but in the ninth century they are recorded, in the Chinese annals,[1] to have been displaced from that region and to have been driven southward by the Kirghiz,[2] who were themselves, at that time, beginning to rise to power, and tending, like other Turki tribes, to press towards the south and west. In early times there seem to have been at least two confederacies of Uighurs in the further east: one living in the region now known as Zungaria, and called the Naimán Uighur, or "Eight Uighurs," while the other inhabited the country watered by the Orkhon and the Tula, and were known as the Toghuz Uighur, or "Nine Uighurs."[3] When the latter were driven to the south and west, the former remained in their old country, where they are found at the time of Chingiz Khan. The Toghuz Uighur settled in the eastern ranges of the Tian Shan, and gradually built up a new kingdom, extending over all the eastern portion of that chain. Here one of their states seems to have been established on the south of the mountains, and subsequently another on the north. The first had for its chief town the representative of the modern Kara-Khoja (called at different periods Si-Chao, Ho-Chao, and Kao-Chang), and embraced, at some periods at least, the modern district of Kuchar, then known as Kui-tze; while the capital of the second was Bishbálik (the Five Towns), which stood on, or near, the site of the present Urumtsi. Very little is known of even these later Uighur kingdoms, although the date when they flourished is not a very remote one. It is chiefly from the Chinese chronicles that any knowledge of their history is to be gathered, but even these do not appear to have been compiled with completeness, nor to have embraced the entire Uighur nation, which must have been a large and influential one for a long period.
In addition to these Uighurs, always so named, and living in the Eastern Tian Shan, there was a third section of the race dwelling farther west. They are called sometimes the 'Karlughi,' and their seat of power was originally at Ili-bálik and on the head waters of the Chu. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they appear to have dominated Western Turkistan and perhaps the whole of Alti-Shahr, while one of
- ↑ See Bretschneider, i, p. 236 seq. Also Klaproth, Tableaux Hist., p. 129.
- ↑ Or more properly, as Sir H. Howorth notes—"the people whom the Chinese call Hakas, and who are identified, in my paper on the Kerais, with the ancestors of that famous people—the subjects of Prester John—who, in the time of Chingiz, are found dominating the old Uighur country."
- ↑ I owe this definition to Sir H. Howorth.
