Photo 1083/37(5)

Genre: Landscape Photography

View looking down onto the raging waters of the falls. According to the account in No Passport to Tibet (pp. 125-6), Bailey first encountered and photographed the falls on 20 July: 'Then I found a path leading down to the Tsangpo at the end of which I could see a cloud of spray. I went down the path half a mile, dropping about 400 feet. I first went out on to a rock about 100 feet above the water, which was rushing through a narrow chasm about 50 yards wide. To my left there were violently swirling rapids, below and to the right the river plunged over a ledge and dropping about thirty feet sent up clouds of spray which formed a cloud about twenty feet above the top of the fall. Morshead, who came to it later in the day, saw a rainbow in it and since the Tibetans had no name for it we nicknamed it the Rainbow Fall. I took some photographs from the rock and then I climbed down and took another photograph from river level just above the fall.' These are the falls described by the Survey of India employee Kintup, who in 1879 had been sent out as the servant of a Mongolian monk to explore the course of the Tsangpo below Gyala (Kintup was subsequently sold by the monk as a slave and only escaped back to India after several months' hardship).

Subjects = Bailey Collection; exploration; river scenes; surveys; waterfalls

Location = Pemakochung; Tibet; Tsangpo (river)