Indian Antiquary Vol 45

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 42

38
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(MARCR, 1916
Western China, always moving southwards till they spread over the whole land. The effects of all these waves of population are to this day visible in the people in places everywhere. But for praotical purposes the great variety of local tribes that have emerged from the medley of ages of immigration and internecine struggle may be separated into four main groups: the Tibeto-Burman race of Tibet and Burma; the Siamesa-Shan race (Thais, Laos, Karens); the Mon race of Southern Burma (Talaings), Cambodia (Khmers), and Cochin-China (Chams); and the Annamese of Annam and Tong-king (Giâos, Giaochi).
Until the masterful intervention of the English in Burmese affairs (1824), and of the French in those of Annam (1787), these peoples have struggled for supremacy over the Mons and each other through all time without reference politically to any part of the world other than China ; and the main facts to bear in mind about them are that they are of Mongolian stock, and that their mental attitude is Far Eastern and Chinese, and not Indian nor Mid-Asiatic. At the same time, their civilization has been strongly tinged for a very long period with Hinduism and Buddhism from India. Their future will be closely bound up with Western civilization, and in this view the present situation of Siam is of particular interest. Hedged in between two powerful Empires, the English to the west and the French to the east, independent only by virtue of their joint guarantees, and led by an energetic and enlightened ruling family, she bids fair to be the Belgium of Eastern Asia as to agriculture, industrial enterprise, commerce and wealth.
II.-THE TIBET ANS. It is not usual to class the Tibetans with the nations of Indo-China, but their relationship to them is so close, and their general historical and ethnical situation so similar, that it will be convenient to do so here. None the less so, because, as in the case of the Indo-Chinese peoples proper, so much of their civilization as has not been borrowed from India has come from China. The name Tibet is a corruption of the native term Tö-bhöt (Stod-bod), or High Bod, for the uplands of the loftiest country in the world, through which travellers found their way into it.
Into this land of Bod, predestined by its configuration to isolation from the rest of the world -unless, indeed, improved communications will some day induce a large a lien population to develop its almost universal distribution of gold-there wandered eastwards from their home in Western China the earliest of the same description of Mongolian emigrants as those who, in successive swarms, found their way into the lands east of India, i.e., into Indo-China proper. Eventually, with an inevitable admixture from surrounding lands, they formed the strong, hardy, light-brown, but popularly red, race of the Bhö-pä (Bod-pa), or Tibetan people. The language which they have gradually developed belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group, and was reduced to writing by Thonmi Sambhotâ in the seventh century A.D., who, with the aid of Buddhist monks, introduced a variety of the Indian script of the period.
To Europeans Tibet, as a mysterious land, unapproachable except by the most intrepid or religiously inclined, has for centuries been the natural goal of explorers and missionaries, including many famous names, onwards from the days of the Frenchman, Guillaume Bouchier, in search of gold in 1253.
The Tibetans are known historically in the Chinese annals from the eleventh century B.C., as Kiang, or " Shepherds," with whom, nevertheless, the Chinese had but a superficial acquaintance, while their own legendary history commences in the late sixth century B.C., with a king, Gnya-Khri-Btsanpo, who is directly connected with India