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

China | Xinjiang Province | Turpan | Jiaohe

Back in Turpan after my Berlin interlude I wandered six miles west of the city to the ruins of the ancient city Jiaohe.

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China | Xinjiang | Turpan | Toyuq

About another twenty miles east of Bezeklik is the small oasis of Toyuq, located right on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The hills around here are riddled with caves which once served as Buddhist hermitages and monastic complexes. Unfortunately these caves are now closed to the public. Since the late fourteenth century the area has been Islamic and is now a favorite pilgrimage site for Moslems from all over Central Asia. Toyuk is known as “Little Mecca,” and a pilgrimage here is considered “half as sacred” as a pilgrimage to Mecca itself. Pilgrims who come here can count themselves as “half-hadji” (pilgrim to Mecca). The oasis is also famous for its elongated white grapes, known as Mare’s Nipple Grapes, which are highly valued as far away as Beijing.

Oasis of Toyuq on the northern edge of the Flaming Mountains

Incredibly lush oasis land surrounded by bleak desert

The Emerald-domed Mosque is the center of “Little Mecca.”

Main Mosque in Toyuq

China | Xinjiang | Turpan | Bezeklik

From Gaochang I mosied up to the nearby Bezeklik Grottos, located in the gorge of the Murtuk River, which flows through the Flaming Mountains. Here there are seventy-some caves dating from the fourth to thirteen centuries. At one time the caves were filled with one of the most staggering collections of Buddhist wall paintings in Central Asia and perhaps the world. Moslem iconoclasts, who arrived in the area in the late fourteen-century, damaged some of the paintings; Western archeologists, including Aurel Stein and Von Le Coq, removed many of the remaining paintings at the beginning of the twentieth century; and what was left was almost completely destroyed by the Mao’s Little Generals, the Red Guards, during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although a dozen or so of the caves are now open to the public almost no of the original artwork, with the exception of some barely visible 1000 Buddhas motifs on the ceiling of one or two of the caves, has survived in situ. Many examples of the wall paintings, “stolen” by Western archeologists such as “the thief Stein” and others—as information signs at the complex are now quick to point out, can however be seen in museums in London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. See Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia for the sordid details on Stein, Le Coq, et. al.

Given the fact that nearby Gaochang is often posited as a possible location of the history Shambhala, it is interesting to speculate the Kalachakra Tantra was composed here or at the many Buddhist monastic complexes tucked away in the adjacent mountains. However, the art work produced here was entirely lacking in any Vajrayana influences, leading one to believe that tantric Buddhism was not practised in this area.

The gorge of the Murtuk River, flowing through the Flaming Mountains. The cave complex is just above here.

The caves were dug into cliffs along the bank of the Murtuk River.
More views of Bezeklik:

Uighur women at Bezeklik

Near where the Murtuk River debouches onto the desert floor is another cave complex known as Shenjinkou, just visible above the curve of the river. This area is now closed to the public.

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China | Xinjiang Province | Gaochang | Shambhala

From Turpan I proceeded about 20 miles east to the ruins of the city of Gaochang, the southern capital of the ancient kingdom of Khocho. Shambhalists have long considered Khocho one of the main candidates for the historical kingdom of Shambhala where the Kalachakra was first composed and taught. Scholar of Indic religions Sir Charles Eliot opined as early as 1921 that, “This country [Shambhala] is seen only through a haze of myth: it may have been in India or it may have been somewhere in Central Asia, where Buddhism mingled with Turkish ideas.” In 1949 Tibetologist-Shambhalist Giuseppe Tucci (Tibetan Painted Scrolls) noted:

It is evidently a pious tale, without the least historical foundation, that the Kalacakra “the wheel of time”, was revealed by the Buddha twelve months after his enlightenment in the mc’od rten at Dhanyakataka, which for the occasion, became dilated until it assumed the proportions of the universe, symbolized by every stupa. The scholar who is said to have given a literary form of this revelation was Zla ba bzan po [Suchandra, First King of Shambhala], an incarnation of P'yag na rdo rje, who put the Buddha's words into writing, and having gone back to his country, Sambhala, and built there a stupa in honour of the Kalacakra, taught his people its secrets. But everything leads us to think that there is much truth in the rest of the narrative; according to it in Sambhala, placed by tradition near the river Sita, (viz. Tarim) many generations of kings succeeded one another and ruled wisely, handing down the secret teaching of the Kalacakra, until their power was weakened by a raid of the Kla klo, coming from Me k'a (Mecca), i.e. the Moslem invasion.

The eminent Shambhalist John Newman also weights in on this issue:

The primary texts of the Kalachakra system came into around the beginning of the 11th century . . . so Shambhala must have existed at that time. The Vimalaprabha (See Ornament of Stainless Light: An Exposition of the Kalachakra Tantra and Kalacakratantra: The Chapter On The Individual Together With The Vimalaprabha) tells us that Shambhala is on a latitude north of Tibet, Khotan, and China, Furthermore, the Vimalaprabha says again and again that Shambhala is north of Sita River. The descriptions of the Chinese traveler, Hsuan tsang [Xuanzang] (7th century) and the Tibetan traveler, Man lungs Guru (13th century), both clearly identify the Sita as the Tarim River in Eastern Turkestan. Thus, “Sambhala” [sic] must be a special name for the Uighur kingdom centered at Khocho that flourished circa 850-1250.

The Uighurs of course originated in Mongolia, where they had their capital at Khar Balgas, in what is now Övörkhangai Aimag. When they migrated en masse to Xinjiang circa 840 a.d. they set up a northern capital at Beshbaliq, on the northern side of the Tian Shan Mountains, and a southern capital on the southern side at Gaochang.

Ur-Shambhalist Edwin Bernbaum (1980) elaborates:

. . . by these criteria, the Uighur Kingdom of Khocho in the Turfan [sic] Depression beneath the Tien Shan Mountains stands out as one most likely places to have been Shambhala. In accordance with the Tibetan guidebooks to Shambhala, Turfan lies north of the Sita, which most Western scholars have identified as the Tarim River. Established by the Uighurs, a Turkish people, around A.D. 850, the kingdom of Khocho flourished for four hundred years as a remarkable oasis of culture and learning. A predominately Buddhist country with numerous monasteries, it also had active centers of Manicheism and Nestorian Christianity—two of the three religions with the greatest influence on the Kalachakra. Although few Muslims lived in the Kingdom itself, Islam was certainly familiar as a new and aggressive religion that was supplanting Buddhism elsewhere in Central Asia.

At the time the Kalachakra appeared in India, the kingdom of Khocho probably possessed the most advanced civilization and the highest standard of living of any country in Central Asia. Well-irrigated fields and orchards produced enough surplus food to allow the Uighurs to run welfare programs for the poor. Living together in peaceful harmony, people of different races, religions and languages stimulated each other”s thoughts and culture. Paintings found in the ruins of Turfan show houses built in the Chinese style, men and women dressed in embroidered silk, and a chamber emsemble complete with harps, guitar, and flutes. Even the Chinese, the most fastidious connoisseurs of culture, were impressed the grace of Uighur society. In Turfan we [see] how a number of religions coexisted in an enlightened kingdom that survived for several hundred years; perhaps a group of dedicated mystics founded a similar, but smaller, community where they went on to extract the underlying wisdom of these religious traditions.

In his 2001 edition of The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas Bernbaum writes that he finally visited Khocho in 1984: “. . . I managed to travel to the heart of Central Asia, to the region most likely to have inspired the myth of Shambhala. There, in the Turfan Depression of western China, at the foot of the Tien Shan mountains, I visited the ruins of the ancient kingdom of Khocho or Gaochang, the most likely prototype for the hidden city itself. Gazing at the extensive walls spreading around me toward the distant mountains, I felt as thought I had come to a place of particular significance on my own journey exploring the many facets of the myth of Shambhala.”

The Indefatigably Peripatetic Pilgrim Xuanzang visited pre-Uighur Gaochang in 629 or 630, at the beginning of his sixteen-year sojourn from China to India and back, when the city was ruled by the half-Chinese king Qu Wentai. The powerful potentate and the pious pilgrim fast became bosom buddies, so much so that Qu Wentai eventually insisted that Xuanzang give up his wandering ways and remain in Gaochang. After Xuanzang staged a three-day hunger strike he was finally allowed to continue on to India, where among other places he visited Bodhgaya and Nalanda.

The Inner City Wall at GaochangMain Temple at Gaochang. Zuanzang gave teachings in the courtyard in front of this temple.

Xuanzang also reportedly gave teachings in this hall.

Ruins of building where Xuanzang supposedly lived while at Gaochang

The famous Flaming Mountains just north of Gaochang, mentioned in the Journey to the West, a fictionalized account of Xuanzang’s life.



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