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0408 Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1
Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 / Page 408 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000231
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These Hu-he were followed by the Kara-Kitai,
in the eleventh century; then came the desolation
of Jenghiz Khan. He massacred freely, but he and
his free-thinking family were a protection against
the fanatic proselyting-by-violence of the Moham-
medan states on the west of the Alaï Mountains;
Islam, however, steadily gained ground throughout
Central Asia, and ere many centuries had passed
persecution ceased because of a happy uniformity
of sentiment.

In the sway of empire hither and thither, Kashgar
once, in the fourteenth century, enjoyed the perilous
distinction of being the capital of Tughlak Timour.
Some regal attention, in the way of bloodshed, it
also received from the great Tamerlane. Then, as
the centuries rolled by without producing other
universal tyrants, the priesthood, the letter-worship-
ping Khojas from Bokhara's schools, seem to have
usurped the State, until, in the seventeenth century,
a Kalmuk power northward from Kashgaria entered
to control the struggle of priest-ridden factions, and
at last, about the time America was preparing to
fight for independence, Turkestan sank back into
the arms of China, whose battalions had decimated
Dzungaria and spared not the resisting zealots of
Kashgaria. It seems not improbable that some-
thing of protection for the cities remaining in the
Kashgar-Khotan district resulted from that desic-
cation which, by destroying the towns lying nearer
to Lob-nor, rendered more difficult the inroads
of Mongolian hordes from the north-east. These
would be forced to a more northern route for west-
ward migrations, leaving the southern region to a