Kunlun
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Pronunciation: ko͝onʹlo͝onʹ
Forms: form: Kun Lun
form: K'un-lun
form: Kuen Lun
form: Kwenlun
Etymology: From the Mandarin 崑崙 /昆仑 (Kūnlún) and 崑崙山／昆仑山 (Kūnlún Shān), with the character 山 (shān) being an ambiguous reference to any raised place, inclusive of islands, hills, mountains, and mountain ranges. The characters 崑崙 /昆仑 (Kūnlún) are phono-semantic compounds adding 山 (shān) as a semantic component (形旁 (xíngpáng)) to the characters 昆 (kūn) and 侖／仑 (lún), which were presumably also homophones for Kunlun in Old Chinese—Zhengzhang's reconstructed pronunciation being /*kuːn.run/—but leaving its further development or original meaning uncertain. See also the Name section of the Wikipedia entry on the mythological Kunlun.
Senses: examples: text: Crossing the Altyn Tagh had proved hard enough, but no sooner had the travellers left those mountains behind and crossed the border into Tibet than they had plunged into the recesses of the Kunlun Mountains.
ref: 1822, C. Bernard Rutley, “Zong”, in The Forbidden Land, Blackie & Son, →OCLC, page 90:
text: Between the Himalaya and the Kunlun to the north lies the very high plateau of Tibet, which is traversed by a number of smaller mountain chains.
ref: 1944, Bernhard Haurwitz, James M. Austin, “Asia (Including Russia)”, in Climatology, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., →OCLC, page 269:
text: Brodie lent only half an ear. He was eying the wall map, comparing it with what he had seen from the chopper. He picked out the three nearest towns—Yarkand, Karghalik, and Kokyar—running north to south. Everything inside a huge semicircle bounded on the west by the Yarkand River and the southeast by the Kunlun Mountains was shaded. That must be the barbed-wire zone guarded by the army.
ref: 1978, Hugh McLeave, A Borderline Case, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 148:
text: I joined an AMICAL expedition to the previous unclimbed 7129-meter-high Kokodak Dome, also known as Kokodak II. The peak is part of the Kongur Range in the Kunlun mountains in the region Xinjiang.
ref: 2014 August 30, “First ascent of Kokodak Dome”, in Deutsche Welle, archived from the original on 09 Aug 2022:
text: Observing Lake Yaniugol, rising high in the steppe, he writes: “It settled like a sacred host of jade upon the sand. It appeared to us at twilight, in the hollow of a ledge, flanked to the north by the sharp incisors of the Kunlun peaks soaring to 6,000 meters, and to the south by the Changtang. Behind this shimmering disk, the secret plateau.”
ref: 2021 December 3, Liesl Schillinger, quoting Sylvain Tesson, “Books That Satisfy Your Yearning for Far-Off Places”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 03 Dec 2021, Travel:
glosses: A mountain range in China forming the border between the Tarim Basin to its north and the Tibetan Plateau to its south, extending across the Chinese autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet and province of Qinghai.
examples: text: […] the Yellow Riuer […] is the other famous Riuer of that Kingdome, in greatneſſe and note, which ariſesth without the Kingdome to the Weſt, out of the Hill Cunlun, conjectured to bee the ſame whence Ganges ariſeth, or one neere to it.
ref: 1625, [Samuel] Purchas, “A Generall Collection and Historical Representation of the Iesuites Entrance into Iapon and China, vntill Their Admission in the Royall Citie of Nanquin”, in Purchas His Pilgrimes. […], 3rd part, London: […] William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, […], →OCLC, 2nd book, § V, page 340:
topics: human-sciences
mysticism
mythology
philosophy
sciences
glosses: A mythical mountain or mountain range somewhere west of the North China Plain believed to be the home of Xiwangmu and the Peaches of Immortality, as well as other gods and Taoist immortals, and previously believed to help support the dome of the sky.