it having furnished only a meagre description of it. A Chinese author of the last century says that the whole population of the province, in his time, could be estimated at no more than 3000 families, and these were, for the greater part, so poor that they were scarcely able to provide for themselves. In the summer the heat was excessive, and the blaze of the sun on the barren ridges in the neighbourhood of the town, insupportable—wherefore the people had named them "the fire mountains."[1]
One of its distinctive features is the depression, to some 150 or 200 feet below the level of the sea, of the central districts of Turfán and Kara-Khoja. This is one of the driest as well as one of the hottest portions of Eastern Turkistan, and the one where the greatest ingenuity of the inhabitants, both ancient and modern, has been displayed in irrigating the land so as to render it habitable. Mirza Haidar relates the personal exertions of Vais Khan (though these were not particularly ingenious) to provide water for the cultivation of the land; but possibly the tradition regarding Vais Khan's manual labour is not intended to be taken literally. The attention of modern travellers has been attracted by the remains of aqueducts and systems of wells, showing how dependent the population was, and is, on artificial irrigation. Thus Dr. Regel mentions the reservoirs where water from the mountains is stored, and the underground canals that lead it to the town, and serve also as dwelling-places for the inhabitants, during the fierce heat of summer.[2] Captain F. E. Younghusband found the modern city of Turfán surrounded by lines of pits upwards of a hundred feet in depth—the lines extending for several miles into the desert.[3]
In contrast to the low-lying group of oases in the burning desert, and among the "fire hills," there rise immediately to the north, the eastern ranges of the Tian Shan, with summits reaching to 12,000 or 14,000 feet above the sea, and capped with eternal snow. One of these is the famous Bogdo-Ula of the Mongols and Kalmáks, or the Tengri-Tágh of the Kirghiz; a mountain that, for ages past, has been held sacred by the pastoral tribes that have inhabited the regions around, and whose people have venerated it, no doubt, because it is the
