The name Bolor is very old, occurring in Hiuen Tsang’s Travels (7th century), and in still older Chinese works of like character.  General Cunningham has told us that Balti is still termed Balor by the Dards of Gilghit; and Mr. Shaw, that Palor is an old name still sometimes used by the Kirghiz for the upper part of Chitral.  The indications of Hiuen Tsang are in accordance with General Cunningham’s information; and the fact that Chitral is described under the name of Bolor in Chinese works of the last century entirely justifies that of Mr. Shaw.  A Pushtu poem of the 17th century, translated by Major Raverty, assigns the mountains of Bilaur-istan, as the northern boundary of Swat.  The collation of these indications shows that the term Bolor must have been applied somewhat extensively to the high regions adjoining the southern margin of Pamir.  And a passage in the Tarikh Rashidi, written at Kashgar in the 16th century by a cousin of the great Baber, affords us a definition of the tract to which, in its larger sense, the name was thus applied:  “Malaur (i.e.  Balaur or Bolor) ... is a country with few level spots.  It has a circuit of four months’ march.  The eastern frontier borders on Kashgar and Yarkand; it has Badakhshan to the north, Kabul to the west, and Kashmir to the south.”  The writer was thoroughly acquainted with his subject, and the region which he so defines must have embraced Sirikol and all the wild country south of Yarkand, Balti, Gilghit, Yasin, Chitral, and perhaps Kafiristan.  This enables us to understand Polo’s use of the term.

The name of Bolor in later days has been in a manner a symbol of controversy.  It is prominent in the apocryphal travels of George Ludwig von ——­, preserved in the Military Archives at St. Petersburg.  That work represents a town of Bolor as existing to the north of Badakhshan, with Wakhan still further to the north.  This geography we now know to be entirely erroneous, but it is in full accordance with the maps and tables of the Jesuit missionaries and their pupils, who accompanied the Chinese troops to Kashgar in 1758-1759.  The paper in the Geographical Society’s Journal, which has been referred to, demonstrates how these erroneous data must have originated.  It shows that the Jesuit geography was founded on downright accidental error, and, as a consequence, that the narratives which profess de visu to corroborate that geography must be downright forgeries.  When the first edition was printed, I retained the belief in a Bolor where the Jesuits placed it.