Arthur Douglas Carey

Carey was educated at the City of London School, and qualified for the Indian Civil Service in 1864. He went out to Bombay in 1865. He was a Collector of Salt Revenue in 1881, and the same year Acting Commissioner of Indian Customs.{{cite IBD1915|wstitle=Carey, Arthur Douglas}}{{cite journal |title=Obituary: Arthur Douglas Carey |journal=The Geographical Journal |date=1936 |volume=88 |issue=2 |pages=191–192 |jstor=1785866 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1785866 |issn=0016-7398}}

On his self-financed Central Asian journey while on furlough from the Indian Civil Service, Carey started from Simla. He was accompanied from Leh as interpreter by Andrew Dalgleish. Their group left Leh and crossed the valley of the Chang Chenmo River into the Aksai Chin.{{cite book |last1=Marshall |first1=Julie |title=Britain and Tibet 1765-1947: A Select Annotated Bibliography of British Relations with Tibet and the Himalayan States including Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan Revised and Updated to 2003 |date=2005 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-32784-3 |page=179 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2dV_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA179 |language=en}}

File:Chinese Turkistan and Northern Tibet.jpg of the 1880s in what is now southern Xinjiang]]

For some of the way Carey and Dalgleish were accompanied by H. E. M. James.{{cite web |title=Carey, Arthur D (d 1936), AIM25 collection description |url=https://aim25.com/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=6369&inst_id=10&nv1=search&nv2= |website=aim25.com}} In Carey's words:

I struck a bargain for baggage-ponies with the Tartars of the frontier villages on the Pangong Lake, and left Tanksé on the 12th of August with a caravan of thirty-one men and forty-nine ponies.{{cite journal |last1=Carey |first1=A. D. |title=A Journey Round Chinese Turkistan and along the Northern Frontier of Tibet |journal=Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography |date=1887 |volume=9 |issue=12 |page=732 |doi=10.2307/1801130 |jstor=1801130 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1801130 |issn=0266-626X}}

They travelled east from Nubra, passing the landmark Lake Mungtsa (various spellings) and reaching Tashlik-kul on the edge of the Aksai Chin on day 17. They used a high pass, rising to over {{convert|17,500|feet}}. They headed north to Keriya Town and so to Hotan (Khotan).{{cite book |title=Journey of Carey and Dalgleish in Chinese Turkistan and Northern Tibet and Orography from RGSSPv3 |date=1890 |page=18 |url=https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1282/page/18/mode/1up}}{{cite book |last1=Sandberg |first1=Graham |title=The exploration of Tibet : its history and particulars from 1623 to 1904 |date=1904 |publisher=Calcutta : Thacker, Spink & Co.; London : W. Thacker & Co. |page=197 |url=https://archive.org/details/cu31924023493863/page/n209/mode/2up}}{{cite book |last1=Waller |first1=Derek |title=The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia |date=2004 |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |isbn=978-0-8131-4904-2 |page=163 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sqkeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA163 |language=en}}

In terminology of the time attributed to Carl Ritter, the party had crossed the Kunlun Mountains.{{cite EB1911|wstitle=Kuen-lun}} This first leg of the journey was {{convert|585|miles}}. The route was not at all well known, but had been documented in 1873 by Kishen Singh, in association with the mission of Douglas Forsyth to Kashgar. Singh went from north to south, rather than south to north, as Carey's party did, and Ney Elias later.{{cite book |title=Journey of Carey and Dalgleish in Chinese Turkistan and Northern Tibet and Orography from RGSSPv3 |date=1890 |page=10 |url=https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1282/page/10/mode/1up}}

Carey and Dalgleish were the first Europeans to follow the Hotan River from Hotan downstream into the Tarim Basin, and the Yarkand River. At the confluence, they went along the Tarim River to the eastern Kashgar Plain.{{cite book |last1=Baumer |first1=Christoph |title=History of Central Asia, The: 4-volume set |date=2018 |publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing |isbn=978-1-83860-868-2 |page=117|volume=1 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DhiWDwAAQBAJ&pg=RA1-PA117 |language=en}} They visited Karasahr, and went into winter quarters at Kurla to its south. He then turned south to the Lop Nur salt lake region.

Crossing the Altyn-Tagh, the party gained the Tibetan Plateau, and visited the Qaidam Basin, now in Qinghai. Then looping north they crossed the so-called Humboldt Range of the Kunlun Mountains, and made a way back through Hami, Urumchi, and Yarkand.{{cite EB1911|wstitle=Tibet}} The expedition ended in Ladakh, reached by a more northerly route than on the outbound journey, and the Karakorum pass.

For his leadership of this expedition, Carey was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1889.

Carey was Commissioner of Customs, Salt, Opium and Abkari, 1891. In 1891–2 he was in Lisbon, involved in the Goa Treaty negotiations, at the time of the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1891. He retired from the Indian Civil Service in 1893, and went to live in Switzerland. He died on 11 June 1936, at age 91.

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Category:1840s births

Category:1936 deaths

Category:Indian Civil Service (British India) officers

Category:British explorers

Category:Year of birth uncertain

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