Tibet, Tartary and Mongolia
Their Social and Political Condition, and the Religion of Boodh, as There Existing

An 1851 portrait of central Asian territories told through accounts from some of the first European explorers to go there.

Henry Thoby Prinsep (Author)

9781108028738, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 June 2011

184 pages, 1 map
21.6 x 14 x 1.1 cm, 0.24 kg

Henry T. Prinsep (1792–1878) was the son of a prominent East India Company servant, and like his father, he spent much of his life in the East. He left Britain for Calcutta in 1809, at the age of seventeen, and stayed in India, working in a variety of roles, until his retirement in 1843. He wrote a number of books about India: in this work, published in 1851, he turns to the north of the subcontinent. Prinsep draws from travel narratives of the few explorers who had been to this territory – which corresponds to today's western China and Mongolia – to illustrate the lives of the people there. Using sources ranging from the thirteenth-century account by Marco Polo to eighteenth-century reports by French missionaries, Prinsep brings information on what was then a little-known world to a wider audience.

Tibet, Tartary, and Mongolia.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]