The Historicization of the Enlightenment. How twentieth-century intellectuals created the Enlightenment as an historical era The Specter of Reason:

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the fact that they were "closed" to Europeans added to the mystery of Lhasa and Tibet. The epithets "the Forbidden City" and the "forbidden land" merely served to enhance the desire of individual Western travelers to defy the authorities. Wellby, who wanted to go to Tibet to find out "what mysteries lay beneath the word UNEXPLORED with which alone our latest maps were enlightened" (1898, 72; emphasis in original) finally gave up when he realized that the only way to succeed "would have been to shoot the most determined of our obstructionists… Even if supposing we had shot some of them, it would have been a very hazardous step to have risked a serious scrimmage almost on our very frontier" (72; emphasis added). The desire to explore the unknown as the main reason to travel to Tibet is nicely expressed in Deasy: I had long entertained the desire to travel in some unknown country, and in the spring of 1896, when circumstances were favourable, the wish was transformed into a settled purpose ...»