唐代における靑海・ラサ間の道程

Abstract

The route from Shan-cheng 鄯城 county (Xining 西寧) to the Tibetan capital at Lhasa is recorded in the geographical monograph of the Xin Tang shu 新唐書 (ch. 40), under the heading for Shan-cheng county, Shan-zhou 鄯州. As this itinerary was of considerable importance as the link between Tang China and Tibet it has in the past received a good deal of scholarly attention, but existing studies have not been successful. The author here attempts to reconstruct and map the Tang route, and finds that the route was (1) halfway identical with the Qing official route, and half quite different, (2) totally distinct from the caravan route of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which crossed the southern rim of Tsaidam, and yet (3) the shortest route between Xining and Lhasa that could have been used during the Tang period.