Eurasia, the greatest land mass on the globe, appropriately holds in its centre the loftiest table-land; a table-land walled in by the highest mountains on the earth's surface, rendering it as difficult of access as it is inhospitable to live in. Yet its very inaccessibility has proved a great attraction to travellers, and to-day the character of the country, its chief orographical features, its climate and resources are familiar to all; the blank spaces have been filled in step by step by a series of capable and adventurous travellers, until finally, in 1904, by the members of the mission dispatched by Lord Curzon to Lhasa, under Sir Frank Younghusband, the ‘Forbidden City’ has been once more visited by Europeans and so its mysteries have been unfolded to the outer world.

Tibet occupies an area of some 700,000 square miles, and latest travellers credit it with not more than 800,000 or possibly 1,000,000 inhabitants, making little more than one inhabitant to the square mile; but seeing that six-sevenths of the country is uninhabitable and frequented only during the short summer by nomads on the northern border, who find, in a few of the more favoured spots of the high plateau, a scanty pasture for their flocks and an escape from the great heat and the insect plagues of the lower surrounding depressions, we may relegate some 700,000 inhabitants to the 70,000 square miles of the lower plateau, which should thus be credited with ten inhabitants to the square mile, a figure probably well within the mark.