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

(Sheet No. 5). In the east a zone of high and utterly barren sand-ridges spreads beyond the
Tārim, filling a big triangular space between the foot of the Kuruk-tāgh and the belt of
wind-eroded desert along the western shores of the ancient salt-encrusted Lop sea bed
(Sheets No. 25, 29, 30).

In the south, the border of the Taklamakān lies along the northern ends of the oases,
mostly small, which line at intervals the foot of the K'un-lun glacis
Southern border of
Taklamakān. from Karghalik to Niya (Sheets No. 6, 9, 14, 19). Further east this line
finds its continuation in patches of sandy jungle intermittently watered
by rivers of small size and extending below that gravel glacis (Sheets No. 19, 23) as far as the
small oasis of Charchan. From there onwards to the vicinity of Lop-nōr the narrow belt of
vegetation which accompanies the Charchan river right down to its junction with the Tārim
forms the well-marked border of the Taklamakān.

With the exception of the Khotan-daryā, not one of the numerous rivers descending
from the snowy K'un-lun succeeds in making its way through the
'Terminal oases.' Taklamakān. All the rest are lost in this 'sea of sand' at a greater
or lesser distance from the line occupied by the existing oases or by
areas of coarse desert vegetation. But within historical times, as proved by remains dating
from the third century A. D. onwards, a number of these terminal river courses carried a
greater volume of water and permitted ground to be cultivated lying considerably further
north than the present 'terminal oases'. ¹ My explorations of such ancient sites abandoned
to the desert led to extensive surveys in this southern portion of the Taklamakān, and these
were supplemented by others along the routes followed right across it from the Tārim to the
Keriya river delta and along the bed of the Khotan-daryā. ²

The topographical record of these travels in the Taklamakān illustrates in a striking
manner the uniformity prevailing in the character of this huge desert.
Physical features of
desert. Whether the traveller enters it from the edge of cultivated ground in
oases, or from the jungle belts along river courses and in tracts where
subsoil drainage from the mountains approaches the surface again at the foot of the gravel
glacis, he first passes through a zone with desert vegetation, mostly in the shape of tamarisks,
wild poplars and reeds, surviving amidst low drift-sand. A very peculiar and topographically
interesting feature of this zone consists of 'tamarisk-cones', hillocks of conical form and
often closely packed, which the slow accumulation of drift-sand around tamarisk growth has
in the course of centuries built up to heights reaching fifty feet and more. ³ Further out in
the Taklamakān only shrivelled and bleached trunks of trees or sand-cones with dead tamarisk
growth emerge from the dunes, until finally these too disappear among high and utterly bare
ridges of sand. ⁴

SECTION III.—THE OASES OF THE TĀRIM BASIN.

The areas left between the Taklamakān and the encircling mountain ranges to the
north, west and south have geographically so much in common that they might well be
treated as one region. If I prefer here to separate the western and northern margins of the