Home / Browse / Travel & Exploration / Tibet.
BELL, Sir Charles.
Tibet.
Past & Present.
First edition, extremely uncommon in jacket. "This book gives us a history of Tibet from the 15th century, and its, and and peoples" (Yakushi). Bell was one of the first Westerners to make a serious study of the culture of Tibet. He was given responsibility for overseeing the Chumbi Valley, which was briefly ceded to Britain following the Younghusband Expedition in 1904, and shortly afterward published A Manual of Colloquial Tibetan. He was Political Officer to Sikkim, with responsibility as Diplomatic Officer for Bhutan and Tibet, from 1908 to 1919, and befriended the exiled 13th Dalai Lama in Darjeeling. After his retirement in 1921 he devoted the rest of his life to making Tibet intelligible to the wider world and to vindicate its right to independence. DNB describes his works as "indispensable sources of information." An excellent copy.
Octavo. Original blue cloth, title gilt to spine, Tibetan seals in gilt to upper and lower boards. With the dust jacket. Coloured frontispiece and one other coloured plate, numerous half-tone plates from the author's photographs, 2 folding maps. Lower corner of the upper board bumped, slight bumping of the other corners, crumpling head and tail of the spine, light toning, but a very good copy in the jacket with mounted coloured illustration of Sikkimese "strolling players," tanned at the spine and with some slight chipping head and tail and minor loss at the corners of the turn-ins.
