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

current money. They seem, however, to have been most commonly used as highly
appreciated charms and amulets. I have touched on these questions in BMFEA 7,
pp. 113 f.

Beads and pendants are quite common and certainly from several different peri-
ods. The materials include opal, agate, jade in several colours, malachite, lapis
lazuli, amethyst, coral and glass. Most of them have been pictured on Pl. 33 and 34.
Those of stone, especially jade, are certainly of local manufacture, i. e. made some-
where along the southern border of the Tarim Basin, those of lapis lazuli may have
been traded from Badakhshan, where famous mines are known to have existed
(T P 1904, p. 66). The pendants in some instances consist only of an oblong or
drop-shaped pebble with a perforation at one end, Pl. 34: 49, 51, 54 and 60. Some
of the suspension holes are drilled from both sides and meeting at an angle, i. e. the
holes are V-shaped. The glass beads are no doubt importations from the West, the
main bulk of them would pass as Roman beads in any country. Of special interest
are the eye-bead Pl. 33: 16 and the mosaic bead fragment Pl. 33: 18. Several others
such as Pl. 33: 28—33 are made of two kinds of differently coloured glass and Pl.
33: 19 has the surface covered with white, red and blue spots, standing out brightly
against the black background.

K. 13342: 69 is a fragment from the lower part of a glass bowl, the uncoloured
glass looking very similar to some fragments from Lou-lan in Hedin's old collec-
tion, and the same is true regarding K. 13342: 70—71, two fragments from the
widening rim of some small glass bottles (cf. Bergman 1935 c, pp. 114 ff.). These
sherds may very well be of Syrian glass. A few sherds of greenish, semi-translucent
glass from here have probably been made locally in Turkistan at a later period.

In general these 'Tati' finds from the Kohna-shahr of Charchan are of the same
sort as those acquired by Hedin in Khotan and adjacent sites, but among the artic-
les from Charchan there are none of a Buddhistic character, whereas the Khotan
collection has many such objects.

There is very little Chinese material among the finds from here, but the presence
of some coins indicate that there was some trade with China in the Sung period after
the interruption caused by the Tibetan conquest in T'ang time. Even in Han time
trade must have flourished, as Charchan is situated on the very Road of the South, a
highway that has remained in use ever since. It was along the same road that in-
fluences from India and the West reached Charchan.

The extent of these 'Tatis', several kilometres in length and breadth, where potte-
ry fragments and small articles occur abundantly, is sufficient to prove
that the ancient Chü-mo and its successors must be located in the position of
the present Charchan oasis and its immediate vicinity, as rightly pointed out
by Stein. As far as can be judged none of the objects acquired by me is of a date
later than the Yüan dynasty, and it therefore seems reasonable to suppose that the
occupation of the present Kohna-shahr site ended some time during the 14th century.

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