Henry T. Prinsep (1792–1878) was the son of a prominent East India Company servant, and like his father, he spent much of his life in the East. He left Britain for Calcutta in 1809, at the age of seventeen, and stayed in India, working in a variety of roles, until his retirement in 1843. He wrote a number of books about India: in this work, published in 1851, he turns to the north of the subcontinent. Prinsep draws from travel narratives of the few explorers who had been to this territory – which corresponds to today's western China and Mongolia – to illustrate the lives of the people there. Using sources ranging from the thirteenth-century account by Marco Polo to eighteenth-century reports by French missionaries, Prinsep brings information on what was then a little-known world to a wider audience.