In the forbidden land : $b an account of a journey into Tibet, capture by the Tibetan lamas and soldiers, imprisonment, torture and ultimate releaseLandor, Arnold Henry Savage
History
In the forbidden land : $b an account of a journey into Tibet, capture by the Tibetan lamas and soldiers, imprisonment, torture and ultimate release
Landor, Arnold Henry Savage
Tibet Autonomous Region (China) -- Description and travel
Scanning their features carefully, it struck me that in their facial
lines many points could be traced which would make one feel inclined to
attribute to them a remote Mongolian origin, modified largely by the
climate, the nature of the country, and probably by intermarriage. In the
scale of standard human races the Raots stood extremely low, as can be
judged from the accompanying photographs. The women, as will be seen, had
abnormally small skulls with low foreheads, and although they looked
devoid even of a glint of reason, they were actually fairly intelligent.
They had high cheek-bones; long, flattish noses, broad and rounded as in
the Mongolian type. The chin was in most instances round, very receding,
though the lips were in their normal position, thin, and very tightly
closed with up-turned corners to the mouth. The lower jaw was extremely
short and narrow, whereas the upper one seemed quite out of proportion to
the size of the skull. Their ears were large, outstanding, and
unmodelled, but capable of catching sounds at great distances.
The men had better heads than the women, underdeveloped yet comparatively
well balanced. They had higher and broader foreheads, similar though
shorter noses, chins not quite so receding, the whole lower jaw
extraordinarily narrow, but the upper lip, as with the women, huge and
out of all proportion.
Undoubtedly the Raots are not a pure race, and even among the few I came
across variations so considerable occurred as to puzzle one in tracing
their origin. They invariably possess luxuriant coal-black hair, which
never attains more than a moderate length. It is not coarse in texture,
but is usually so dirty that it appears coarser than it really is. They
have very little hair on their bodies except in the arm-pits, and their
moustaches and beards hardly deserve the name.
The men generally part the crop on their head in the middle, so that it
flows on either side of the skull, just covering the ears, and I found
the same strange custom that I observed years ago among the Ainu of Yezo
of shaving a lozenge-shaped portion of the scalp in the centre of the
forehead directly above the nose. The women, using their fingers as a
comb, draw their hair to the back of the head and tie it in a knot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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