Turkey | Istanbul | Silk Road

Over the years I have wandered to many of the more famous stops on the eastern stretch of the old Silk Road, including its eastern terminus Xian, in Shaanxi Province, China. Continuing westward on the Silk Road I drifted through Lanzhou on the Yellow River, Jiayuguan, the western limit of China during the Ming Dynasty and the end of the Great Wall, and made an obligatory stop at the famous 1000 Buddha Caves at Dunhuang. On the Northern Silk Road, south of the Tian Shan but north of the Taklamakan Desert, I visited the now-tiny oasis town of Toyuk, the famous grape-growing town of Turpan, the nearby Buddhist Caves of Bezeklik and the now-ruined cities of Jiaohe and Gaochang, also known as Khocho), both of which were destroyed during the internecine wars at the beginning of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, and the old Uighur capital of Beshbaliq, on the north side of the Tian Shan. On the Southern Silk Road, south of the Taklamakan Desert, I swung by Khotan, the ancient Buddhist stronghold, nominal location of the historical Shambhala, and center of the Silk, Carpet, and Jade trades, and also Kashgar, in eastern Xinjiang, at the confluence of the Northern and Southern Silk Roads. I also spent a night at the Tash Rabat Caravanserai in Kyrgyzstan, on the old Silk Road from Kashgar to the Fergana Valley, and much later checked into a Russian caravanserai in the ancient trading port of Astrakhan, a Silk Road terminus on the Volga River at the northern end of the Caspian Sea.

Having visited much of the eastern Silk Road, I naturally wanted to visit Istanbul, arguably the most illustrious of the Silk Road’s western termini. Over the years I had received several invitations to visit Istanbul, the latest from our very own Girl from the Golden Horn, the internationally renowned adventuress, temptress, and provocateur-auteur Gunj, with whom I once did a horse trip to Khargiin Khar Nuur in Mongolia. I had received several dispatches from Gunj over the summer in which Bukhara, Samarkhand, Cholpan Ata, Osh, and several other Central Asia cities and towns were mentioned as recent ports of call. Then came one email that mentioned she was going on some ill-defined mission into the Pamir Mountains. I accused her of searching for the notorious Sarmoung Monastery, which she adamantly denied. She did allow that George Gurdieff’s hangouts in Istanbul still existed, however.

In addition to the city’s status as a Silk Road terminous, I was also intrigued by the suggestion I have heard from several lamas in Ulaan Baatar, including Lama Gombo, that a portal to Shambhala can be found in Istanbul. These current-day assertions may be echos of certain enigmatic passages in The Crystal Mirror, a nineteenth century text by the ethnically Mongolian but Tibetan-named lama Nyima Chokyi Thuken. As you know, Khamariin Khiid in Mongolia is also reputed to be a Portal to Shambhala. (A recently surfaced rumor that yet another Portal to Shambhala can be found in the basement of the Rubin Museum in New York City should be discounted due to the dubious source of the information.)

Then came word that Gunj would be in Istanbul back in Istanbul for the last two weeks of October before returning to her pied á terre in Manhattan, not far from the Strand Book Store. If I wanted to visited Istanbul, I should do so while she was there.

So I booked a flight Ulaan Baatar–Beijing–Hong Kong–Dubai–Istanbul and return. Normally I would have stopped in Beijing and stocked up on Puerh Tea from my favorite tea dealer, the estimable Ms. Na, but now the peckerwoods in the Chinese Embassy here in UB have made it so difficult to get Chinese visas that I no longer bother; I just winged straight on through to Hong Kong. Since I had to transfer to Dragon Air for the flight down to Hong Kong I did get to see for the first time Beijing’s spectacular Terminal #3, opened for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Mongolian Airlines still flies to old Terminal #2, so I had to take a shuttle bus to Terminal #3. To paraphrase Richard Nixon standing in front of the Great Wall, the “the terminal is really, really great.” Or at least really, really huge. A terminal of a city which has every intention to be the world leader by the middle of this century. And yes, there are Starbucks. More importantly there are “charging stations” for topping off laptops, cell phones, and Kindles, and small free wi-fi islands around at least some of the charging stations, although there does not seem to be free wi-fi terminal wide.

I had an eight-hour layover in Hong Kong, so I took the train to Kowloon, thinking I would spend a few hours just strolling around the city with one eye open for any Puerh Tea buying possibilities. Unfortunately my body had already accustomed itself to late-fall temperatures in Ulaan Baatar—we had had a nice little blizzard a couple of days before I left and there was still a few inches of snow on the ground on the morning of my departure—and I was totally unacclimated to Kowloon’s near tropical temperatures. Within ten minutes of walking I was drenched in sweat. Then a slow drizzle turned into a near deluge. So I caught the subway over to Hong Kong Island and spent a few hours in my favorite bookstore right near the Center Metro Station. Although I had already downloaded fifteen or twenty books onto my Kindle for reading on this trip I could not resist buying hard copies of Butcher and Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Entanglement in Afghanistan, a rip-roaring account of how Afghanistan has become known as The Graveyard of Empires. The English Empire suffered if not its greatest defeat in Afghanistan then certainly its most ignominious; the Soviet Empire likewise got its butt kicked, and now it is the turn of the USA. And I could not resist picking up a copy of The Blue Manuscript by Sabiha Al Kemir. I am a sucker for books about manuscripts.

Thus fortified with reading material I took the train back out to the airport and caught the 0:35 AM Red-Eye Special to Dubai. I was flying on Emirates Airlines, which has wonderfully new and clean planes with fairly roomy, plushly appointed seats, and exuberantly friendly flight attendants. They announced that among the attendants there were speakers of Arabic, English, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. When they turn out the regular cabin lights there are tiny little light bulbs embedded in the roof which twinkle like stars, so you can imagine you are sleeping out in the desert, in the “Big Tent,” as they say in Mongolia.

Arrived in Dubai’s mammoth but then deserted airport at four in the morning local time. The only place I could find open was a Burger King, so I sat and drank lamentable coffee while reading Lars Brownworth’s Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire on my Kindle. As soon as the sun came up I took a cab down to the Old Town, where I hoped to stock up on Arabian scents in the Perfume Souk. The souks do not open until 9:00 am, but the covered walkways of the Gold Souk were open so I took a bench and sat for two hours watching the passersby. There were no tourists or travelers at this time of the morning. All the people were locals who work in the souks—mostly Pakistanis—and an assortment of local loiterers. I was struck by the number of Chinese who appear to be working here. Are they colonizing Dubai now?

As soon as my favorite scent store opened I bought frankincense and an assortment of essential oils, including musk, rose, jasmine, araic, nooria, amber, and a smattering of others, plus several kinds of aromatic woods which can be burned as incense and some Iranian saffron for culinary purposes. Then I went back to the airport and sipped immense lattes—the cauldron-like cups have handles on either side so you can pick them up with both hands—until my 2:30 PM departure for Istanbul, also on Emirates Airlines.

Planes were stacked up over Istanbul so I was an hour late in arriving. By eight in the evening I was ensconced in a hotel within fifteen minutes walk of the Hagia Sofia, arguably the center of old Istanbul. At nine at the next morning I entered the precincts of the old Church/Mosque.

Hagia Sofia

As you know, Hagia Sofia was built between 532 and 537 A.D. on the orders of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. For almost a thousand years, until the the completion of the cathedral in Seville, Spain, in 1520, it was the largest church in the world.

Hagia Sofia

In late June, 1203, members of the 4th Crusade, ostensibly bound for the Holy Land, where they hoped to retake Jerusalem from the Moslems, decided to swing by Istanbul—then known as Constantinople—for a little free-lance looting and plunder, this despite the fact that Constantinople was at the time a Christian city, albeit Orthodox and not Catholic, like the western European Crusaders. According to the historian Speros Vryonis:

The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. Constantinople had become a veritable museum of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that the Latins were astounded at the riches they found. Though the Venetians had an appreciation for the art which they discovered (they were themselves semi-Byzantines) and saved much of it, the French and others destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine, violation of nuns, and murder of Orthodox clerics. The Crusaders vented their hatred for the Greeks most spectacularly in the desecration of the greatest Church in Christendom. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sofia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church's holy vessels. The estrangement of East and West, which had proceeded over the centuries, culminated in the horrible massacre that accompanied the conquest of Constantinople. The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians. The defeat of Byzantium, already in a state of decline, accelerated political degeneration so that the Byzantines eventually became an easy prey to the Turks. The Crusading movement thus resulted, ultimately, in the victory of Islam, a result which was of course the exact opposite of its original intention.

Hagia Sofia

In 1453 the Ottoman Turks, after a lengthy siege described in intriguing detail in the book 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, captured Constantinople. On Tuesday, May 29, 1453 Sultan Mehmet II entered the city and carrying the sword of the Prophet Mohammed rode his mule straight into Hafia Sofia. Dismounting, he kneeled on the floor and after sprinkling a handful of dust on his head as a sign of humility, announced the victory of Islam over the city and declared that henceforth Hagai Sofia would serve as a mosque. In 1935 Hagia Sofia was turned into a museum and is now visited by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people a day.

Second Floor Hallway in the Hagia SofiaInterior of the Hagia Sofia
Interior of the Hagia Sofia

China | Shaanxi | Xian City Wall

While in town to see the Nestorian Stele, I thought I might as well check out the rest of Xian, which as you no doubt know was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and during the Tang Dynasty probably the largest and most developed city in the world. It is still now probably the last large walled city in the world. The wall surrounding the inner city is a total of 7.3 miles long, forty-nine feet high, and fifty-nine feet wide at the top.

The immense Southern Gate to the city

Just inside the Southern Gate

Stairs lead up to the top of the City Wall

The southern side of the City Wall

The top of the City Wall

The 7.3 mile-long top of the wall provides a nice walking and biking path. Notice the bicycle-built-for-two.

Biker on top of the Wall

Belly button of Biker on top of the Wall

Inside of the east side of the City Wall

Outside of the east side of the City Wall

A green strip and hiking path extends all around the outside of the wall

Path along the outside of the wallOuter rampart of the City Wall

Green strip and park along the outside of the City WallRestored Qing Dynasty houses just inside the City Wall

China | Shaanxi | Xian | Nestorian Stele

I have a big stack of books I have been dipping into, but when my mind wearies and I need a little light reading I turn to The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died (also Kindle Edition). Although not a Christian myself, I do find the advance of Nestorian Christianity into Asia via the Silk Road fascinating from an historical point of view. A few years ago I wandered down to Xian, the Eastern Terminous of the Silk Road, specifically to see the famous Nestorian Stele on display in the city’s Belian Museum.

Grounds of the Belian Museum

Erected in 781 AD, the stele gives a brief description of the introduction of Nestorian Christianity into China in the 8th Century.

At the top of stele is a Nestorian Cross; beneath the cross is the heading “Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin”. Beneath the heading—not really visible in the photo—is The History Itself in 1,756 Chinese characters plus a few lines in the Syriac language.

Peony at Tang Dynasty Times now informs me that there is an entire book about the stele:

Christianity, along with Islam, was one of the many imports that trodded eastward on the Silk Road. For more on this see the wonderfully informative Religions of the Silk Road.

Of course there is much else in the Belian Museum, including many swoon-inducing Buddhist art works. Here are just two samples:

A Tang Dynasty Buddha

A Tang Dynasty rendering of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, unearthed in Xian in 1952.

Kyrgyzstan | Tash Rabat Caravanserai

Woke up this morning thinking about the Tash Rabat Carvanserai which I had visited seven or eight years ago. I had been dreaming of Lady Ga Ga throughout most of the night, and I guess the inevitable Connection Between Lady Ga Ga and Caravanserais triggered my memories of Tash Rabat. Located in Kyrgyzstan, between the small city of Naryn, on the upper reaches of the Naryn River, one of the sources of the fabled Syr Darya River (the ancient Jaxartes), and Kashgar, in Xinjiang, this is one of best preserved caravan hostels on the entire eastern section of the Silk Road. I stopped overnight here while traveling from Bishkek, the current capital of Kyrgyzstan, to Kashgar. Of course you can no longer stay in the caravanserai itself, but the local Kyrgyz maintain a small wooden guesthouse nearby and there are also several gers available for rent. I stayed in a ger.

Tash Rabat Caravanserai

Although it is a standard sight-seeing stop for most travelers from Bishkek to Kashgar via the Torugart Pass, with many of them staying overnight, very little is known about the history of the caravanseria itself. The local Kyrgyz claim to know nothing, except that it was a standard stop on the old Silk Road. Other sources maintain that the caravanseria was originally a Nestorian Christian monastery or church dating back to the 10th century. The interior layout is indeed in the form of a cross, with a large doomed room at the intersection of the arms and the vertical column. Since there was a Nestorian Bishopric in Kashgar in the 12th century it is not outside the realm of possibility that the Nestorian Christians established an outpost here. (Incidentally, see The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died (also Kindle Edition) for an utterly fascinating account of Christianity in Asia during the first Millennium. Many people forget that for its first one thousand years Christianity was essentially an Asian religion. Only later did it become identified with the “West”. )

Still other sources maintain that the building was once a Buddhist temple or monastery. Others dismiss both these assertions and claim that the caravanserai was purpose-built in the 14th century. Anyhow, the building measures roughly about 110 feet deep by 100 feet wide, with a wall 18 feet high at the entrance and tapering down to four or five feet at the back. Off the main corridor are numerous rooms, some measuring only 8 by 8 feet, which were apparently used by the more humble travelers. This corridor leads to a large room which served as the lobby, kitchen, and dining room combined. This room is capped by a dome which extends sixty or more feet above the floor. It looks as if there may have been frescos or paintings around the top edge of the dome, but these are now largely obliterated. It was eerily silent here under the dome even during the day when there was a lot of ruckus outside—drunken Kyrgyz brawling with each other, dog fights, etc. Off to the side of this central area were several large bedrooms apparently meant for more affluent travelers.

At one point while I was there full-sized bus arrived with at least forty veiled women on board. I did not see any men except for the two drivers. They went together into the main room under the dome and after all other visitors, including myself, were shooed out, they apparently engaged in prayers or a ceremony of some sort. After or hour or so they came out of the building and immediately boarded the bus and left. The local Kyrgyzs allowed that they were Sufis, but other than that would say nothing about what they were doing there.

A elderly Russian man who claimed he lived about twenty miles down road from the caravanserai and just happened to be passing by could shed no more light on the Sufis, but he did say there was a local legend which maintained that the caravanserai was built over the entrance to a cave which extended for dozen of miles south, with an opening on the other side of the Chinese border. He claimed that in the nineteenth century daring smugglers used the caves to smuggle gold and other compact items into China. Whether there is any truth to this legend I cannot say.

Looking up the valley from Tash Rabat. The old Silk Road went up this valley.

Nowadays the road heads west and then swings around some spurs of the Tian Shan Mountains before reaching the Torugart Pass to the south. In the old days the caravan route went straight up the valley from the caravanserai and over the Tash Rabat Pass through the Tian Shan. This was the last pass before the 12,310-foot Torugart Pass leading to Kashgar and Xinjiang. I hired a horse from the local Kyrgyz and rode up the valley to the 13,018-foot Tash Rabat Pass for a look around. The north side of the pass is quite steep and would have been a trial for heavily-laden horses or camels. I really wanted to ride on to the Torugart Pass, but this of course was impossible. The next day I continued on by jeep to the Chinese border at Torugart Pass and on to the storied Silk Road City of Kashgar.

View south from 13,018-foot Tash Rabat Pass

Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #9

How Dambijantsan spent the late 1880s is unclear. In the spring of 1890 he suddenly appeared near the city of Kulja, on the Ili River in what is now Xinjiang Province of China. Whatever he had been doing in the previous years he was now transformed. He was no longer an aspiring member of a monastic community, nor an itinerant drifter, nor a hired-hand with Russian expeditions. Instead he made a startling announcement to all who would listen: he was the grandson of the Oirat chieftain Amursana, who had led the last great revolt again Qing rule, and he had returned to take up the struggle once again and free Mongol peoples from the tyranny of the Qing Dynasty.

The Ili Basin where Dambijantsan chose to reappear in his new guise was part of the New Frontier (xin jiang) added to the domains of the Qing Dynasty China after the defeat of Amursana in 1757, but separated as it was from the rest of Xinjiang by formidable geographical barriers it constituted a distinct domain of its own. Also, as one geographer points out, the Ili Basin is of “special interest as the historical divide between the eastern and western halves of Inner Asia.” As such it was more oriented toward the west, towards the vast steppes and deserts that stretch off to the shores of Caspian Sea. rather than to mountain-rimmed basins and depressions to the east. The Ili River was the easternmost of the rivers known to the Türks who inhabited the region in the sixth century as Jetisu, or “Seven Rivers.” Later this area would become known as Semireche, Russian for Seven Rivers. Bounded on the west by the Talas River and the east by the Ili, and including the Chu and other rivers in eastern current-day Kazakhstan, “Semireche is an area where sedentaries and nomads have met at various points in history—coexisting, overlapping, or competing—because it lends itself to both ways of life . . .”

The Ili River and the Ili Basin

The Ili River itself begins about thirty miles east of the current-day city of Yining (also know as Ili, Yili, Kulja, and Gulja), at the confluence of the Kax and the Künes rivers. Both of these rivers, which flow roughly parallel through the Ili Basin, begin about 150 miles farther east, originating from glaciers sheathing 18,044-foot Erenhaberg Shan (shan = mountain), a peak located at the nexus of the of the Tian Shan Range and the Borohogo Shan Range. The Tian Shan, which bisects Xinjiang east to west, culminates in the 22,949-foot peak of Khan Tengri, about 260 miles west of Erenhaberg Shan. This formidable range separates the Ili Basin from the huge Tarim Basin and Taklimahan Desert to the south. From the peak of Erenhaberg Shan the Borohogo Shan Range extends west to the Zungarian Alatau Mountains on the current-day border between China and Kazakhstan.

Western flanks of the Borohogo Shan

With peaks of up to 11,000 feet, this range separates the Ili Basin from the immense Zungarian Basin to the north. The Ili River itself flows 388 miles west from the confluence of the Kax and Künes rivers, emerging from the double prongs of the Tian Shan and the Borohogo Shan and flowing out onto the Khusundaka Steppe before finally debouching into the land-locked, 6,562-square-mile Lake Balhash in Kazakhstan.

The fertile Ili Basin

Up to sixty miles near the current border with Kazakhstan, well watered by rivers flowing off the flanks of the Borohogo Shan and Tian Shan ranges, with fertile riverine bottomlands bordered by rich grasslands ramping to the mountains on the north and south, and the Ili Basin was a prize that was coveted and fought over by nomads for at least 2500 years. Many of these nomads, after rising to power in this fecund land, eventually migrated elsewhere and founded great dynasties and empires. The people known as Scythians, or Saka, may have inhabited this area as early as the seventh-century B.C. After they were dislodged by the Yuezhi in the second century b.c.. they emigrated to northern India where they eventually founded a Indo-Scythian kingdom. The Yuezhi an Indo-European people described by some sources as having reddish or blonde hair, established their capital in the Ili Basin. With a population of some 400,000 people (apparently adults), they were capable of mobilizing a mounted army of 100,000 archers. The Yueshi were in turn displaced by the Wusun and moved westward to the found the Kushan Empire in what is now Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. The Kushan Empire, straddling the great trade routes between India and Inner Asia, became one of the major vectors for the dissemination of Buddhism throughout what is now Xinjiang and Transoxiana and on into China. The Wusun, who replaced them, occupied the Ili Valley and set up a capital on a tributary of the Ili River believed to be the current-day Tekäs River. At one time they numbered some 120,000 households with 630,000 individuals, including 188,000 men capable of bearing arms. As such they were a power to be reckoned with in Inner Asia. According to one Chinese annalist, “Of all the [people] of the Western Regions, the Wusun looked the most peculiar. [They] have cerulean eyes and red beards and look like Mi monkeys are their descendants.” The Wusun were eventually defeated by the Xiongnu (Hunni), who then presumably occupied the Ili Valley, although little it known about their presence in the region. By the seventh century A.D. the western branch of the Khökh Türks occupied the Ili Basin, and still others, including Sogdians, the Khara Khitai, and Uighurs would also make their homes here between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.

With the rise of the Mongol Empire the Ili Basin came into still greater prominence. In 1209, Barchug, the Uighur ruler of Uighuristan, centered around the capital city of Khocho, near current-day Turpan in eastern Xinjiang, recognized the rising power of the Mongols and prudently allied himself with Chingis Khan, thus avoiding the terrible fate of so many who opposed the Mongol khan. In appreciation, Chingis gave him one of his daughters in marriage and even referred to him as his “fifth son.” Eastern Xinjiang thus secured the Mongols moved on to western Xinjiang and the Ili Basin. Earlier, in 1204, Chingis had defeated the tribe known as the Naiman, who occupied what is now northwestern Mongolia. The Naiman chieftain Tayang Khan was killed in the battle, but his son Küchlüg escaped to the Semireche region and after various complicated machinations had by 1211 managed to overthrow the then-ruling Khara Khitai regime and usurp power for himself. Originally a Christian who had converted to Buddhism, Küchlüg soon made himself intensely unpopular in Semireche and the western Tarim Basin by his persecutions of Moslems. Apprised of Küchlüg’s unpopularity with many of his subjects, Chingis Khan sensed an opportunity to deal once and for all with this loose end who had earlier escaped from his grasp in Mongolia, and at the same time extend his reach westward. Küchlüg had also murdered of the husband of one of his granddaughters, an act for which Chingis may also have been seeking revenge.

In 1216 Chingis dispatched one of his most trusted generals, Jebe (the Arrow) with a force of some 20,000 men to the Ili Basin. At a place called Almalik, near current-day Yining, Jebe “accepted the peaceful submission of the tribes in Zungharia and Semireche” who had been alienated by Küchlüg. The Naiman renegade himself fled over the Tian Shan to Kashgar at the western end of the Tarim Basin with Jebe in pursuit. Küchlüg had worn out his welcome with the Moslem populace of Kashgar, but Jebe himself was greeted as a liberator. “It was as if the arrow of prayer hit the target of answer and acceptance,” pronounced the thirteen-century historian Juvaini, playing on Jebe’s name. Jebe, according to Juvaini’s informants, ““caused a herald to proclaim in the town that each should abide by their own religion and follow his own creed. Then we knew the existence of this people [the Mongols] to be one of the mercies of the Lord and one of the bounties of divine grace,’” Deprived of his power base in Kashgar, Küchlüg fled south over the Pamir Mountains, apparently hoping to escape to India.

The Pamirs from near Kashgar

The Gez River flowing out of the Pamirs. This is the main passageway to the Pamirs on the route from Kashgar to Pakistan. Jebe pursuited Küchlüg via this vallley. Marco Polo probably also came this way, as did the Chinese Pilgrim Xuanzang.

Jebe caught up with the wayward son of Tayang Khan in the Pamirs and killed him (according to one account, he was beheaded) near a place called Sarikol south of the current-day border town of Tashkurgan, in what is now Pakistan.

24,757-foot Muztagh Ata Mountain, on the route to Pakistan

The Pamir Highland near Sarikol where Küchlüg bit the dust

With the elimination of Küchlüg, Kashgaria (the oases cities of the western Tarim Basin) and the Semireche region, including the valleys of the Chu and Talas rivers and the Ili Basin, were all incorporated into the Mongol Empire.


Chingis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, died in 1227. Before his death he bequeathed his realm to his four sons, with Chagatai, the second oldest, receiving a huge swath of Inner Asia from Turpan in the east to the oases cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in the west, including Lake Issuk Kol in current-day Kyrgyzstan and Ili Basin. The Chagatayids eventually established their capital at Almalik in the Ili River valley, near current-day Yining, where Jebe had earlier accepted the allegiance of the local populace. The exact location of the former Chagatayid capital of Almalik is unknown, although some local sources maintain it was near the current-day market town of Yakxamba Bazaar, about 20 miles west of Yining.

Yakxamba Bazaar on an off-day—Believed to have been the site of Almalik

After the death of Chagatai in 1243, for the next 150 years or so, until the latter part of the fourteenth century, his descendants would continue to occupy Ili Basin and surrounding territories. As with many inheritances, however, there were disputes, and large chunks of the territory left to Chagatai would be fought over by his brothers and their descendants. Ögödei, Chingis’s third son and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire after Chingis’s death, took effective control of Uighuristan, centered around Khocho (near current-day Turpan), and other settled areas of the Tarim Basin. After the death of Ögödei, Möngke, the son of Tolui, Chingis’s youngest son, eventually assumed the title of Great Khan and attempted to divide the Chagatayid khanate between himself and his cousin Batu, son of Jochi, Chingis’s oldest son and ruler of the Golden Horde which occupied much of current-day western Russia. After Möngke‘s death, Khubilai and his brother Arig Böke, sons of Tolui, fought for the title of Great Khan, with khanate of Chagatai to the west a pawn in their disputes. Upon Arig Böke’s death in 1264 Khubilai became undisputed Great Khan and founded the Yüan Dynasty, but rival relatives soon wrested away control of the western Tarim Basin which he had earlier claimed. From 1271 to 1301 Khaidu, son of Ögödei, became the de facto ruler of the Chagatai khanate, with Chagatayid princes in place as figure-head khans. After Khaidu’s death in 1301, the resurgent Chagatayids retook control of much of the original khanate, including the Ili Basin. Secure in their homeland, they now launched attacks on northern India, Afghanistan, and eastern Persia.

By the 1340s, however, the Chagatayids had split into two factions. The khan Tarmashirin, based in the oasis cities of Transoxiana, had converted to Islam in the late 1320s. In 1334 the Chagatayids in the Issuk Kul region of current-day Kyrgyzstan and the Ili Basin, adherents of Buddhism, Christianity, and shamanism, rebelled and recognized their own khan. Tarmashirin remained in control of Transoxiana, but the breakaway branch of Chagatayids now ruled the rest of Chagatai’s original patrimony. This new khanate soon acquired a new significance and a distinctive moniker. As geographer Svat Soucek points out, “Semireche and the adjacent territories, from the Talas river all the way to the upper course of the Ili, together with present-day Kyrgyzstan . . . developed a special identity, that of a Mongol homeland, to the extent of acquiring a new name, Moghulistan—in other words, Mongolia.”

One of the most famous rulers of this western extension of the Mongolia homeland was Tughluq Temür (r. 1347 to 1364), an eleventh generation descendant of Chingis Khan through Chagatai. When still a young man he had met Jamal al-Din, a member of an Islamic sect known as the Khwajas (Masters), who explained to him the teachings of Islam. As noted, Tarmashirin’s conversion to Islam was one of the reasons for the split between the two factions of Chagatayids in the 1330s. Tughluq Temür did not then accept Islam, but he promised that if he ever became khan of the Moghulistan branch of the Chagatayids he would indeed convert. By the time he did become Khan Jamal al-Din had died, but his son Arshad al-Din appeared before Tughluq Temür tent at dawn one day and made the call for morning prayers. Tughluq Temür was enraged at having his slumber disturbed, but after Arshad al-Din reminded him of his promise he agreed to convert to Islam and offered himself to be circumcised, always a dicey proposition for a adult male. Not only that, but he ordered that all his princes also convert. With the exception of one, they did, along with, according to the perhaps apocryphal account of Moslem historians, 160,000 of their followers. Whatever the actually numbers, by the mid-fourteenth century the Chagatayid Khanate was largely Islamicised.

In March of 1360 Tughluq Temür marched on Transoxiana and quickly retook the Chagatayid domains, claimed earlier by Tarmashirin. The then-ruler of Transoxiana fled to Afghanistan, but his nephew Temur switched sides and allied himself with Tughluq Temür. Later Tughluq Temür appointed his son Ilyas-khojas as viceroy of Samarkand and named Temur as the young man’s advisor. Temur would later became world famous as Tamerlane, “The Sword of Islam,” and “The Scourge of God.”

“Thus the unity of the old khanate of Jagatai [Chagatai] was restored under a forceful and dreaded khan [Tughluq Temür],” intones historian of the steppes René Grousett, “No one could have foreseen at that time that not many years later the Tamerlane who he had given his son as mentor would bring this Jagataite restoration to an end and replace it with a new empire.”

Tughluq Temür, although completely forgotten by most of the world, is well remembered in Xinjiang. His Mausoleum Complex near the village of Huocheng, about thirty miles from Yining, contains both his tomb and the tomb of his sister (according to some accounts his daughter) and is now a hallowed pilgrimage site and popular tourist destination.

The Tomb of Tughluq Temür

The coffin of Tughluq Temür

The coffin of Tughluq Temür’s sister (or daughter)

Fetishes left by pilgrims at the tomb of Tughluq Temür

Mongolia | Ulaan Baatar | Scriptorium

Welcome to the Scriptorium!

One corner of my hovel in the howling wilderness of Zaisan Tolgoi is devoted to my Scriptorium. New Additions to the Scriptorium are made on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis.

One section of my Scriptorium

Just this week there have been four new additions, three fiction and one non-fiction. The first fiction title is Michael Chabon's Gentleman of the Road. I had read Chabon’s first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was interesting only because I myself had once lived in Pittsburgh, in the Shadyside District where much of the action takes place, but I had not read anything by him since. But Gentlemen of the Road takes place in 10th-century Khazaria, the Jewish kingdom which then existed on the steppes along the Volga River north of the Caspian Sea, and who could resist a setting like that? Later, in the seventeenth century, several tribes of the Oirat, or Western Mongols, including the Torguts and Dörböts, would migrate to this same area north of the Caspian Sea and become known as the Kalymks. The infamous Ja Lama was a Dörbot Kalmyk from this area. The main characters in Chabon’s book are two swindlers and con men, a Jew from Regensburg, in what is now Germany, and a gigantic black Abyssinian from Africa—the title’s Gentlemen of the Road—who get caught up in a scheme to place a Khazar prince on the Khazarian throne. But then it turns out that the Khazar prince is actually a princess! The Gentlemen of the Road should have been tipped off to this when the prince/princess refused to urinate in their presence. Like many con men they could not believe they were being conned. Who could resist a story like this?
Ever since reading The Miniaturist, a tale about a miniature painter in the Indian court of Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (جلال الدین محمد اکبر), also known as Akbar the Great (1542 –1605), a distant descendant of Chingis Khan, I have been a big fan of Kunal Basu.

Thus I could hardly resist his book The Opium Clerk, a tale about a Indian clerk working for the East India Company in the late 1800s. Lots of interesting details about the production of opium in India, and some of the action takes place in Canton, where the East India Company unloaded a lot of their opium. On a contemporary note some might say it’s payback time for the Opium Wars, which opened up China to foreign opium, resulting in the addiction of tens of millions of Chinese. Like, who now owns a sizable chunk of Merrill, Lynch and Citibank?

I am also a big fan of Yasmina Khadra, already having read his The Swallows of Kabul, plus The Attack and The Sirens of Baghdad. Yes, I said “his” books, since despite his female pen name the author is a man. Yasmina Khadra (Arabic:ياسمينة خضراء) is the pen name of the Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul (born January 10, 1955). Moulessehoul, who was an officer in the Algerian army when he first starting writing, adopted a woman's pseudonym to avoid military censorship. He revealed his true identity in 2001 and now lives in exile in France. So I sprung for one more of his books, In the Name of God, a story about how villagers in Algeria got caught up in fanatical Islamic fundamentalism. Just reading this one—review to follow.

The one non-fiction title added to the Scriptorium this week was The Turks in World History. I stopped by the Silk Road Restaurant the other day and was paging through this book while I had a cup of coffee. On page 12 was an illustration entitled “Nomadic Camp Scene.” The original was done in the fifteenth or sixteenth century somewhere between Herat and Tabriz in what is now Iran. Glancing up from the book I was startled to see a copy of this exact same painting on the wall in front of me. This is just one of the numerous Silk Road-themed reproductions on display at the Silk Road Restaurant. There are also reproductions of the Uighur Princes and Uighur Princesses from the Bezeklik Caves, near Turpan in Xinjiang, China. By the way, the originals of these paintings are now in the Indian Art Museum in Dalhem, on the outskirts of Berlin, Germany. Then on page 42 there is a photo of the Tonyukuk Monuments near Nalaikh, not far from Ulaan Baatar. All and all, this looks to be quite an interesting book. There does seem to be one glaring omission: there is no mention of the Turk Gunj.

China | Gansu | Dunhuang | Mogao Caves

Wandered out to Dunhuang, in western Gansu Province, for a peek at the Mogao Caves.

An enormous Maitreya Statute takes up the entire inside of this temple. The no-cameras-in-the-caves policy is very strictly enforced here hence no photos.

There are seven or eight hundred caves here—some sources say more than a thousand—but unfortunately only about a dozen are routinely open to the public, and these can only be seen by joining a guided tour—you are not allowed to wander around by yourself. More Information.

These caves downstream from the main complex are not open to the publicUndeveloped cave complex