Today Aksai Chin is viewed almost entirely through the prism of borders and strategic rivalry. Yet older routes across the plateau connected Ladakh with the Karakash valley, Khotan and Yarkand, raising questions about geographical memories that predate modern frontiers.
By Pooja Bhatia
Few places in the Himalayas are today discussed as exclusively through the language of geopolitics as Aksai Chin.
The name evokes maps, boundaries, military deployments and the India-China dispute. Its high-altitude plains are usually imagined as remote, empty and almost inaccessible — a vast cold desert lying between Ladakh, the Karakoram and the Kunlun mountains.
That contemporary image is understandable, but historically incomplete.
Long before modern boundaries acquired their present importance, travellers, surveyors and caravans knew routes across the wider Aksai Chin and Lingzi Tang plateau. These tracks linked eastern Ladakh with the Karakash valley and, farther north, with Shahidulla, Yarkand and Khotan. The region was inhospitable and sparsely populated, but it was not unknown.
It is within this older geography that Bharat Nanda, in Beyond the Himalayas: Rediscovering India’s Forgotten Geography, introduces the name Gausthana. Nanda explores whether this older geographical expression may preserve a memory associated with the Aksai Chin region, while clearly treating the identification as a subject requiring further investigation rather than as a settled historical equivalence.
That distinction is essential.
Unlike names such as Agni-desa for Karashahr, which can be independently documented in established scholarly references, a search of readily accessible historical material does not reveal broad academic agreement identifying Gausthana as an accepted ancient name for Aksai Chin.
The strongest case, therefore, is not to declare that “Aksai Chin was called Gausthana”.
It is to investigate the older geography in which such an identification has been proposed.
A Plateau That Modern Maps Make Look Empty
Aksai Chin is one of the highest large plateaus in the world.
Its environment is severe. Much of the region lies above 4,500 metres. Vegetation is sparse, water sources are limited and winters are extreme.
These conditions explain why permanent settlement remained minimal.
But an absence of large settlements does not mean an absence of history.
Nineteenth-century records provide detailed evidence that routes passed through the plateau.
The official Report of a Mission to Yarkand in 1873, one of the most important historical accounts of travel between British India and Central Asia, describes routes crossing the Lingzi Tang, identified in the report also with Aksai Chin, before descending towards the Karakash River.
The report makes clear how demanding these journeys were. Travellers remained at extreme altitude for successive marches, while pack animals suffered from hunger, thirst and exhaustion. (National Institute of Informatics)
Yet the routes existed.
They were surveyed.
They were travelled.
And attempts were even made to develop them for regular trade.
Leh, Aksai Chin and the Road to Yarkand
The more familiar historical trade route from Ladakh towards Central Asia crossed the Karakoram Pass.
But it was not the only route.
Historian K. Warikoo’s study of Himalayan trade records another road leaving Leh through Chang La, the Chang Chenmo valley and the Lingzi Tang plains, eventually joining the principal Leh-Yarkand route near Shahidulla. The route was improved after an agreement between the Kashmir Durbar and the British Indian Government in 1870 and was declared a free highway. (Perlego)
The British hoped that the Chang Chenmo route might provide an alternative to the difficult Karakoram crossing.
In practice, merchants were reluctant to use it extensively.
The problem was geography.
The road was longer.
Fuel was scarce.
Grass for animals was inadequate.
Water could be difficult to obtain.
Caravans naturally preferred routes where survival was more predictable. (Perlego)
Nevertheless, the attempt itself is historically revealing.
Aksai Chin was not simply a blank space between Ladakh and Xinjiang.
It existed within a known system of routes.
The Karakash River: A Northern Connection
The Karakash River is central to understanding this forgotten geography.
Rising in the highlands, the river eventually flows north towards the Khotan region. Historical travellers crossing the Aksai Chin-Lingzi Tang plateau could follow routes that descended towards the Karakash and then continue towards Shahidulla.
The 1873 Yarkand Mission report describes one such route meeting the Karakash before following the river towards Shahidulla. (National Institute of Informatics)
Another passage from the same mission records an old route from the Chang Chenmo region through the Lingzi Tang plains, down the Karakash and eventually towards Sanju, located between Yarkand and Khotan. (National Institute of Informatics)
This makes the geographical relationship much clearer.
Ladakh lay to the south.
Khotan and Yarkand lay beyond the Kunlun to the north.
Between them stretched an enormous high-altitude landscape.
The Karakash provided one of the natural corridors through it.
A Forgotten Alternative to the Karakoram Route
Historical studies of routes between Central Asia and Kashmir confirm that nineteenth-century surveyors explored several alternatives across Aksai Chin.
An article published by the United Service Institution of India notes that while the Karakoram Pass remained the principal caravan route between Leh and Yarkand, British explorers attempted to identify substitute routes across Aksai Chin. Those alternatives were eventually abandoned commercially because of the harsh conditions of the plateau. (United Service Institution of India)
This point is worth emphasising.
The failure of a route to become commercially dominant does not erase its historical existence.
A road may be known but unpopular.
It may be used occasionally.
It may serve explorers more often than merchants.
It may become important in one century and irrelevant in another.
Historical geography is therefore more complicated than simply identifying the busiest road.
The Aksai Chin routes belonged to a wider network of possible movement between Ladakh and Central Asia.
The Yarkand Missions and Aksai Chin
The British Indian missions to Yarkand provide unusually detailed documentation.
During the first mission in 1870 and the subsequent mission of 1873, surveyors travelled through parts of the Chang Chenmo, Lingzi Tang and Aksai Chin region.
The official record cited during the India-China discussions of 1960 describes the 1870 mission travelling through Lingzi Tang and Aksai Chin, with another party following a more westerly course towards the Karakash.
The second Yarkand Mission included a specialised survey party led by Captain Henry Trotter of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Members travelled through the Chang Chenmo route, conducting height measurements, route surveys and astronomical observations before following the Karakash towards Shahidulla. (Nehru Archive)
Whatever interpretation one places upon later boundary debates, these records establish something of direct relevance to historical geography:
the plateau was surveyed and traversed from the Ladakh side during the nineteenth century.
It was known terrain.
Older Roads Before Modern Frontiers
This older geography complicates the way the region is instinctively visualised today.
Modern political maps encourage us to see Aksai Chin principally as territory.
Caravan geography encourages us to see it as terrain between destinations.
A merchant thought about water.
A guide thought about passes.
A surveyor thought about altitude.
A caravan owner worried about grazing.
A traveller heading towards Khotan thought about reaching the Karakash valley alive.
The landscape was understood practically.
Its significance lay in where it could take you.
This is one of the most important themes running through Nanda’s Beyond the Himalayas. Modern boundaries are real and politically important, but they should not be projected backwards so completely that older patterns of movement disappear from historical memory.
Ladakh and Xinjiang Were Economically Connected
The broader connection between Ladakh and the oasis towns of Xinjiang is firmly documented.
The Ministry of External Affairs’ Encyclopedia of India-China Cultural Contacts describes Yarkand as a major commercial centre of southern Xinjiang and records the Leh-Yarkand route through the Karakoram Pass as the preferred trading road for merchants from Kashmir and Punjab. Indian goods including cotton textiles, indigo, spices, tea and coral reached Yarkand, while wool, carpets, silk, silver and other commodities moved southwards. (Ministry of External Affairs)
Academic research on India-Xinjiang connections similarly records substantial trade between Ladakh and the oasis towns of Yarkand, Kashgar and Khotan, particularly through the nineteenth century. (ResearchGate)
The main trade may have preferred the Karakoram Pass.
But the existence of these commercial relationships explains why alternate routes through the Aksai Chin region were repeatedly explored.
The plateau lay between connected economies.
Roads Towards Khotan
Khotan is particularly relevant.
Recent academic work on the history of Khotan notes that one historical route southwards from the oasis crossed Aksai Chin towards western Tibet, while another ran through the Sanju, Shahidulla, Suget and Karakoram passes before reaching Ladakh. (Dash Harvard)
This is an important reminder that the geographical connections were not solely east-west.
The Tarim Basin is famous for the Silk Roads running around the Taklamakan.
But there were also north-south connections.
Khotan looked south towards the mountains.
Ladakh looked north.
The high plateau stood between them.
What, Then, Was Gausthana?
This is where caution becomes necessary.
Beyond the Himalayas introduces Gausthana in connection with the historical geography of Aksai Chin. The possibility is intriguing because the book’s wider argument concerns old names preserved within Indian, Buddhist and trans-Himalayan geographical traditions.
But presently accessible independent evidence does not appear sufficient to state confidently that Gausthana was a historically established Sanskrit name for Aksai Chin.
That means several questions remain open.
Does Gausthana occur in an identifiable Sanskrit or Buddhist geographical text?
Did it refer to the entire plateau or only one locality?
Could it describe a neighbouring region rather than modern Aksai Chin precisely?
Does a Tibetan or Chinese transcription provide a bridge between the old name and the landscape?
These are questions for philological and historical investigation.
Until stronger evidence is found, Gausthana should be presented as a proposed identification rather than a settled ancient name.
That is the responsible way to preserve the question without transforming hypothesis into fact.
Geography and Territorial Claims Are Different Questions
There is another important distinction.
Ancient place names cannot by themselves determine modern sovereignty.
Historical geography and international boundary questions operate on different evidentiary foundations.
A Sanskrit name, a caravan route or an old traveller’s account may demonstrate historical knowledge of a region.
It may show patterns of trade.
It may illuminate how people understood a landscape.
But none of those facts automatically resolves contemporary territorial claims.
Nanda’s discussion is most useful when read in precisely this way: as an effort to recover a historical landscape beneath the strategic geography of the present, rather than as an attempt to derive modern borders from ancient nomenclature.
That distinction makes the history stronger, not weaker.
Aksai Chin Before Geopolitics
Imagine the plateau without the lines of a contemporary political map.
A caravan leaves Ladakh.
It moves through Chang Chenmo.
Animals struggle across Lingzi Tang.
The travellers search constantly for water and grazing.
Eventually they descend towards the Karakash.
Beyond lies Shahidulla.
Farther still are Yarkand and Khotan.
The journey is brutal.
Many merchants prefer another road.
But the route exists.
Surveyors map it.
Travellers describe it.
Officials attempt to improve it.
The plateau that modern imagination regards as empty becomes part of a network.
This does not make Aksai Chin densely inhabited.
It does make it historically connected.
The Name May Be Uncertain; the Geography Is Not
That is perhaps the most important conclusion.
The proposed identification of Gausthana with Aksai Chin still requires stronger independent documentary support.
The old routes do not.
Nineteenth-century mission reports describe them.
Surveyors mapped them.
Historical studies document them.
Trade histories place Ladakh within a commercial network stretching towards Yarkand and Khotan.
The Karakash connected the plateau with the northern oasis world.
The evidence therefore allows a distinction that is useful throughout the Forgotten Geography series:
Gausthana remains a historical-geographical hypothesis.
Aksai Chin’s place within older trans-Himalayan routes is historically demonstrable.
Bharat Nanda’s Beyond the Himalayas: Rediscovering India’s Forgotten Geography deserves credit for bringing these two strands together and asking readers to examine a region normally encountered only through modern geopolitics from a much longer historical perspective.
Modern maps show Aksai Chin as a contested frontier.
Older travel records show roads through it.
The archives remember Chang Chenmo, Lingzi Tang, the Karakash and Shahidulla.
And one proposed older geographical tradition remembers Gausthana.
Whether that final identification can ultimately be demonstrated remains open.
But the landscape behind the question is very real.
Before it became a frontier, it was also a road.
That is forgotten geography.
Pooja Bhatia is a media analyst and law graduate with an interest in history and geopolitics.
