1. Sven Hedin mapped lake Lop Nur, and the remains of cities, grave sites and the Great Wall of China in the deserts of the Tarim Basin.
93 Facts About Sven Hedin
1. 2.
At 15 years of age, Sven Hedin witnessed the triumphal return of the Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiold after his first navigation of the Northern Sea Route.
3.
From that moment on, young Sven Hedin aspired to become an explorer.
4.
Sven Hedin never married and had no children, rendering his family line now extinct.
5.
Sven Hedin was one of the first European scientific explorers to employ indigenous scientists and research assistants on his expeditions.
6.
Sven Hedin, in addition to Nikolai Przhevalsky, Sir Francis Younghusband, and Sir Aurel Stein, was an active player in the British-Russian struggle for influence in Central Asia, known as the Great Game.
7.
Sven Hedin was, and remained, a figure of the 19th century who clung to its visions and methods in the 20th century.
8.
Sven Hedin instead traveled through Mongolia by car and through Siberia aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway.
9.
Sven Hedin concluded a contract which guaranteed freedom of travel for this expedition which, because of its arms, 300 camels, and activities in a war theater, resembled an invading army.
10.
In 1935, Sven Hedin made his exclusive knowledge about Central Asia available, not only to the Swedish government, but to foreign governments such as China and Germany, in lectures and personal discussions with political representatives of Chiang Kai-shek and Adolf Hitler.
11.
Whoever compares this atlas with Adolf Stielers Hand Atlas of 1891 can appreciate what Sven Hedin accomplished between 1893 and 1935.
12.
From 1931 until his death in 1952, Sven Hedin lived in Stockholm in a modern high-rise in a preferred location, the address being Norr Malarstrand 66.
13.
Sven Hedin lived with his siblings in the upper three stories and from the balcony he had a wide view over Riddarfjarden Bay and Lake Malaren to the island of Langholmen.
14.
On 29 October 1952, Hedin's will granted the rights to his books and his extensive personal effects to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; the Sven Hedin Foundation established soon thereafter holds all the rights of ownership.
15.
Sven Hedin is buried in the cemetery of Adolf Fredrik church in Stockholm.
16.
Sven Hedin was born in Stockholm, the son of Ludwig Hedin, Chief Architect of Stockholm.
17.
When he was 15 years old Sven Hedin witnessed the triumphal return of the Swedish Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiold after his first navigation of the Northern Sea Route.
18.
Sven Hedin describes this experience in his book My Life as an Explorer as follows:.
19.
In May 1885, Sven Hedin graduated from Beskowska secondary school in Stockholm.
20.
Sven Hedin then accepted an offer to accompany the student Erhard Sandgren as his private tutor to Baku, where Sandgren's father was working as an engineer in the oil fields of Robert Nobel.
21.
Sven Hedin later learned several Persian dialects as well as Turkish, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Tibetan and some Chinese.
22.
On 6 April 1886, Sven Hedin left Baku for Iran, traveling by paddle steamer over the Caspian Sea, riding through the Alborz Range to Tehran, Esfahan, Shiraz and the harbor city of Bushehr.
23.
Sven Hedin then returned to Sweden, arriving on 18 September 1886.
24.
In 1887, Sven Hedin published a book about these travels entitled Through Persia, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus.
25.
Sven Hedin spoke with him and later accompanied him to the Elburz Mountain Range.
26.
Sven Hedin published the books King Oscar's Legation to the Shah of Persia in 1890 and Through Chorasan and Turkestan about this journey.
27.
On 27 April 1892, Sven Hedin traveled to Berlin to continue his studies under Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen.
28.
Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen not only encouraged Sven Hedin to absolve cursory studies, but to become thoroughly acquainted with all branches of geographic science and the methodologies of the salient research work, so that he could later work as an explorer.
29.
Sven Hedin abstained from doing this with an explanation he supplied in old age:.
30.
Sven Hedin was attracted to the idea of traveling to the last mysterious portions of Asia and filling in the gaps by mapping an area completely unknown in Europe.
31.
Between 1893 and 1897, Sven Hedin investigated the Pamir Mountains, travelling through the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang region, across the Taklamakan Desert, Lake Kara-Koshun and Lake Bosten, proceeding to study northern Tibet.
32.
Sven Hedin covered 26,000 kilometres on this journey and mapped 10,498 kilometres of them on 552 sheets.
33.
Sven Hedin started out on this expedition on 16 October 1893, from Stockholm, traveling via Saint Petersburg and Tashkent to the Pamir Mountains.
34.
Sven Hedin remained in Kashgar until April 1895 and then left on 10 April with three local escorts from the village of Merket to cross the Taklamakan Desert via Tusluk to the Khotan River.
35.
Bruno Baumann traveled on this route in April 2000 with a camel caravan and ascertained that at least one of the escorts who, according to Sven Hedin, had died of thirst had survived, and that it is impossible for a camel caravan traveling in springtime on this route to carry enough drinking water for both camels and travelers.
36.
When that escort collapsed from thirst, Sven Hedin left him behind as well, but managed to reach a water source at the last desperate moment.
37.
Sven Hedin did return to his servant with water and rescued him.
38.
In January 1896, after a stopover in Kashgar, Sven Hedin visited the 1,500-year-old abandoned cities of Dandan Oilik and Kara Dung, which are located northeast of Khotan in the Taklamakan Desert.
39.
Sven Hedin reported that this lake is supplied by a single mighty feeder stream, the Kaidu River.
40.
Sven Hedin navigated the Yarkand, Tarim and Kaidu rivers and found the dry riverbed of the Kum-darja as well as the dried out lake bed of Lop Nur.
41.
Sven Hedin found a wooden wheel from a horse-drawn cart as well as several hundred documents written on wood, paper and silk in the Kharosthi script.
42.
From Leh, Sven Hedin's route took him to Lahore, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Benares to Calcutta, meeting there with George Nathaniel Curzon, England's then Viceroy to India.
43.
Sven Hedin was the first to describe yardang formations in the Lop Desert.
44.
Between 1905 and 1908, Sven Hedin investigated the Central Iranian desert basins, the western highlands of Tibet and the Transhimalaya, which for a time was afterward called the Sven Hedin Range.
45.
Sven Hedin visited the 9th Panchen Lama in the cloistered city of Tashilhunpo in Shigatse.
46.
Sven Hedin was the first European to reach the Kailash region, including the sacred Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash, the midpoint of the earth according to Buddhist and Hindu mythology.
47.
Sven Hedin returned from this expedition with a collection of geological samples which are kept and studied in the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Geology of Munich University.
48.
Between 1927 and 1935, Sven Hedin led an international Sino-Swedish Expedition which investigated the meteorological, topographic and prehistoric situation in Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and Xinjiang.
49.
Sven Hedin gave archaeologists, astronomers, botanists, geographers, geologists, meteorologists and zoologists from Sweden, Germany and China an opportunity to participate in the expedition and carry out research in their areas of specialty.
50.
Sven Hedin met Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing, who thereupon became a patron of the expedition.
51.
Sven Hedin used them to finance the expedition, selling them for a price of five dollars per set.
52.
The stamps were unwelcome at the time due to the high price Sven Hedin was selling them at, but years later became valuable treasures among collectors.
53.
Ma Zhongying's adjutant claimed to Hedin that Ma Zhongying had the entire region of Tian-shan-nan-lu under his control and Sven could pass through safely without any trouble.
54.
Sven Hedin continued on to Beijing to meet with President Lin Sen and to Nanjing to Chiang Kai-shek.
55.
Sven Hedin celebrated his 70th birthday on 19 February 1935 in the presence of 250 members of the Kuomintang government, to whom he reported interesting facts about the Sino-Swedish Expedition.
56.
Sven Hedin had considerable debts at the German-Asian Bank in Beijing, which he repaid with the royalties and fees received for his books and lectures.
57.
Sven Hedin met Adolf Hitler in Berlin before his lecture on 14 April 1935.
58.
Sven Hedin warned of the dangers he assumed to be coming from Czarist Russia, and called for an alliance with the German Empire.
59.
In 1912 Sven Hedin publicly supported the Swedish coastal defense ship Society.
60.
In early 1914, when the Liberal government enacted cutbacks to the country's defenses, Sven Hedin wrote the Courtyard Speech, in which King Gustaf V promised to strengthen the country's defenses.
61.
Sven Hedin developed a lasting affinity for the German empire, with which he became acquainted during his formal studies.
62.
Sven Hedin viewed World War I as a struggle of the German race and took sides in books like Ein Volk in Waffen.
63.
Adolf Hitler had been an early admirer of Sven Hedin, who was in turn impressed with Hitler's nationalism.
64.
Sven Hedin saw the German leader's rise to power as a revival of German fortunes, and welcomed its challenge against Soviet Communism.
65.
Sven Hedin was not an entirely uncritical supporter of the Nazis, however.
66.
Sven Hedin objected to some aspects of National Socialist rule, and occasionally attempted to convince the German government to relent in its anti-religious and anti-Semitic campaigns.
67.
Sven Hedin met Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazi Party leaders repeatedly and was in regular correspondence with them.
68.
The politely-worded correspondence usually concerned scheduling matters, birthday congratulations, Sven Hedin's planned or completed publications, and requests by Sven Hedin for pardons for people condemned to death, and for mercy, release and permission to leave the country for people interned in prisons or concentration camps.
69.
In correspondence with Joseph Goebbels and Hans Drager, Sven Hedin was able to achieve the printing of the Daily Watchwords year after year.
70.
Sven Hedin directly interviewed Hitler in October 1939, one month after the invasion of Poland, where Hitler claimed that there could be peace if the United Kingdom and France recognized the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.
71.
On 29 October 1942, Hitler read Sven Hedin's book entitled, America in the Battle of the Continents.
72.
Sven Hedin was trying to discover the mythological place of Agartha and reproached the Polish explorer and visiting professor Antoni Ossendowski for having been gone where the Swedish explorer wasn't able to come, and thus was personally invited by Adolf Hitler in Berlin and honoured by the Fuhrer during his 75th birthday feast.
73.
In 1937 Sven Hedin refused to publish his book Deutschland und der Weltfrieden in Germany because the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda insisted on the deletion of Nazi-critical passages.
74.
The consequence was that Sven Hedin expressed himself more favorably about Nazi Germany in his book Funfzig Jahre Deutschland, subjugated himself against his conscience to the censorship of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and published the book in Germany.
75.
On 8 June 1942, the Nazis increased the pressure on Sven Hedin by deporting Alfred Philippson and his family to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
76.
Sven Hedin too undertook everything possible to further this humanitarian work.
77.
The names and fates of the over one hundred deported Jews whom Sven Hedin tried to save have not yet been researched.
78.
Sven Hedin intervened on his behalf on 4 December 1946, arguing that Falkenhorst had likewise striven to pardon the ten Norwegians condemned to death.
79.
Sven Hedin was released early from Werl Prison on 13 July 1953.
80.
In 1905, Sven Hedin was admitted to membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1909 to the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences.
81.
Sven Hedin was an honorary member of numerous Swedish and foreign scientific societies and institutions which honored him with some 40 gold medals; 27 of these medals can be viewed in Stockholm in a display case in the Royal Coin Cabinet.
82.
Sven Hedin was a Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle.
83.
The sources for Sven Hedin research are located in numerous archives.
84.
Sven Hedin recorded routes by plotting many thousands of kilometers of his caravan itinerary with the detail of a high resolution topographical map and supplemented them with innumerable altitude measurements and latitude and longitude data.
85.
Sven Hedin drafted the first precise maps of areas unresearched until that date: the Pamir mountains, the Taklamakan desert, Tibet, the Silk Road and the Himalayas.
86.
Sven Hedin was, as far as can be scientifically confirmed, the first European to recognize that the Himalayas were a continuous mountain range.
87.
Sven Hedin systematically studied the lakes of inner Asia, made careful climatological observations over many years, and started extensive collections of rocks, plants, animals and antiquities.
88.
Sven Hedin prepared a scientific publication for each of his expeditions.
89.
Sven Hedin used the fees and royalties which he received from his popular science books and for his lectures for the purpose.
90.
Sven Hedin did not himself subject his documentation to scientific evaluation, but rather handed it over to other scientists for the purpose.
91.
Sven Hedin soon became famous as one of the most well-recognized personalities of his time.
92.
Sven Hedin was a pioneer and pathfinder in the transitional period to a century of specialized research.
93.
Sven Hedin had not only an important business relationship with the publisher Albert Brockhaus, but a close friendship.