-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: MAPS-L: Army Map Service series 1301 - gansu, qinghai and
tibet
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 17:15:49 -0500
From: Tsering W Shawa ([log in to unmask]) <[log in to unmask]>
To: Maps, Air Photo & Geospatial Systems Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Jean Hanus,
One of the main challenges of finding an ethnic Tibetan area’s (includes TAR, Qinghai, and parts of Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan) place name is a conversion or translation of a Tibetan place name into a Roman letter. Another issue is a pure politics of translating a Tibetan place name into a Chinese pinyin or a Chinese Romanization system. For example, SHIGATSE, an important Tibetan city is translated into following spellings.
Shigatse (English, using Tibetan phonetic)
Rigazi (translated into Chinese Pinyin)
Xigaze (translated into Chinese romanization)
Almost all the official Chinese map will use either Pinyin or Chinese Romanization system in spelling a Tibetan place name. Most of the modern maps will also use either of the above spelling, if the map is created without much research. The politicizing of place name has created a confusion to geographer and cartographer like me, a native Tibetan who reads and writes Tibetan, find it difficult to recognized the place name that are spelled in pinyin system because it sound different when you read a place name in a Tibetan language. Most of the 19th and early 20th centuries travellers have used the Tibetan phonetic to spell the place names.
Good place to look for a Tibetan place name is the Tibetan and Himalayan digital library. You can search their gazetteer to check spelling and location of a place. (http://www.thdl.org/collections/cultgeo/gazetteer/). “Tibet and Adjacent Under Communist China’s Occupation 1:3,200,000” map published by the Ammye Machen Institute, Tibetan Center for Advanced Studies, Dharamsala, H.P. India, could be helpful as a reference for phonetic Tibetan place names (you may have seen this map). The Tibet Map Institute located in your area (http://www.tibetmap.com/) has created series of map covering most of central Tibet and Kham area. If you read Tibetan, you mayl find a Tibetan Autonomous map published in 1981 by TAR a good source of place name information.
Hope this information is helpful to you.
Thanks.
-Wangyal
Tsering Wangyal Shawa
Geographic Information Systems Librarian
Head, Digital Map and Geospatial Information Center
Geosciences and Map Library
Fine Hall B Level, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Phone: (609) 258-6804
Fax: (609) 258-4607
www.princeton.edu/~geolib/gis
----- Original Message -----
From: Angie Cope <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, March 2, 2006 6:54 am
Subject: MAPS-L: Army Map Service series 1301 - gansu, qinghai and tibet
To: [log in to unmask]
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: series 1301
> Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 09:07:57 +0100
> From: Jean Hanus <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
>
>
> The last 5 summers I travelled in Gansu,Qinghai and Tibet,trying to
> follow travellers of the 19th and early 20th centuries.The main
> difficulty is to find what is to-day's name of all the names
> encounteredin the diaries of the travellers.
> I found the maps compiled by the (US) Army Map Service of the 1:1 000
> 000 International Map of the World,Series 1301 very useful. I
> found a
> poor copy of Sheet NJ 47,it is very exciting as you find a mixture of
> Chinese,Mongol and Tibetan names,the area covered is the same as TPC
> G8B,very poor in surface information.Both are very complementary.
> I am searching for other sheets of the same series,in particular
> NJ 48,
> and more generaly sheets covering Gansu,Qinghai and Tibet.
>
> If somebody has access to these maps and can make multi A3
> photocopy, I
> would be grateful and for sure pay for the copies and mailing...
> Gratefully yours, Jean Hanus
>
> Jean Hanus
> 2 rue de Belgrade
> 38000 Grenoble,FRANCE
> Tel/fax : 04 76 43 33 96
> International : 33 4 76 43 33 96
> e-mail : [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
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