Chang Tang Traverse

Abstract

Two British military men, Captain Montagu Sinclair Wellby and Lieutenant Neill Malcolm, passed Lungmu Co, also known as Tsagger Co, a small lake in the far western Chang Tang of Tibet, in early June 1896. They had started in India in the town of Leh with thirty-nine mules and ponies and a staff of eleven Ladakhis, determined to be the first expedition to cross the highest and most desolate part of the Tibetan Plateau. Traveling mostly eastward, they crossed the Lanak La, a pass of around 18,000 feet, at that time the border between Ladakh and Tibet. There, near Lungmu Co, as Wellby wrote in his book Through Unknown Tibet (1898), “we decided to give up all searching for routes and to find a way for ourselves, marching due east as much as possible.”