DAS, Sarat Chandra.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet. First edition of this important account of clandestine travel in Tibet by an Indian explorer in British service. This copy belonged to Sir Henry Arthur Blake, Governor of Hong Kong from 1898 to 1903, and has the ownership inscription of his wife, Edith Blake.Das undertook two covert missions into Tibet in the late 1870s and early 1880s, gathering geographical, political, and ethnographic intelligence for the British Indian government. His reports were first printed confidentially by the Government of Bengal and only later made public; their appearance here in 1902 placed long-withheld frontier intelligence before readers on the eve of the Younghusband expedition.Das's work belonged to the wider Survey of India tradition of "pundit" exploration, following figures such as Nain Singh and Kishen Singh, whose journeys helped map regions largely closed to Europeans. Blake's ownership is suggestive: as Governor of Hong Kong, he occupied a senior China-coast post at a moment when British interest in Tibet was bound up with Qing authority, frontier access, and imperial rivalry in Asia.

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