20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

William Rockhill's observations of Inner Mongolian tribal rituals... 485rob and bully them in the most shameful way. Their flocks are herded bythe women, who use slings to ‘round them up’ when scattered, throwingstones or dried dung with wonderful precision to considerable distances.” 14Not long after, ROCkhILL ran out of money for new supplies, and wasforced to call off the journey, 600 kilometers short of Lhasa. He had spent 8months, travelled over 7800 km through 4800 – meter mountain ranges, andin the last 1000 km in Eastern Tibet (now Chinghai and Szechuan provinces)passed thirty-six lamaseries. 15 His book, Land of the Lamas, 16 and his articleswritten for Century Magazine recount his trip of 1888 and 1889.Second Trip to Inner MongoliaTwo years later on November 30, 1891, the American diplomat againleft his Peking post as Secretary in the U.S. Legation to embark on anothermajor journey through Mongolia to Tibet, which lasted until October 5,1892. This route took him further into Southern Mongolia and WesternGansu. This time, to better prepare for his travels, he had researched theletters of Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the writingsof Abbe Huc (Souvenirs), and Nikolai Prjevalsky’s 17 first journey inCentral Asia. By then, ROCKHILL’s Kalmyk Mongolian had improvedenough for him to write down all Mongol terms in his travel Diary.His route took him through the Chahar Inner Mongolian city of Kalgan 18in north China, where he remarked on the beautiful camel caravans, anddescribed an oboo. 19 In this region Mongols lived a sedentary life likeChinese. They wore Chinese clothing, smoked opium, liked to drink, and14Ibidem, 120.15Varg, 14-15.16William W. ROCKHILL, Land of the Lamas, Notes of a Journey Through China,Mongolia and Tibet (Delhi, India: Sri Satguru Publications, 2004 [1891, New York andLondon: The Century Company]).17Nikolai Mikhailovich Prjevalsky (1839-1888) was a famous Russian militaryexplorer, geographer, and writer about Mongolia and Inner Asia. He made four journeys tothe region and collected and identified many new species of plants and animals includingthe wild camel and the takhi (Equus Prjevalskii) or wild horse that is named for him. Hisbook, Mongolia, the Tangut Country, and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet (1876) wastranslated into English and edited by Sir Henry Yule. See http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Nikolai_Mikhailovich_Prjevalsky.18Kalgan, which is a Mongol word from qaalγan, meaning “gate”, today is knownin Chinese as Zhangjiakou. The older Qing dynasty name for Kalgan is Wanchuan and itis under this name that the Kalgan Consulate’s archival materials in the National Archivesin Washington, D.C. can be found.19A stone heap monument associated primarily with the shamanist worship ofmountains and sacred places in Mongolia.