Land of the Lamas: Notes of a Journey through China, Mongolia and Tibet

New York: The Century Co. Good. 1891. First Edition. Hardcover. Frontispiece of a Chinese pilgrim on the road to Lh'asa, 60 illustrations in the text, 2 double page maps, index. Bound in publisher's brown cloth with black and gold spine label. Heavy rubbing to spine, both ends of spine bumped and worn, all four corners rubbed and worn, front gutter cracked, binding sound. The author was a succesful American career diplomat who is most famous for being the author of America's Open Door Policy towards China. He was fluent in Tibetan, Chinese, and French and interrupted his career in his mid-30s to travel in Tibet, a place very few western travellers had ever been or written about. Rockhill prepared assidously for his trip, hiring a Tibetan Lama to tutor him in Tibetan culture and language while living in Peking. He travelled into Mongolia so he could enter Tibet from the north because doing so gave him the best chance to get as far as possible into Tibet before the xenophobia of the Tibetans inevitably caught up with him. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 399 pages .