portion of his book, is evidently intended as an exordium to the second, which contains a number of plates of birds and plants, with a descriptive letter-press, chiefly the work of a well-known ornithologist. But there is no lack of other materials for a history and a description of this tract, now under the dominion of one of the most remarkable of men. Of these materials not a few of value and interest have become available since the date of the visit which Mr. Shaw has agreeably described in the second of the works now before us. The memoranda of Russian visitors and explorers, the inquiries made by the British officers in the neighbouring countries of Thibet and Cashmere, and the information brought to India by successive Toorkistanee visitors, official and non-official, have thrown a light on much that was obscure when Mr. Shaw wrote. To which must now be added a valuable collection of M. Vambéry's papers on the topography and politics of Central Asia.

The country, lying nearly due north of Cashmere, is a gently undulating plain, about 250 miles across from north to south near its western extremity, where cultivation is least sparse: open and gradually widening out to the east, where the great rainless desert of Gobi extends, and from whence long arms of sand and shingle stretch back into the cultivated region, up to the very walls of the cities and villages: shut in on the south by the true backbone of Asia-the mighty chain of the Kioon-Loon, Karakorum, Moostagh* or Taghdoongbashf―so its various portions are called; on the west by the extremely elevated Pameer plateau, rightly called by the people the Roof of the World,' forming a kind of ganglionic centre from whence the mountain ranges of Asia diverge; and on the north by the Tengiri,‡ or Tian-Shant range, the outward and culminating ridge of the mountain system in which the great rivers of Siberia take their rise. On the glaciers and winter snows § of these several chains cultivation depends, the rain-fall at even the skirt of the hills being limited to a few showers in the winter and spring, and in the open plain beyond ceasing altogether. Consequently agriculture is limited to

*Toorkee for 'Ice-mountain.'

† Toorkee for head of the mountains.' Toorkee and Chinese for 'heavenly.'

Though the elevation is enormously high, it is only in rare shady hollows that snow lasts throughout the year. At this great elevation the sun's rays, unchecked by the extremely rarefied air, inflict in summer a heat of 230° F., and even more. And the snow-fall at so great a distance from the sea is comparatively slight.

the narrow strip that can be artificially irrigated at the base of the mountains, and along the banks of the rivers that emerge from it. Those rivers all finally unite in one which disappears in a marsh far removed in the desert of Gobi. Where there is water the landscape wears a smiling look, being dotted over with comfortable farmsteads and hamlets embedded in orchards. Wheat, barley, and Indian corn of superior richness are produced. Fruit is varied, abundant, and excellent, the grapes being especially celebrated throughout Central Asia. The mineral wealth of the mountains has been little developed, but is said to be of some value. Gold is found in the east of the Kioon-Loon range, and used to be exported to Pekin. The jade so much valued in China was all brought from the Karakorum; copper, lead, and sulphur are found there, and in the spurs of the Taghdoongbash and of the Pameer; and the fireplaces of Kashghur and Yarkund are supplied with coal brought from the eastern parts of the TianShan mountains. The people, numbering about a million and a half, are robust, industrious, frugal, of peaceful dispositions, and with a strong taste for commercial ventures in neighbouring countries. Wealthy men among them are rare, but, on the other hand, hardly any are in other than comfortable circumstances. They are all Soonnee Mahommedans, very regular in their religious observances, but naturally very averse to anything like that hypocritical ritualism which, in the neighbouring country of Bokhara, serves so often as an excuse for cruelty, and a veil for the most disgusting vices. Their history has, however, shown that their spiritual masters, invoking not any kind of Mahommedan fanaticism, but a superstitious personal devotion to themselves, can rouse them to bloody insurrections, in which all considerations of worldly prudence are thrown to the winds, and which are, while they last, as hot as they are short.

On that history previous to 1864 it will not be necessary to dwell long. Little has come to light to necessitate any change in the account given in a previous number of this Review.* Peopled at first in all probability by an Aryan stock, this country, with all its neighbours, was overrun by the Tartar hordes, and became part of the great Tartar or Mongol kingdom, which stretched from China to the western confines of Asia. In the convulsions that marked the disintegration of that empire a local Toorkee family eventually rose into power. In their time Boodhism gave place to Islam as the dominant

See the article on Western China, in No. cclx., for April 1868.

religion, though the old faith still lingered in the mountains; and the ruling Toorkee line closed in a daughter, who was given in marriage to a holy man, a Khoja, or soi-disant descendant of the first successors of Mahommed, belonging to a sect that had attached to itself many devotees in Western Toorkistan. A similar success attended him in Eastern Toorkistan, and though the line of these priest-kings has been marked by little but bloodshed, oppression, cruelty, and sensuality, his successors are still the spiritual guides, and as such command the affections, of the bulk of the population. Almost immediately on the death of their founder the family split up into two factions-the White and the Black. The various cities found a vent for their mutual jealousy by taking up the side now of one faction, now of another. For three hundred years the struggle waxed and waned, and waxed again, till, in the middle of last century, one faction expelled the other by the aid of the Chinese, recent conquerors of the neighbouring country-Zoongaria; and then, as was natural, were themselves expelled by the allies whom they had brought in. The Chinese rule in Eastern Toorkistan lasted 108 years, a period, so long as the central power continued strong, of orderly and lenient government, which in the traditions and recollections. of the people contrasts favourably with the anarchy that preceded and followed it. The civil administration was in the hands of native Mahommedans, who used to collect the light taxes from the people-a tithe of the produce, a few yards of a coarse cotton cloth, and a few pounds of cotton from each house. The proceeds of these taxes were devoted to the maintenance of the several functionaries and soldiers, the remainder being given over to the Chinese military commanders, called Ambans, and by them deposited in great storehouses as a provision for times of need. The gold, copper, and jade mines were worked as a monopoly by the Chinese authorities; but, besides this produce, no more than a nominal tribute, as a token of allegiance, was annually sent to Pekin, from whence, on the other hand, 12,000 ingots-curiously-shaped things like boats-of silver, worth about 216,0007., used each year to come for the pay of the troops and their officers.

And yet at no time had the Chinese any secure hold on the country. Whenever a member of the Khoja family left his asylum in Khokund and appeared in the province, he was enthusiastically received by the people, who entirely forgot all they had suffered from his predecessors. Chinese garrison generally shut itself up in the citadel, which, after their first experience of these troubles, they took care

The

to construct close to each of the great towns. Not seldom, after holding out therein for a time, little molested by the insurgents, nor making much endeavour to drive them off, that garrison, reduced to extremities by starvation, blew itself up. The Khoja's power lasted a few months till the Tsian-Tsoong at Ili, the Governor-General of Zoongaria and Eastern Toorkistan, powerless to move without authority from Pekin, obtained permission to advance against the rebels. By that time the ineradicable vices of the old ruling family had become cruelly felt by the people, and the Khoja's expulsion or capture was as easy as had been his rise to power. Such, with a considerable degree of uniformity, were the features of four different risings during the present century. On the first of these occasions the Khoja who stirred the people to revolt was let loose by the Khan of Khokund, in consequence of a quarrel regarding the right to appoint Khokundee consular agents in the Chinese cities. From the first the merchants of the several nationalities in each trading city had been permitted, subject to the approval of the Chinese authorities, to appoint a representative and protector of their interests, styled an Aksukal, or white-beard.' And in Kashghur the nomination of the Khokundee 'aksukal'* and the levy of the 'aksukalee' fees (one in forty on all sales) had fallen into the hands of the Khan of Khokund, in return for a stipulation that he would protect caravans from the attacks of the intervening tribes of Kirghiz. Just in the same way the Meer of Budukshan obtained the right to nominate the aksukal, and to levy the fees in Yarkund, on condition of protecting caravans from the attacks of his feudatories, the Wakhanees and Shignanees. Finding the privilege profitable, the Khan of Khokund, about the year 1827, asked for its extension to Yarkund and other trading cities. The catastrophe that befell the Chinese garrison, in consequence of their refusal of this demand, taught the Court at Pekin a lesson; and when their authority was restored in the province after eight months' abeyance, they granted all

The distinctness which this imperium in imperio was allowed to assume is remarkable. Captain Valikhanoff, when visiting Kashghur in 1858, found that the Khokundees had a police of their own, under their aksukal. As the aksukalee fees were a valuable perquisite of dominion in Khokund, each revolution in that khanate-and there were many-was followed by a change in the person of the aksukal. Captain Valikhanoff was in Kashghur when such a revolution took place, and found that the old aksukal was only kept on long enough to delude him into the belief that he would not be disturbed, and need not therefore conceal the amount of his collections.

that had been asked, veiling the blow to the dignity of the empire by freeing the traders of all nationalities from the payment of dues, so far as they were concerned, and obtaining in return a surrender of the Khoja in whose favour the people had risen, together with a promise that the Khan would in future keep the members of that family apart from their sympathising disciples in Eastern Toorkistan. This obligation was, however, frequently disregarded. Not content with the privileges which he had obtained, the Khan of Khokund proceeded subsequently to demand that his aksukals should levy dues from the Thibetan and Cashmere merchants, and, being refused, on three different occasions, at various intervals, permitted the Khojas to reappear in a country where their appearance was on each occasion an immediate signal for insurrection.

*

The last of these risings, in 1857, was stirred up by the most infamous of an infamous line-Wullee Khan, who pos sessed a wolfish appetite for blood for its own sake, cutting off several heads a day for the mere fun of the thing, and adding them and other skulls collected from all quarters to a ghastly pile which he reared outside the gate of his besieging camp. For, though he succeeded in getting possession of the Mahommedan city of Kashghur, the Chinese citadel, at a little distance, held its own against him. While still encamped before its walls, he had the satisfaction of adding to his pile the head of a European traveller, who had been seized as he approached Yarkund, then besieged by one of Wullee Khan's partisans. This was Adolphe Schlagintweit, then on a voyage of scientific discovery beyond the Himalayas. According to one story, he had provoked his fate by saying to Wullee Khan, Have you been so long before this little fort? My people could take it in a few days.' Of that fort Wullee Khan never got possession; for, in the midst of the siege and of his cruel amusements, he was interrupted by the approach of a Chinese force from Ili. He fled to the Meer of Durwaz, but being accused of the murder of Khokundee subjects, was given up to the Khan of Khokund, and was only spared at the intercession of the holy men of the principality, who feared that their own turn might come if a Khoja were once made answerable for his crimes. His inroad was followed by an angry correspondence between the Chinese authorities and the Khan of Kho

Three years afterwards Lord William Hay, the Deputy Commissioner in Simla, while on a tour, was able to procure the MS. notes of his journey, and they were sent by the Indian Government to his relations in Berlin.