the country of the "Yogurs" or Uighurs.[1] Mirza Haidar, writing in the sixteenth century, makes no mention of Tarsi, or even of Uighurs generally, as being the inhabitants of Eastern Turkistan,[2] and it may be inferred that, by his time, the bulk of the people having become Musulmans, had ceased to be distinguished by their race-name of Uighur. He speaks only of the 'Sárigh,' or 'Yellow,' Uighurs, who appear to have been a small community occupying a territory to the east, or north-east, of Khotan, and to have been, according to his view, idolators.[3] These may quite possibly have been merely a section of the original inhabitants who had retained their old religion—Christianity or Buddhism—and had found a refuge from the converting Musulmans in the secluded region bordering on the eastern desert. In this case they would have been Turks, like the rest of the population, in race and language.
Besides the Uighurs, the only people that are heard of in Alti-Shahr, at the period of the Tárikh-i-Rashidi, are the Kalmáks, as they had begun then to be called by Musulman writers.[4] To the Mongols and the Chinese they were known as Oirat, and this was probably their real name.[5] They must have been few in number, and were, of course, Mongolian, and not Turki, in race. Their home was among the eastern ranges of the Tian Shan, and therefore only partially within the limits of Alti-Shahr: thus they were more properly borderers of the "Eastern Khanate," or Uighuristán, and indeed occupied very much the same localities in which they are found at the present day. In this region, like in Moghulistan, there were no towns or cultivated districts: the people were tent-dwellers, and owners of flocks, and their religion was, no doubt, Buddhism then, as it is now. During the period of the Moghul Khans, they appear to have played but a small part in the history of the country, and to have exercised little influence over the course of its affairs; though after the dis-
- ↑ See Yule's Cathay, p. 205.
- ↑ He notices only certain persons as Uighurs, and in the one passage where he mentions the word Tarsa, he is citing the Tarikh-i-Jahán Kushái. In his day the name was probably extinct.
- ↑ See p. 348, and note, p. 349.
- ↑ Professor Grigorief states that the name of Kalmák (or Kal-imák) only appears for the first time in the fifteenth century. (Schuyler, i., p. 369.)
- ↑ The Chinese corruption was Wa-la. They are the same people who became subsequently known as Eleuth or Olöt, and Zungar (Bretschneider, ii., p. 159); though it would perhaps be more correct to follow the Chinese traveller Chuan Yuan, of the last century, and say that the Zungars were a branch of the Eleuths. (See Gueluy, Chine Occid. in Le Muséon, 1887, p. 100.)
