Three years before our visit a large part of the principal bazar had been destroyed by fire, and our host had lost many shops on this occasion; but the visitation was a blessing in disguise, for neat wooden stalls with well-made shutters had been built in place of the former dirty, untidy booths. We were taken to see the principal mosques and shrines, architecturally beneath notice and all very shabby in appearance, and beyond the bazar was the dismantled mud brick fort erected by Yakub Beg. Separated from the old native town was the modern China-town, walled in and dominated by a fort, and on all sides stretched the well-watered oasis. Maize, barley, millet, buckwheat, rice, cotton, hemp, grapes, peaches, melons and mulberries were grown in abundance, while the numberless irrigation channels were planted with poplars and willows which serve as fuel.
Khotan is famous for its silks and felts, its cotton cloth, carpets, paper and jade, but the modern silk carpets with their aniline dyes are not artistic, and the few old ones to be found command an exorbitant price. In Rockhill’s Life of the Buddha there is a curious legend relating to the introduction of the silk industry into the province. A king of Khotan married a Chinese princess, who wished to benefit the country of her adoption by teaching its inhabitants how to make silk. She had brought the eggs of the silkworm with her, concealed in her hat, as one version has it; but the Chinese ministers, who were determined that Cathay should retain the monopoly of a lucrative trade, told the credulous king that the harmless worms would turn into venomous serpents and ravage the land. The monarch in a panic commanded the rearing-house to be burnt down; but his wife managed to save some of the caterpillars, and later on appeared in beautiful garments woven from their silk. Her husband, realizing that he had been duped by the Chinese, repented of his foolish act and thenceforth warmly fostered an industry that greatly contributed to the prosperity of his kingdom.
Silk is said to have been made in China from remote ages, for it is recorded that to the wife of an emperor who reigned about 21,640 B.C. (sic) belongs the credit of inventing the loom; but the secret was guarded so jealously that centuries passed before the industry took root in Khotan and Central Asia. At the commencement of the Christian era raw silk was literally worth its weight in gold, and we read that the Emperor Justinian had a monopoly of the costly stuff and set up weaving-looms in his palace. The story goes that he persuaded two Persian monks to bring him the precious eggs from Cathay at the risk of their lives, for death would have been the penalty had the Chinese discovered the contents of the hollow bamboo staff which they carried to Byzantium about A.D. 550. Khotan is believed to be the district from which those eggs and the great silk industry of Europe actually came, and only at the present day has it been necessary to procure a fresh supply of the former from the East to renew the original stock brought across the desert so many centuries ago.
It was interesting to visit the chief silk factory of Khotan, where thousands of pale yellow cocoons were being boiled in big cauldrons, in defiance of the command of the Chinese princess, who said that such a proceeding was a sin against the light, and would be followed by a silkworm famine during the following year. Beside these vats women were squatting who deftly picked a thread from each cocoon, unwinding it until it was ready to be handed on to other women sitting beside primitive spinning-wheels, who wound the threads off upon a spool. From small reels the shining silk was wound on to large ones, and finally it was hung up in thick hanks of delicious creamy colour, ready for export. The native-woven silk is coarse in texture and dull when compared with that produced from European looms, but when dyed with deep vegetable colourings it has an indescribably rich appearance, and much of it is exported to India.
Yu is the Chinese name for jade or nephrite, and Yu-tien or Khotan signifies Kingdom of Jade; therefore I was naturally anxious to obtain all the information I could about this stone, which is valued above all others in China and is even spoken of as “the quintessence of Heaven and Earth.” The jade of Khotan has been known to the Chinese for over two thousand years. Rémusat points out that there are references to it as far back as 140 B.C., and it was often sent as tribute from the rulers of the province to the Emperor of China.
One Chinese author compares a wise man to jade, affirming that both have five of the same good qualities, and another talks of the different colours of the stone, saying it is red as the comb of a cock, yellow as a cooked chestnut, and so on. Again, a third writer affirms that it gives forth light and a perfume, and others speak of its weight and of the way in which it can be imitated and how easily it can be dyed.
In popular belief the Jade River was separated into three branches that carried down the white, black and green varieties respectively from the mines situated at its source; and in bygone days the King of Khotan used to inaugurate the “Jade Harvest,” or season of the year when his subjects began to fish in the streams for the precious stone. This beautiful mineral is found in veins running through rocks of schist or gneiss, and is of almost every shade of white, grey, green, yellow, or black. Until the recent revolution it was worn profusely by the royalties and their courtiers, and was buried with the dead in the form of bracelets and amulets, a carved bowl, screen or goblet being a choice gift for the Emperor to send to a ruling sovereign, in which connection a jade screen presented to Queen Victoria was valued at £300,000 by English experts.
Badrudin took us into the town to see the jade workers turning cups on lathes and polishing them by means of sand. On the ground lay some small dull green boulders, the stone in its raw state, and I was told that, had they been white flecked with green, they would have fetched between two and three hundred pounds apiece. After the white, the yellow is the most highly prized, and then comes the green and lastly the black, for which the famous cenotaph of Tamerlane at Samarkand is renowned. But alas, since the revolution the royal stone is no longer popular in China, and the export to Peking has practically ceased. To counterbalance this there is a small demand for it in India, where it is bought by the British; but so low has the industry fallen that my brother and I could not procure nearly as many cups as we wished. The best that we found were a transparent black speckled with moss green, most beautiful when held up to the light; but only four of these goblets could be bought, and the rest of our purchases were in an attractive dull reseda green that reminded me of sea-water in its translucent delicacy.
One day we rode out to inspect the old jade pits several miles to the east of the city, Badrudin supplying us with horses, as our own always enjoyed a well-earned rest whenever we halted. He and his son escorted us through the Oasis to the broad stone-strewn bed of the Yurungkash or White Jade River, which we easily forded. We then trotted and cantered along sandy paths between the high mud walls of countless gardens. Our goal was a wide tract, formerly a river-bed, now a series of pits ringed with boulders, the result of digging for jade during the centuries. The sand-dunes of the great desert had crept to the edge of the masses of rubble, among which our horses painfully stumbled as we examined the so-called mines, holes about a dozen feet in depth. It is at that distance from the surface that the blocks of jade washed down in bygone days are to be found, the jade obtained from the mines being soft and inferior in quality. Few finds of value are made nowadays, and all good pieces are sent direct to Peking, the Khotan craftsmen being unable to execute the carving for which the Chinese are famous. The glory of Khotan was its jade, and it was owing to the high esteem in which the Chinese held this stone that we hear so much about the province from the early pilgrims and travellers.
When the Chinese travellers Fa-hien and Hiuen Tsiang visited the province, in the fifth and seventh centuries respectively, there were many towns in the kingdom which are now buried beneath the desert sand, and according to the accounts of both pilgrims there were a hundred Buddhist monasteries in the Oasis. It appears that the Khotanis were not whole-hearted followers of the Master, for we hear that the adherents to Buddhism were violently persecuted towards the end of the ninth century, by those that worshipped spirits; but the religion lingered on until it was finally extinguished by Islam, which swept like a great wave through Chinese Turkestan.