The Life of Yakoob Beg; Athalik Ghazi, and Badaulet; Ameer of Kashgar

by Demetrius Charles Boulger

Until the close of the autumn of 1876 Yakoob Beg had not devoted much personal attention to his eastern frontier. After the first Tungan war and the capture of Kucha he had confided to his son and his lieutenants, the charge of maintaining order in the annexed districts, and of protecting his dominions against any hostile attempt on the part of the Chinese. About the month of September in that year couriers arrived with strange tidings in Kashgar. The message, we can well imagine, was terrible in its brevity. The Chinese had appeared north of the Tian Shan. They had sacked Urumtsi, and were laving close siege to Manas. Their numbers rumour had magnified to almost a hundred thousand combatants, and they came armed with all the auxiliaries Western science could supply.

Before following the movements of the ruler of Kashgar upon the receipt of this intelligence, it will be necessary to consider what had been the history of this Chinese army which had so suddenly appeared in Jungaria. When in the natural course of events the Chinese government, having solved the Taeping and Panthay difficulties, having restored order where disorder had been supreme, and having created an army where there had been only a disorganized rabble, turned its attention to the question, which it had never lost sight of, of chastising the Tungan rebels beyond Kansuh, the victorious soldiers of Yunnan, instead of being disbanded, were invited to participate in a fresh campaign in the regions beyond Gobi. It requires no great stretch of imagination to realize the scene when the imperial edict came before these veterans, calling on all true soldiers to vindicate their country's honour and their outraged religion against the Tungan outcasts; how the generals, such as Chang Yao, set an example of enthusiasm which the main body of their soldiers speedily followed. In the presence of such military enthusiasm we are transported back to the days of imperial Rome, when the subjection of one province was only the prelude to some fresh triumph, and when every campaign found in the ranks of the army the veterans of the last. So it was that the victors of Talifoo, by long marches through Szchuen and Shensi, reached Lanchefoo, the capital of Kansuh, where the viceroy of that province was gathering together the munitions of war, and the recruits who were to swell the nucleus of trained soldiers to the proportions suitable to an invading army. Some have considered, and we are far from denying that there is much to support such a view, that there was a political motive at the root of this enterprise, the motive being a desire on the part of the ruling family to give employment to a large disciplined body of men, who if retained in China proper would be at the service of any powerful conspirator or presumptuous aspirant to imperial honours. Whether there is any foundation or not for this supposition, it is certain that those troops who were not required for garrison work in Yunnan were taken by a round-about route at a great distance from the capital to the north-west frontier town of Lanchefoo, there to prepare for the most arduous military enterprise China had undertaken since her conquest of Eastern Turkestan in the last century.

It is not certain when these movements began to be carried out, but there appears to be no reason to doubt that the advanced portion of the Chinese army had commenced its march westward before the end of the year 1874. In the barren region between Lanchefoo and Hamil, a tract of country some 900 miles as the crow flies, but probably nearer 1,200 by the road followed by the Chinese, such difficulties were encountered that one if not two winters were occupied in overcoming these preliminary obstacles to the advance of the main force. The interval was not passed in complete idleness at headquarters, where magazines of arms and stores were being collected, recruits enlisted and drilled, and the plan of campaign that was to astonish Asia, if not Europe also, was being drawn up by the Viceroy of Kansuh in person and his able lieutenants. At last, with the break of spring upon the desert plains of Gobi, the Chinese army, which numbered in its entirety some 50,000 men, set out on the long road across the desert to the more fertile regions lying north and south of the Celestial Mountains. Of the details of this portion of the enterprise the Pekin Gazette is strangely reticent. The most profound secrecy was observed, and, although it was known that military events were in progress in the north-west, their object and their extent were mysteries. After the delay experienced by the advanced guard, which had to form fixed encampments, or rather settlements, in the desert, and plant the corn that was to enable it to advance in the following spring, no serious check was experienced by the Chinese until they appeared before the walls of Urumtsi, which the Tungan leaders had resolved to defend.

Although several officers in the service of Yakoob Beg happened to be in the city, and several of the leading Tungani resided there, the defence was not prolonged, and after a few days Urumtsi surrendered to the Chinese. Many of the inhabitants had fled to the neighbouring city of Manas, but the garrison was massacred by order of the Chinese generals. There is no mention in this case of what fate befell those of the inhabitants who remained.

Urumtsi surrendered towards the close of August, 1876, and on the 2nd of September the Chinese sat down before the fortifications of Manas, a much more strongly situated city, and defended with the whole force of the Tungan people. The first panic at the appearance of the Chinese had passed off, and the defenders of Manas recognized that they were not only fighting for their cause and independence, but also for their lives and the honour of their families. The terrible lesson of Urumtsi was not without its effect upon the resolute but despairing garrison of Manas. The capture of Urumtsi was a creditable performance in a military sense, but the campaign had to be decided before the ramparts of Manas. On the 2nd of September the Chinese batteries commenced to play on the north-east portion of the wall, and for two months the bombardment was carried on on all sides with more or less vigour. Several assaults were repulsed, and the Tungani, in face of superior odds and weapons, had behaved like brave men. But the Chinese were as persistent in their attack after an eight weeks' siege as they had been on the first day of their arrival, and the provisions of the Tungani were almost exhausted. With their supplies ebbed also their courage, and, after an unsuccessful sortie, the Tungan general, Hai-Yen, presented himself to the Chinese outposts begging to be accorded an honourable capitulation. Ostensibly, terms were granted—or, rather, to put the matter as it is expressed in the official Chinese report, everything was left vague—and on the 6th of November Hai-Yen and the main body of his fighting men came forth from the city towards the Chinese camp. The subsequent events are not clear, but it seems that the attitude of this body was suspicious. The men were armed, they were in a well-ordered phalanx, and to the Chinese on the hills around it looked as if they were about to attempt to cut their way through. Once the Chinese generals entertained the suspicion, they proceeded to act promptly upon it, as if it were an incontestable fact, and the Tungani, attacked from all sides, by artillery, horse, and foot, were in a short time annihilated. Such of their chiefs as were not slain were brought before the Chinese generals, and forthwith executed "with the extreme of torture." Every able-bodied man found in the city or its vicinity was massacred; but the report distinctly states that the women, children, and old men were spared, and there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the Chinese. There would, in their eyes, be no need to palliate such strictly just acts of retribution as these.

Not content with having chastised the living Tungani, by annihilating them, as a race capable of self-defence for a generation to come, the bodies of some of the prime movers in the Tungan movement in its infancy, such as To-teh-lin, Heh-tsun, and Han-Hing-Nung, were exhumed and quartered, as an example to all traitors to the Chinese Empire. The fall of Manas struck a blow that resounded throughout Central Asia, and at the intelligence a panic spread among all the peoples of Chinese Turkestan and Jungaria. The enterprise had been conducted with such astonishing secrecy, and the blow had been struck with such rapidity and skill, that the effect was enhanced by these causes, new alike in the annals of China and Central Asia. Not only had the Khitay returned for revenge, but they had brought with them all the auxiliaries that make England and Russia the dominant powers in that continent. The Khitay no longer advanced in the clumsy formation of a long-forgotten age, but in obedience to orders based on the models of France and Germany. Their artillery was not a source of danger to the artillerists alone, but as effective as the workshops of Herr Krupp can supply. But, above all, their generals had made still more astonishing progress. In the sieges of Urumtsi and Manas they had proved themselves to be no mean tacticians; in their next and more extended enterprise they were to show that they must be ranked still higher as strategists.

Before the end of 1870 the Tungani had ceased to be an independent people. The great majority of them had fallen either in the field or by the hand of the executioner; and with their disappearance the first portion of the task of the Chinese army was completed. The blood of the Khitay massacred in 1862 and 1863 was atoned for, and Chinese prestige restored to as great a height as at any time it had been in the present century. More remained to be accomplished, in its danger as in its result more important, which we have now to consider, before their full task should be consummated; but the Chinese army and its generals had done, even up to this point, a feat of which any country might be proud.

These events appear sudden and strange to us who are far removed from their influence, and who only entertain a languid kind of supercilious interest in matters in which the Chinese are the guiding spirit. But what must they have appeared to Yakoob Beg in his palace at Kashgar, although that palace was 1,000 miles removed from the spot where his victorious enemies lay encamped? It is impossible for us to gauge the feeling of apprehension with which these first triumphs of the Chinese were viewed throughout Eastern Turkestan; and if the bold heart of the Athalik Ghazi did not misgive him, it was not through any light spirit as to the gravity of the danger.

Intelligence of the fall of Manas reached Yakoob Beg, probably, before the end of November, and in consequence of the lateness of the season he had the whole of the winter before him to make his preparations for defence. The surrender of these cities was not generally known in this country until April, 1877, when we also heard of Yakoob Beg's march eastward to protect his menaced frontier. There is very little to be learnt of the internal affairs of Kashgar between March, 1876, and March, 1877; that is to say, between the close of the revolt in Khokand, with the surrender of Abderrahman Aftobatcha, and the mustering of Yakoob Beg's army round the city of Turfan, or Tarfur. There can be no doubt that in that period some important changes had taken place in the sentiment of the Kashgarian people; these changes may not have been very perceptible to a casual observer, yet in their consequences they were as important as manifest sedition. It is not difficult to suggest what some of these modifications may have been; of what they resulted in there can be no doubt—the weakening of the power of the Athalik Ghazi.

Yakoob Beg's over-caution in November, 1875, when the last rising broke out in Khokand, damaged his prestige more than a lost battle. It damped the ardour of the Khokandian element among his followers, and when we remember that these were his ablest and most devoted partisans, this alone was a serious blow. But there are many tokens that the disaffection was not confined to any special party among his people, but was spread amongst them all. The Tungan wars had never been popular, and had been costly and sanguinary operations. The old trade with Russian territory, that once had been so lucrative, languished for want of a fostering hand, and the difficulties of that northern range of mountains, which the patience and care of the Chinese had for a time pierced through, were made the most of to prevent intercourse with Kuldja and Vernoe. More than all, too, all Yakoob Beg's skill as a "manipulator of phrases" could not conceal the fact that his treaty with England was a failure. It did not give him that British protection which alone he cared for, and it did not provide, through the greater obstacles of nature, his people with that new trade outlet which was the sole object worth securing in their eyes. The Forsyth treaty seemed to bring the relations of England and Kashgar to a sudden termination; and the Kashgari were quite shrewd enough to perceive that the Athalik Ghazi would not be buttressed by English bayonets against Russian aggression, if that instrument was to be held, as in their eyes it could not be otherwise than held, the only connecting link between the countries. The consequence of this belief was a resignation to a Russian subjection at no distant date.