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42
EAST ASIA.
The more or less mixed races of East Tibet on the Chinese frontier, on the route
of the troops that plunder them and of the mandarins who oppress them, seem to
be less favourably constituted, and are described as thievish and treacherous.
Amongst the peoples of the plateau the Khampas and Khambas are to be carefully
resemble the Tibetans of
distinguished. The Khampas of the Upper Indus valley
Ladak. They are always cheerful, even under what to others would seem to be
unspeakable misery. But the religious sentiment is little developed amongst them,
and none of their children ever enter the monastic orders. The Khambas are
immigrants from the province of Kham, east of Lassa, who visit all the camping
grounds as far as Kashmir as professional beggars. But a few groups have here
and there abandoned the nomad life and taken to agriculture.
The Tibetans have long been a civilised people. Stone implements have no
doubt been retained for certain religious ceremonies, and the stone age itself still
partly continues on the upland plateaux, where many shepherd communities use stone
cooking vessels. But even these are acquainted with copper and iron, while the
rest of the nation is one of the most highly cultured in Asia. In some respects
they are even more civilised than those of many European countries, for reading
and writing are general accomplishments in many places, and books are here so
cheap that they are found in the humblest dwellings, though several of these works
are kept simply on account of their magical properties. In the free evolution of
their speech, which has been studied chiefly by Foucaux, Csoma de Koros,
Schiefner, and Jiischke, the Tibetans have outlived the period in which the Chinese
are still found. The monosyllabic character of the language, which differs from all
other Asiatic tongues, has nearly been effaced. The official style, fixed by the priests
twelve hundred years ago, is still maintained in literature, but the current speech has
gradually become polysyllabic, and the practice of distinguishing the sense of mono-
syllables by their varied intonation is beginning to disappear. Old words, whose
meaning has been lost, have been agglutinated to the roots to form nominal and verbal
inflections, and the article is employed to distinguish homophones. The various
alphabetical systems are derived from the Devanagari introduced from India by the
first Buddhist missionaries. The present pronunciation of few other languages
differs more from the written form than does the Tibetan, whose ancient ortho-
graphy has been scrupulously maintained for centuries. Many of the written letters
are either silent or sounded differently, just as gh in the English words enough,
rough, is pronounced /, while it is mute in plough, bough. So in Tibetan dbjm
becomes simply u; bkra si/is Uninpo-= Tnxhilnnpo, &c.
The Tibetan dialects are both numerous and highly differentiated from each
other. Although the peoples of Bod stock stretch beyond the present frontiers
into Kashmir, Bhutan, and Sechuen, west, south, and east, nevertheless several of
the wild or barbarous tribes in the east and north belong to different races more or
less mixed together.
In the south the Mishmis, Abors, and others are allied to the
hillmen of Assam ; while the Arru, Pa-i or Ghion, Telu, and Remepang all speak
varieties of the Mclam, an archaic and polysyllabic Tibetan language mixed with
many foreign elements. The Amdoans of the north-east, near the Kansu frontier, are