Exploration on the North East Frontier

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Amongst the many activities of the Indian Survey Department not the least in scientific interest is the series of exploratory surveys which have been carried out on the north-east frontier, to the north and east of Assam, in the wild and mountainous hinterland which lies between Tibet and Burma. The scientific interest of these explorations is two-fold, geographical and ethnographical. The region dealt with in the report of Colonel Sir Sidney Burrard (Surveyor-General of India) embraces the principal basins of the rivers Mekong, Salween, and Irrawaddy and the Himalayan catchment areas of the four principal feeders of the Brahmaputra, namely, the Lohit (Zayul), the Dibang, the Dihang, and the Sabansiri, and for the sheer physical difficulties offered to systematic mapping is probably unmatched by any equal area in the world.
The scantiness of population, denseness of jungle, altitude of ranges, steep precipices, torrential streams and internal climate have so far practically barred communication between India and China and between Tiber and Burma. It is here that four survey detachments have been working intermittently from 1911 to 1914 to assist each other in cracking that old geographical nut which lay enshrined in the mountains which overhang the course of the Brahmaputra and the sources of the Irrawaddy. We have heard of the remarkable exploits of geographers, such as Captain Bailey, who traversed those regions with unexampled success and vindicated the reputation of earlier native explorers, but we have not heard much of the determined efforts of the official pioneers of scientific mapping, whose work furnishes the basis of all successful exploration