In 1863 Captain Godwin Austen accompanied Sir Ashley Eden's mission to the court of the Deb raja, and made a survey of the route to Punakha.
The observations of Strachey, Godwin-Austen and of Griesbach and other members of the Geological Survey of India only extend to the southern edge or rim of the great plateau, where vast alluvial deposits in horizontal strata have been furrowed into deep ravines, while Russian explorers have but superficially examined the mountain regions of the north and north-east, and the British mission to Lhasa, in 1904 afforded observations merely along the trade-route to that city.
But we may follow Godwin-Austen in accepting the main chain of the Murtagh as merging into the central mountain system of the Tibetan Chang, its axis being defined and divided by the transverse stream of the Shyok at its westward bend, whilst the Karakoram range, in which the Shyok rises, is a subsidiary northern branch.