Hippolyte Desideri

Abstract

Father Desideri travelled by Kashmir and Ladakh to the capital of the Dalai Lama and made a prolonged stay at the city: this, or very little more, was not so long ago the sum and substance of the Italian traveller’s contribution to the literature of Tibetan travel. The curious reader might turn to the only reference supplied, the translation of a letter written from Lhasa, April 10, 1716, in the Lettres Edifiantes ¹), but he would rise from its perusal with an intense feeling of disappointment: not a word about the long journey through the Tsangpo valley, not a word, worst of all, about Lhasa itself. It was the tantalizing incompleteness in this as in other documents that drew from Yule’s pen the complaint that “a fatality has attended the accounts of Lhasa that should have been.”