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They were pursued and overtaken in the Arghú Valley adjoining Artosh. Here
Abdurrahím and several of his men were captured and taken prisoners to the Ambán,
but the rest escaped into the hills and ultimately returned to Tashkand. Abdurrahím
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 Khán Khoja,
and the final conquest of the country by his General, the Koshbegi Yákúb Beg, Atálik
Ghází, and now the Amír Muhammad Yákúb Khán. 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 Búdhist
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 Yákúb 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 Farghána, Andijan, or Khokand, as it is indifferently called, V. B.
was during the rule of the Moghol Kháns a more or less independent principality,
mostly in alliance with Bukhárá, under the rule of princes of the Tymúr dynasty.
After the defeat of Babur, whose father, Umar Shekh, was its ruler, the province fell
into the possession of the Uzbak, Sháhibeg Khán or Shaibán, in whose time from
Osh to Khojand was the country of Yúnus Khán. His sons, with the aid of the
Kirghiz and Kapchák, 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 Kaidú.
On the decline of their dynasty, during the reign of Rashíd Sultán of Kásh- P.
ghar, the power of the Moghol Kháns 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 Abdúlla, and the few months of that of his son and
successor, Abdúl Momin, with whose death in 1597 A.D. the Shaibání dynasty
ended, the province of Farghána recovered its independence under local chiefs; and
maintained it more or less continuously during the disordered reigns of princes of
the Ashtarkhán dynasty which ended with Abúl Fyz who, shortly after his surrender
to Nádir in September 1870, was murdered together with his son by his own wazír,
Rahím Báy of the Manghit tribe, who then usurped the government and founded the
existing dynasty of Bukhárá.
I have not met with any published account of the history of Andijan during
this period of turmoil marking the decline of the Ashtar Khán 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 Káshghar, I obtained a manu-
script account of the conquest of the country by Yákúb Beg, Atálik Ghází, written
for me by his General Abdúlla, Amírilashkar, who was a principal actor in the events
he describes. He was the most trusted and most active of Yákúb Beg's adherents,
and joining him at the outset, served him faithfully and well till incapacitated by an