“No one who has visited Khotan or who is familiar with the modern accounts of the territory, can read the early notices above extracted without being struck at once by the fidelity with which they reflect characteristic features of the people at the present day. Nor is it necessary to emphasize the industrial pre-eminence which Khotan still enjoys in a variety of manufactures through the technical skill and inherited training of the bulk of its population.”
Sir Aurel Stein further remarks (Ancient Khotan, I., p. 183): “When Marco Polo visited Khotan on his way to China, between the years 1271 and 1275, the people of the oasis were flourishing, as the Venetian’s previously quoted account shows. His description of the territories further east, Pein, Cherchen, and Lop, which he passed through before crossing ‘the Great Desert’ to Sha-chou, leaves no doubt that the route from Khotan into Kan-su was in his time a regular caravan road. Marco Polo found the people of Khotan ‘all worshippers of Mahommet’ and the territory subject to the ‘Great Kaan’, i.e. Kúblái, whom by that time almost the whole of the Middle Kingdom acknowledged as emperor. While the neighbouring Yarkand owed allegiance to Kaidu, the ruler of the Chagatai dominion, Khotan had thus once more renewed its old historical connexion with China.”
XXXVI., p. 190.
“A note of Yule’s on p. 190 of vol. I. describes Johnson’s report on the people of Khoten (1865) as having ‘a slightly Tartar cast of countenance.’ The Toba History makes the same remark 1300 years earlier: ‘From Kao-ch’ang (Turfan) westwards the people of the various countries have deep eyes and high noses; the features in only this one country (Khoten) are not very Hu (Persian, etc.), but rather like Chinese.’ I published a tolerably complete digest of Lob Nor and Khoten early history from Chinese sources, in the Anglo-Russian Society’s Journal for Jan. and April, 1903. It appears to me that the ancient capital Yotkhan, discovered thirty-five years ago, and visited in 1891 by MM. de Rhins and Grenard, probably furnishes a clue to the ancient Chinese name of Yu-t’ien.” (E. H. Parker, Asiatic Quart. Rev., Jan., 1904, p. 143.)
XXXVII., p. 190 n.
Stein has devoted a whole chapter of his Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan, Chap. XVI., pp. 256 seq. to Yotkan, the Site of the Ancient Capital.
XXXVII., p. 191, n. 1.
PEIN.
“It is a mistake to suppose that the earlier pilgrim Fa-hien (A.D. 400) followed the ‘directer route’ from China; he was obliged to go to Kao ch’ang, and then turn sharp south to Khoten.” (E. H. Parker, Asiatic Quart. Rev., Jan., 1904, p. 143.)
XXXVII., p. 192.