Turki Proverb.
As soon as we had settled down at Kashgar we were anxious to explore the city and its environs, and Mr. Bohlin proved an invaluable guide in our various expeditions.
From its position the capital of Chinese Turkestan was a commercial centre from very early times. The town as we knew it is built on high ground above the Tuman Su and surrounded by a mud wall and a dry moat, but there are ruins of old Kashgar close by, and the Oasis has changed hands many times. The small traders and peasant proprietors, who form the bulk of the population, are by no means a warlike race, and have apparently accepted with equanimity the rule of whatever master fate might send them. Throughout the centuries it never seems to have occurred to the cities of what is now Chinese Turkestan that they might with advantage have combined against a common foe, instead of letting themselves be subjugated piecemeal.
PRIEST AT THE TEMPLE OF PAN CHAO.
Page 67.
Perhaps the earliest mention of Kie-sha, as it was then called, was when the famous Chinese general Pan Chao in the first century of our era conquered the Oasis and marched his armies almost as far as the Caspian. Accordingly we made our first expedition to the picturesque temple erected by the Chinese to this hero, who, we were told, defended the city most valiantly against fierce attacks from the Kirghiz tribes. This monument is quite modern, the Mohamedan conqueror Yakub Beg having destroyed the original temple during the ’sixties, and the legend that places the remains of the great soldier in the high mound on which the temple stands is open to doubt.
The dirty, black-clad priest in charge of the building pointed out to us the gods in their ill-kept shrines, life-size plaster figures clad in gorgeous silken robes with finger-nails of monstrous length. The god of war was a jet-black deity of peculiarly repulsive appearance, and all had stands before them in which worshippers could burn joss-sticks. There was an upper story to the temple, which we reached by means of a rickety wooden staircase not fastened to the wall in any way, and giving me the impression of being a most insecure mode of communication, and here I remember the quaint figure of the god of schoolboys, appropriately armed with a formidable cane. But the view was what held us enchained. From our post of vantage we could see over the entire town, with its shrines and mosques standing out from the thousands of mean, flat-roofed, mud dwellings, and as the sky was clear that morning the serrated peaks rose up grandly, ramparts, as it were, of the Roof of the World, that we were to visit later on.
We looked down upon the castellated city wall, which is some eighteen feet wide between its high parapets, and I was told the legend according to which it was built by half-starved slaves who were urged to their task by overseers armed with whips. If one of the labourers died, as frequently happened, his fellows were not allowed to remove the body, but were forced to build it into the wet mud in order that it might form part of the fabric, and the narrative haunted me when I stood upon the wall itself.
Though modern artillery would bring down this defence of the city, and the outer moat is always dry, as water would undermine the ramparts, the wall with its square bastions has nevertheless an imposing appearance: so also have the four great bronze-covered gates giving entrance to the town, which are shut at sunset to the accompaniment of Chinese crackers.