weight felt upon the independent states of Turkestan to the north
and east, and thus acquired a steadily growing influence. It was
not, however, till the 10th century that Islam was established at
Kashgar, under the Uighur kingdom (see Turks). The Uighurs
appear to have been the descendants of the people called Tölas and
to have been one of the many Turkish tribes who migrated westwards
from China. Boghra Khan, the most celebrated prince of this line,
was converted to Mahommedanism late in the 10th century and the
Uighur kingdom lasted until 1120 but was distracted by complicated
dynastic struggles. The Uighurs employed an alphabet based upon
the Syriac and borrowed from the Nestorian missionaries. They
spoke a dialect of Turkish preserved in the Kudatku Bilik, a moral
treatise composed in 1065. Their kingdom was destroyed by an
invasion of the Kara-Kitais, another Turkish tribe pressing westwards
from the Chinese frontier, who in their turn were swept away
in 1219 by Jenghiz Khan. His invasion gave a decided check to the
progress of the Mahommedan creed, but on his death, and during
the rule of the Jagatai Khans, who became converts to that faith,
it began to reassert its ascendancy. Marco Polo visited the city,
which he calls Cascar, about 1275 and left some notes on it.
In 1389–1390 Timur ravaged Kashgar, Andijan and the intervening country. Kashgar passed through a troublous time, and in 1514, on the invasion of the Khan Sultan Said, was destroyed by Mirza Ababakar, who with the aid of ten thousand men built the new fort with massive defences higher up on the banks of the Tuman. The dynasty of the Jagatai Khans collapsed in 1572 by the dismemberment of the country between rival representatives; and soon after two powerful Khoja factions, the White and Black Mountaineers (Ak and Kara Taghluk), arose, whose dissensions and warfares, with the intervention of the Kalmucks of Dzungaria, fill up the history till 1759, when a Chinese army from Ili (Kulja) invaded the country, and, after perpetrating wholesale massacres, finally consolidated their authority by settling therein Chinese emigrants, together with a Manchu garrison. The Chinese had thoughts of pushing their conquests towards western Turkestan and Samarkand, the chiefs of which sent to ask assistance of the Afghan king Ahmed Shah. This monarch despatched an embassy to Peking to demand the restitution of the Mahommedan states of Central Asia, but the embassy was not well received, and Ahmed Shah was too much engaged with the Sikhs to attempt to enforce his demands by arms. The Chinese continued to hold Kashgar, with sundry interruptions from Mahommedan revolts—one of the most serious occurring in 1827, when the territory was invaded and the city taken by Jahanghir Khoja; Chang-lung, however, the Chinese general of Ili, recovered possession of Kashgar and the other revolted cities in 1828. A revolt in 1829 under Mahommed Ali Khan and Yusuf, brother of Jahanghir, was more successful, and resulted in the concession of several important trade privileges to the Mahommedans of the district of Alty Shahr (the “six cities”), as it was then named. Until 1846 the country enjoyed peace under the just and liberal rule of Zahir-ud-din, the Chinese governor, but in that year a fresh Khoja revolt under Kath Tora led to his making himself master of the city, with circumstances of unbridled licence and oppression. His reign was, however, brief, for at the end of seventy-five days, on the approach of the Chinese, he fled back to Khokand amid the jeers of the inhabitants. The last of the Khoja revolts (1857) was of about equal duration with the previous one, and took place under Wali-Khan, a degraded debauchee, and the murderer of the lamented traveller Adolf Schlagintweit.
The great Tungani (Dungani) revolt, or insurrection of the Chinese Mahommedans, which broke out in 1862 in Kan-suh, spread rapidly to Dzungaria and through the line of towns in the Tarim basin. The Tungani troops in Yarkand rose, and (10th of August 1863) massacred some seven thousand Chinese, while the inhabitants of Kashgar, rising in their turn against their masters, invoked the aid of Sadik Beg, a Kirghiz chief, who was reinforced by Buzurg Khan, the heir of Jahanghir, and Yakub Beg, his general, these being despatched at Sadik’s request by the ruler of Khokand to raise what troops they could to aid his Mahommedan friends in Kashgar. Sadik Beg soon repented of having asked for a Khoja, and eventually marched against Kashgar, which by this time had succumbed to Buzurg Khan and Yakub Beg, but was defeated and driven back to Khokand. Buzurg Khan delivered himself up to indolence and debauchery, but Yakub Beg, with singular energy and perseverance, made himself master of Yangi Shahr, Yangi-Hissar, Yarkand and other towns, and eventually became sole master of the country, Buzurg Khan proving himself totally unfitted for the post of ruler. Kashgar and the other cities of the Tarim basin remained under Yakub Beg’s rule until 1877, when the Chinese regained possession of their ancient dominion. (C. E. D. B.; C. El.)
KASHI, or Kasi, formerly the Persian word for all glazed
and enamelled pottery irrespectively; now the accepted term
for certain kinds of enamelled tile-work, including brick-work and
tile-mosaic work, manufactured in Persia and parts of Mahommedan
India, chiefly during the 16th and 17th centuries.[1]
Undoubtedly originating in the Semitic word for glass, kas, it is quite possible that the name kashi is immediately derived from Kashan, a town in Persia noted for its faïence. This ancient pottery site, in turn, probably receives its name from the old-time industry; as a “city of the plain” it would obviously have no claim to the farther-eastern suffix shan, meaning a mountain. Sir George Birdwood wisely considers that “the art of glazing earthenware has, in Persia, descended in an almost unbroken tradition from the period of the greatness of Chaldaea and Assyria ... the name kas, by which it is known in Arabic and Hebrew, carries us back to the manufacture of glass and enamels for which great Sidon was already famous 1500 years before Christ ... the designs used in the decoration of Sind and Punjab glazed pottery also go to prove how much these Indian wares have been influenced by Persian examples and the Persian tradition of the much earlier art of Nineveh and Babylon” (The Industrial Arts of India, 1880). The two native names for glass, kanch and shisha, common to Persia and India, are, seemingly, modifications of kashi. The Indian tradition of Chinese potters settling in bygone days at Lahore and Hala respectively, still lingers in the Punjab and Sind provinces, and evidently travelled eastward from Persia with the Moguls. Howbeit in Lahore the name Chíní is sometimes wrongly applied to kashi work; and the so-called Chíní-ka-Rauza mausoleum at Agra is an instance of this misuse. It now seems an established fact that a colony of Chinese ceramic experts migrated to Isfahan during the 16th century (probably in the reign, and at the invitation, of Shah Abbas I.), and there helped to revive the jaded pottery industry of that district.
Kashi work consisted of two kinds: (a) Enamel-faced tiles and bricks of strongly fired red earthenware, or terra-cotta; (b) Enamel-faced tiles and tesserae of lightly fired “lime-mortar,” or sandstone. Tile-mosaic work is described by some authorities as the true kashi. From examination of figured tile-mosaic patterns, it would appear that, in some instances, the shaped tesserae had been cut out of enamelled slabs or tiles after firing; in other examples to have been cut into shape before receiving their facing of coloured enamel. Mosaic panels in the fort at Lahore are described by J. L. Kipling as “showing a gul dasta, or foliated pattern of a branching tree, each leaf of which is a separate piece of pottery.” Conventional representations of foliage, flowers and fruit, intricate geometrical figures, interlacing arabesques, and decorative calligraphy—inscriptions in Arabic and Persian—constitute the ordinary kashi designs. The colours chiefly used were cobalt blue, copper blue (turquoise colour), lead-antimoniate yellow (mustard colour), manganese purple, iron brown and tin white. A colour-scheme, popular with Mogul and contemporary Persian kashigars, was the design, in cobalt blue and copper blue, reserved on a ground of deep mustard yellow. Before applying the enamel colours, the rough face of the tile, or the tesserae, received a thin coating of slip of variable composition. It is probably owing to some defect in this part of the process, or to imperfect firing, that the enamelled tile surfaces on many old buildings, particularly on the south side, have weathered and flaked away.
In India the finest examples of kashi work are in the Punjab and Sind provinces. At Lahore, amongst many beautiful structures, the most notable are the mosque of Wazir Khan (A.D. 1634) and the gateways of three famous pleasure gardens, the Shalamar Bagh (A.D. 1637), the Gulabi Bagh (A.D. 1640), and the Charburji (c. A.D. 1665). At Tatta the Jami Masjid, built by Shah Jahan (c. A.D. 1645), is a splendid illustration; whilst in that “vast cemetery of six square miles” on the adjacent Malki plateau, are numerous Mahommedan tombs (A.D. 1570–1640) with extraordinary kashi ornamentation. Delhi, Multan, Jullundur, Shahdara, Lahore cantonment, Agra and Hyderabad (Sind), all possess excellent monuments of the best period viz. those erected during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir (A.D. 1556–1628).
In Persia, at Isfahan, Kashan, Meshed and Kerman are a few buildings and ruins showing the old kashi work; the palace of Chehel Sitùn in Isfahan, built during the reign of Shah Abbas I. (c. A.D. 1600), is a magnificent specimen of this art.
Occasional revivals of the manufacture have taken place both in India and Persia. Mahommed Sharíf, a potter of Jullundur in the Punjab, reproduced the Mogul enamelled tile-work in 1885, and there is a manuscript record of a certain Ustad Ali Mahommed, of Isfahan, who revived the Persian processes in 1887. (W. B.*; C. S. C.)
KASHMIR, or Cashmere, a native state of India, including
much of the Himalayan mountain system to the north of the
Punjab. It has been fabled in song for its beauty (e.g. in Moore’s
Lalla Rookh), and is the chief health resort for Europeans in
India, while politically it is important as guarding one of the
approaches to India on the north-west frontier. The proper
- ↑ Káshí, the Hindu name for the sacred city of Benares, has no ceramic significance.
