| Private houses | 600 |
| Orthodox church | 1 |
| Synagogue | 1 |
| Mosques | 5 |
| Schools | 3 |
| Military hospital | 1 |
together with district administrative offices similar to those established at Kazalinsk. The water-supply is drawn from the Syr Daria by means of wells. There are no hotels. The town revenue is only 12,350 roubles; although the importation of various goods from Russia into the Perovski district represents an annual sum of 2,900,000 roubles. With the advent of the Central Asian railway the commercial importance of Perovski, once a point through which caravans destined for Orenburg or Tashkent passed, waned. Now its trade is dependent upon the numerous Tartars and Ural Cossacks who have settled there. The place is unhealthy, and the settlement is affected by the malaria arising from the marshes which surround it. In spring and summer the lagoons swarm with myriads of mosquitoes and horse-flies; so great is the plague that the Kirghiz together with their flocks and herds after wintering along the Syr Daria beat a hurried retreat into the steppe, driven off by the tiresome insects. Many months elapse before the nomads return; it is not until the cold weather has set in that they appear in any numbers. Quite close to Perovski there are two immigrant villages—Alexandrovski and Novo Astrakhanski—erected in 1895, where the inhabitants are occupied with cattle-farming and the sale of hay in winter time to the Kirghiz. The district possesses nothing save a pastoral population and a small settlement of 200 souls at Djulek. This place, formerly a fortress founded in 1861 and now half destroyed by the floods of the Syr Daria, contains the administrative offices of the commissioner of the section, with a postal and telegraphic bureau and a native school. To the south of Djulek there is Skobelevski, another small village founded by immigrants in 1895 and containing some fifty-six houses. It is watered by the Tchilli arik. Skobelevski is rapidly developing into a trade-mart, the source of its good fortune being contained in the advantageous position which it fills in the steppe. Throughout this region, plots of land with a good quality soil and well watered have been granted to colonists.
The Chimkent district similarly possesses a rich and fertile soil, derived in the main from its network of irrigating canals. Its population is more numerous than other adjacent settlements and it supports altogether seventeen immigrant villages with a population of 5135. Chimkent contains in itself all the features necessary to the development of a wide belt of agriculture; but at the present time the most extensive tracts of wheat land are along the systems of the Aris, Aksu, Badam, Buraldai, Burdjar, Tchayan and Bugun rivers. In the valley of the Arisi, along the middle reaches, there are rice-fields; and in the country round Chimkent the cotton industry has begun to develop. Experiments are being tried in the cultivation of beetroot as the soil and climatic conditions of the district are especially favourable to its growth. The present quality of the Chimkent beetroot is not inferior to that grown in the Kharkoff Government; so that Chimkent may well become, in the near future, the centre of a sugar-producing industry not only for Turkestan but for the whole of Central Asia, which so far has imported its sugar exclusively from European Russia.
KIRGHIZ WOMEN
The district town of Chimkent, formerly a Khokand fortress taken by the Russian forces under the command of General Chernaieff September 22, 1864, lies upon the eastern side of the railway. Its population comprises:
| Males. | Females. | Total. |
| 6887 | 5554 | 12,441 |
| Orthodox Russians | 768 |
| Jews | 150 |
| Natives | 11,523 |
There are in the