Summary
This article surveys European information and other extant sources pertaining to Tibet in the early modern period, when the region was still relatively unknown to Europeans and, like Cathay (with which it tended to be associated), was thought to be home to Christian communities. The article is organized into three major themes that focus on discerning, mapping, and exploring Tibet. The first part examines the features of what was for Europeans an uncertain association between Tibet and Cathay. The second part of the study, concerned with mapping, analyses the Jesuit cartographical work in China, partly using Chinese sources, that eventually gave Tibet a location independent from Cathay, even though cartographers in Europe continued to depict Cathay as sharing the spotlight with Tibet. Finally, the third section examines mid seventeenth-century Jesuit explorations in central Asia that provided fresh first-hand information for the likes of Athanasius Kircher in his China Illustrata (1667), one of the main sources of European knowledge about Tibet in those times. This research shows an undecided European attitude towards the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it was expressed in a double movement that generated new knowledge while embracing an imaginary past in central Asia, “dragging” Tibet with it.
Summary also in Spanish.

Local access dig.pdf. [Hosne-Tibet.pdf]