 173.

125. N. M. Przehevalsky, Mongolia, the Tangut Country and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet, 2 vols. (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876), 2:70n.

126. Prejevalsky, Mongolia, the Tangut Country and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet, vol. 2, 83; G. Kreitner, Im fernen Osten. Reisen des Grafen Bela Szechenyi in Indien, Japan, China, Tibet und Birma in den Jahren 1877–1880 [In the Far East. Travels of Count Bela Szechenyi in India, Japan, China, Tibet and Burma in the Years 1877–1880] (Wien: Alfred Holder, 1881), 727–728.

127. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, 283–284.

128. Boulnois, Powdered Gold and Silver Coins in Tibet, 71–85.

129. Peter Lindegger, Griechische und römische Quellen zum peripheren Tibet [Greek and Roman Sources on Tibet’s Peripheries], Opuscula Tibetana, Fasc. 14 (Rikon/ Zürich: Tibet-Institute, 1982), 183, map, 44–45n; Boulnois, Powdered Gold and Silver Coins in Tibet, end map.

130. Burrard, Records of the Survey of India, vol. 1, 22.

131. Gill, The Narrative of a Journey Through China and Eastern Tibet, 93; Rockhill, Diary of a Journey through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892, 357.

132. Cooper, An Overland Journey from China Towards India, 417.

133. Ryall, “Explorations in Western Tibet,” 449; Shuttleworth, “A Wool Mart of the Indo-Tibetan Borderland,” 557.

134. Shuttleworth, “A Wool Mart of the Indo-Tibetan Borderland,” 557.

135. Cf. Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet, 80.

136. J. Hanbury-Tracy, Black River of Tibet (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1938), 58.

137. G. Tucci, The Religions of Tibet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 110–111.

138. Cf. Tsarong, “Economy and Ideology on a Tibetan Monastic Estate in Ladakh: Processes of Production, Reproduction and Transformation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1987).

139. Prejevalsky, Mongolia, the Tangut Country and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet, vol. 2, 46–47; Tsybikoff, “Journey to Lhasa,” 746; Rock, “The Unexplored Amnye Machen Range,” 161.

140. Carrasco, Land and Polity in Tibet, 213.

141. Cutting, The Fire Ox and Other Years, 195.

142. E. R. Huc and J. Gabet, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844–1846, foreword by Paul Pelliot (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1928), translated from the original French edition, Paris, 1850 (reprint, New York: Dover Publications 1987), vol. 2, 59; cf. A. David-Néel as quoted by R. Middleton, Alexandra David-Neel: Portrait of an Adventurer (Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambala, 1989), 121; G. N. Patterson, Requiem for Tibet (London: Aurum Press, 1990), 52.

143. Tucci, The Religions of Tibet, 130.

144. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844–1846, vol. 1, 89, 92; W. Gill, “Travels in Western China and on the Eastern Border of Tibet,” The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 48 (1878): 93; A. D. Carey, “A Journey Round Chinese Turkistan and Along the Northern Frontier of Tibet,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 9, no. 12 (1887): 731–752; Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet, 45; Filchner, Kumbum Monastery, 12.

145. C. Bell, Portrait of the Dalai Lama (London: Collins, 1946), 49.

146. Huc and Gabet, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844–1846, vol. 2, 180.

147. Rockhill, Diary of a Journey Through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892, 357; Futterer, “Geographical Sketch of Northeast Tibet,” 326; Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet, 45; Carrasco, Land and Polity in Tibet, 213.

148. Desgodins, Tibet, from the Correspondence of Missionaries, 334–335; Bower, Diary of a Journey Across Tibet, 282; Kawaguchi, Three Years in Tibet, 458; Bell, The People of Tibet, 125; Filchner, Kumbum Dschamba Ling, 218.

149. Stein, La civilisation tibétaine, 92; cf. Macauley, Report of a Mission to Sikkim and the Tibetan Frontier, 16, 44.

150. Kawaguchi, Three Years in Tibet, 456.

151. Cf. Van Spengen, “Political Geography, Braudelian Historical Geography, and Cultural Regionality of Tibet,” 102 for an elaboration on the subject.

152. Bell, The People of Tibet, 109.

153. A. Lamb, British India and Tibet, 1766–1910 (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 256ff.

154. Bell, The People of Tibet, 113; G. Tucci, To Lhasa and Beyond. Diary of an Expedition to Tibet in the Year MCMXLVIII (Roma: Libreria della Stato, 1956), 10.

155. Carrasco, Land and Polity in Tibet, 213; cf. Brauen, Peter Aufschneiter, 158.

156. Bell, The People of Tibet, 130.

157. Cf. Gregory and Gregory, To the Alps of Chinese Tibet, 112.

158. Radhu, Tibetan Caravan, 168; Stoddard, The Beggar from Amdo, 77.

159. A. Winnington, Tibet: Record of a Journey (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), 185–189.

160. G. T. Andrugtsang, Four Rivers, Six Ranges: Reminiscences of the Resistance Movement in Tibet (Dharamsala: Information and Publicity Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1973), 9–10.

161. Radhu, Tibetan Caravan, 168.

162. Patterson, Requiem for Tibet, 38.

163. Peter, A Study of Polyandry, 474.

164. Tolstoy, “Across Tibet from India to China,” 172, 178.

165. Tucci, To Lhasa and Beyond, 12.

166. Bell, The People of Tibet, 117; Tucci, To Lhasa and Beyond, 33.

167. J. Hanbury-Tracy, Black River of Tibet, 181; A. David-Néel, “Les marchands tibétains” [Tibetan Merchants], France-Asie 9, no. 83 (1953): 284–293, part 1; France-Asie 9, no. 84 (1953): 398–409, part 2.

168. J. W. Edgar, Report on a Visit to Sikhim and the Thibetan Frontier (1874; reprint, New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House, 1969), 45–47; Hosie, Report on a Journey to the Eastern Frontier of Thibet, 28; W. Stötzner, Ins unerforschte Tibet: Tagebuch der deutschen Expedition Stötzner 1914 [Into Unexplored Tibet: Diary of the German Stötzner Expedition 1914] (Leipzig: Verlag von K F. Koehler, 1924), 107; Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet, 141; S. Goswami, “The Opium Evil in Nineteenth Century Assam,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 19, nos. 3–4 (1982): 365–376; J. Norbu, Warriors of Tibet: The Story of Aten and the Khampas’ Fight for Freedom of Their Country (London: Wisdom Publications, 1986), 71.

169. Peter Goullart, Forgotten Kingdom (London: John Murray, 1955), 102–105.

170. T. W. Wiley, “Macro Exchanges: Tibetan Economics and the Roles of Politics and Religion,” The Tibet Journal 11, no. 1 (1986): 10, cf. T. W. Shakya, “1948 Tibetan Trade Mission to United Kingdom,” The Tibet Journal 15, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 98.