The region around Mt. Kailas is a unique place in the world. Though its mystique is rooted in remoteness and spirituality, its majestic form and unique appearance gave early travelers pause for thought, and contributed to its central position in the scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism Jainism and the Bön-po.

Located in the south-west corner of Tibet, the Kailas is difficult to visit, and difficult to find solid information about. Having visited in 1998 (see travelogue), I wanted to find out more about the mountain, and the greater region from which four of Asia's great rivers flow.

The first difficulty was finding a detailed map of the area. A Polish company was selling Soviet Military Survey originals that had somehow come into their possession after the end of Communism. These were 1:200,000, and comparison with GPS points showed a fair degree of horizontal accuracy, but that they were lacking in vertical fidelity (±100 metres).

Original 1:200 000 Soviet Map with 40/200 meter contours of the Plain Of Bakhara and Kailas. The Kora north along the leftmost column, and south between the third and fourth columns, veering west in the top and bottom rows.

Having located and received the source map, the next step was to digitise it, representing each printed contour line with a vector and associated height. Though high-end tools exist to simplify parts of this, the density of the 40 metre contours, coupled with the low quality of printing made this tricky, and I eventually settled for manually drawing in each contour.

40 metre contours looking directly down on Kailas

Having created 40 metre contours across the massif of Kailas, and 200 metre contours across the wider region, these were then broken into around 40,000 individual points, each with an associated height. These in turn were used to interpolate a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), representing the surface of the region.

Basic DEM coloured by altitude looking at Kailas from the south-west.

The DEM was then taken from Manifold to Terragen. Terragen is a scenery generator which renders a landscape based on user-specified criteria. Though it does not overlay actual imagery over a terrain, it gives a sufficiently high degree of control over the appearance of a render as to allow a very real imitation of the a landscape to be generated.

Frame 480 of the Terragen animation

An animation of 903 images was created through Terragen and stitched together in Videomatch. Rendering the animation took over 48 hours on a P4 2.2GHz with 1 GB of RAM! The viewer follows a path around the Kailas Kora, always focused at the peak of Kailas.

Frame 26 of the Landsat animation

A second rotation animation was created by draping a landsat 5 image over the terrain map using 3DEM. Though the resolution of this is lower, it comprises space imagery and is thus truer to the landscape than the Terragen version.