National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

Tibetan style of the carvings suggests that its construction took place before 1550 A.D.,
i.e., before the chiefs of Chigtan became Muhammadan.

Among the ruins of the old town below the castle, we found two stone slabs which
contained inscriptions in a very faulty form of Tibetan. One of them treated of the
remission of taxes and forced labour, and gave the name of Adam Malig of Chigtan.
This Adam Malig is probably identical with a chief whose name is found in the
genealogical roll of the chiefs of Chigtan, and who probably reigned c. 1580 A.D. The
other inscription is more fragmentary. It does not contain the name of any chief, but
apparently treats of a similar subject and may be attributed to the same time.

The ancient Buddhist monastery of Chigtan is situated at the other end of the
village and on the further bank of the brook, coming from the palace (Plate XLII, b).
It is similar in type to the monasteries of Rin-chen-bzang-po's times and is attributed to
the so-called bKā-gdams-pa epoch, judging by the Wanla inscription, mentioned above.
The bKā-gdams-pa epoch probably began in the middle of the 11th century, a generation
or so after Rin-chen-bzang-po's time. There are a great number of raised medallions on
the wall opposite the door, and all had formerly stucco images in front of them, which
were destroyed, when Chigtan adopted the Muhammadan religion. I counted the
medallions and found their number to be thirty-nine. This is seven more than the usual
thirty-two; but the seven additional medallions seem to belong to a special group of
larger images which once occupied the central portion of the wall. We found traces of
a number of inscriptions on the temple walls, the best preserved of which is the Tibetan
inscription of the old Lamaist chiefs of Chigtan, which I discovered in 1906.¹ There are
also traces of another Tibetan, one Arabic (or Persian), and at least five or six Śāradā
inscriptions. Most of them are found on the medallions. We took photos of two of the
Śāradā inscriptions, and with one of them we succeeded so well that Pandit Mukund
Ram Shastri of Kashmir who examined the photo with a magnifying glass, was able to
read a couple of words. The inscription was in Sanskrit, and the character a very
late type of Śāradā. As the words "army" and "inflated skins" occur among the
distinct portions of the inscription, it looks almost as if it had been written by a
Ḍogrā Brahmin during the time of the Ḍogrā wars. In front of the medallions has
been erected an altar (lhatha) which is ornamented with twigs of the pencil cedar; a
number of brass cups containing offerings of butter, have been placed below it. The
temple hall is a square of 14 or 15 paces each side. Its height is about 24 feet. The
roof which was recently renovated is supported by four high pillars of pencil cedar
wood. They are quite plain, but the door of the temple is elaborately carved in Indian
style (Plate XLIII, b). It shows the figures of a number of Buddhist saints,
whose identity it is however impossible to ascertain, owing to the decayed state of the
wood. We found the temple in charge of two Muhammadans who said that they were
descended from its former Buddhist keepers. Their house name is Lha-khang-pa or
dGon-pa-pa. These people still light the butter-filled lamps in the temple, and look after