Chapter 1: Introduction
Mongolia has not received much attention from Englishmen. Nor do I wonder. It has little or no charm for the tourist; no scenery, no sport. Mongol life is simple and not beautiful, and the few objects of interest are archaeological relics, unattractive in form, and not easily accessible.
For two centuries before the era of treaty relations with China, a sparse succession of Russian missions—ecclesiastical, commercial, and diplomatic—crossed the Gobi by one or other of the caravan routes from Kiakhta to Kalgan, and during the last forty years there has been a continuous if slender trickle of foreign travellers, mostly Russian, over the same routes;
but they are the only tracks which can be considered beaten by Europeans. Elsewhere the important trade routes have been traversed by a number of Russian explorers and pioneers of commerce, but there is still a good deal of blank space on the map—blank space which hardly contains any secrets of moment.
If you set aside the regular caravan routes, and the south-eastern border from Dolon Nor to Kwei-hua-cheng (the “Blue Town” of Huc), few English names appear in the list of Mongolian travellers, and few of those turned their attention to regions west of the Kiakhta-Kalgan line.
The most notable English name is Ney Elias, and his route was from Kwei-hua-cheng to Sair-usu, Uliasutai, Kobdo, and the Russian frontier at Biisk. There is no record of an English traveller in the large space from the Kiakhta routes on the west to the Khingan mountains on the east.
Besides the Jesuit father Gerbillon, whose journeys date back two centuries, and Dr. Franke, of the German Consular Service, I know of none but Russians who have travelled in this space, and the number is small. The prominent names are Fritsche, Pozdnyéev, and Prjevalski, and the last went no further north than the Dalai Nor of Inner Mongolia.
I was attracted to this region by a recommendation of Bretschneider, and in May, 1900, I found myself with sufficient time at my disposal to undertake a leisurely journey in East Mongolia.
The outfit for this had been carefully arranged, and was the outcome of a year’s preparation, but on my way north through Tientsin to Peking I was unfortunate or fortunate enough to drop into the middle of the Boxer outbreak, and I was forced by unlooked-for contingencies to postpone the expedition till the summer of 1902.