this position until beyond the date of Timur, or within the fifteenth century, and speaks of them as a group of small but not independent principalities.[1] In all probability the independence, or otherwise, of these Uighur communities, had no influence on the name which their country went by among neighbouring nations; it seems merely to have acquired the race-name of the inhabitants, as is often the case elsewhere, and (what chiefly concerns us here) to have preserved that name for some two hundred years, after a new and foreign principality had sprung up on its soil.
The only consecutive account of the history of Turfán, from the days of Chingiz and the Uighur chiefs onwards, would seem to be that contained in the Chinese chronicles of the Ming dynasty, and we are indebted to Dr. Bretschneider for an epitomised translation of them.[2] The companion province of Chálish is not mentioned in the epitome, and for this reason, we may assume that no notice of it is contained in the Ming-Shi. Possibly the Chinese annalists may have regarded it as part of Turfán, and if this was the case, their account of that province may be taken to embrace the whole of the eastern Khanate of Uighuristán. The Ming record begins very shortly after the opening dates of the Tárikh-i-Rashidi, by relating how the prince of Tu-lu-fan (or Turfán), having repeatedly plundered foreign embassies proceeding through his dominion towards China, the Emperor, in 1377, despatched an army to punish him and ravage his territory—a task that seems to have been accomplished with success. No name is mentioned for this prince. The date would correspond with the reign, in Moghulistan, of Kamar-ud-Din, but I know of nothing that points to Uighuristán forming a part of Kamar-ud-Din's territory, unless perhaps the fact that Timur, shortly after the date in question, when oyerruning Moghulistan in the course of a punitive expedition, sent one of his columns as far east as Kara-Khoja, which lay well within Uighuristán. On the other hand, a few years later, on the death of Khizir Khwája, Timur's army, under Mirza Iskandar, laid waste the country only as far east as Kuchar, and then (for what reason is not stated)
- ↑ Tableaux Historiques, pp. 121–5.
- ↑ Most, but apparently not all, of what Dr. Bretschneider has translated is contained in De Mailla's Hist. de la Chine (vol. x.), but it is there much scattered and involved with the history of Hami. Dr. Bretschneider's version is therefore the more useful of the two. (See his Med. Researches, ii., pp. 193 seq.)
