its weakness as a State is owing to this or to whatever other cause, it has always been an easy prey to invaders, and has seldom had a native ruler within historic times. Its population has been a Turki one for ages past, and the Uighur branch of that race may be regarded (as far as historic times are concerned) as the original owners of the soil, and the parent stock of the bulk of the present inhabitants.[1] That in later times, at least, they were not an aggressive race appears evident from the little we hear of them, and that they had some capacity for crafts and literature seems also to be established. No doubt the tendency of such a people would be to live peaceably under any government strong enough to repel external enemies; so that when Mirza Haidar tells us that Alti-Shahr was "free from the discord of men and the trampling of hoofs, and became an asylum for the contented and the prosperous," he is probably drawing a picture of the country not only true of his own time, but one that serves for several centuries both before and after it.
During the periods that the Dughlát Amirs and Moghul Khans held sway, we hear of expeditions being sent to overrun Badakhshán, Ladak, and other weak States, but these were evidently undertaken by foreign rulers with their foreign troops, and not by the people of the country; indeed, we come much more frequently upon records of invasions which they themselves underwent at the hands of various enemies, such as the Arabs, the Mongols, the Kara Khitai, and even the Kalmáks. In the raids of the Moghuls into Western Turkistan and Mávará-un-Nahr, in their wars with Timur and Ulugh Beg, and their long campaigns with the Uzbegs, it is probable that the natives of Alti-Shahr took little part, for they are never mentioned as combatants. They had, in short (and have still), all the attributes of a lowland and unwarlike people, whose wealth excites the cupidity of aggressive neighbours, but the nature of whose country and customs prevent them from becoming themselves aggressive.
It would be interesting to learn what the armies were composed of, that invaded, in the reigns of Abá Bakr and Sultan Said, Badakhshán, Chitral, etc., Ladak, Tibet and Kashmir. In all likelihood the numbers were very small—to be counted in some instances by hundreds rather than by thousands—while most of the men were probably mercenaries from countries
- ↑ Comp. Klaproth, in Timkowski's Voy. à Peking, i., p. 392, and Radloff in Petermann's Mittheilungen, 1866, Heft. iii., p. 97.
