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They were pursued and overtaken in the Arghii Valley adjoining Artosh. Here

Abdurrahim and several of his men were captured and taken prisoners to the Amban,

but the rest escaped into the hills and ultimately returned to Tashkand. Abdurrahim

was kept in prison pending reference to the Viceroy at Ila ; and after some months,

orders arriving from Pekin, he was publicly executed.

Next followed the Tungani mutiny, and the invasion by Buzurg Khan Khoja,

and the final conquest of the country by his General, the Kostbegi Yakûb Beg, Atalik

Ghazi, and now the Amir Muhammad Yakûb Khan. To understand these revolu-

tions aright, and to appreciate the differences that mark the character and

exciting causes of this last from the previous revolts in this country, it is necessary

to go back and review the history of the Khokand State in regard to its political

relations with this western province of the Chinese empire, and to note the important

fact that, though each and all of these revolts arose from one common source in the

impatient ambition of Islam, this last revolution sprang from the eastward as the act

of a nation or whole people for the supremacy of their religion; whilst its

several predecessors originated as the work of a single ambitious family, or of private

individuals for their personal interests, in the adjoining western state of Khokand

which, again, has finally interposed to replace the Muhammadan Chinese rule as

represented by the Tungani rebels by the usurped authority of its own adventurers.

This last revolution in fact, the description of which is to come, in contra-

distinction to all the previous revolts, was an outbeak amongst the Chinese themselves.

It was Chinese destroying Chinese, the Muhammadan Tungani against the Btidhist

Khitay. In the midst of their contention the old Khoja claim was revived, but, as

the Tungani had never been their partizans, it was nowhere supported, and hence the

success of Yaknb Beg in the confusion of rival interests distracting the country—a

success to which the presence of the Russians on the northern frontier was not with-

out effect in determining the course of events.

The province of Farghana, Andijan, or Khokand, as it is indifferently called, V. B.

was during the rule of the Moghol Khans a more or less independent principality,

mostly in alliance with Bukhara, under the rule of princes of the Tymûr dynasty.

After the defeat of Babur, whose father, Umar Shekh, was its ruler, the province fell

into the possession of the Uzbak, Shahibeg Khan or Shaiban, in whose time from

Osh to Khojand was the country of Yûnus Khan. His sons, with the aid of the

Kirghiz and Kapchâk, drove out the usurper Tanbal, and then warred with the Uzbak

for possession of all the lands on the banks of the Syhon or Jaxartes, claiming these

Turkistan lands as the descendants and heirs of Kaid{t.

On the decline of their dynasty, during the reign of Rashid Sultan of Kash- P.

ghar, the power of the Moghol Khans succumbed to that of the Uzbak, and was shortly after usurped by the Khoja pretenders. In the anarchy characterizing the last

years of the long reign of Abdillla, and the few months of that of his son and

successor, Abdul Momin, with whose death in 1597 A.D. the Shaibanf dynasty ended, the province of Farghana recovered its independence under local chiefs; and

maintained it more or less continuously during the disordered reigns of princes of the Ashtarkhan dynasty which ended with Abûl Fyz who, shortly after his surrender to Nadir in September 1870, was murdered together with his son by his own waz'ir, RahIm By of the Manghit tribe, who then usurped the government and founded the existing dynasty of Bukhara.

I have not met with any published account of the history of Andijan during

this period of turmoil marking the decline of the Ashtar Khan dynasty, in which it appears the province regained independence under a local chief who founded the

power of the present ruling family there. Whilst at Kashghar, I obtained a manu-

script account of the conquest of the country by Yakilb Beg, Atâlik Ghazi, written for me by his General Abdiilla, 4mvrilaskkar, who was a principal actor in the events

he describes. He was the most trusted and most active of Yakûb Beg's adherents, and joining him at the outset, served him faithfully and well till incapacitated by an