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Ancient Khotan : vol.1 |
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foundation has been demonstrated in a striking manner by the numerous documents in an early
Indian script and language which I discovered at the Niya Site. As will be seen later, the
character of these documents renders it certain that the administration of the territory was
during the third century of our era carried on in an Indian language, and that this language
was familiar to a considerable portion of the population ²⁷.
Similar evidence cannot be adduced at present for that early immigration from the side Alleged
of China which the same tradition alleges. But there are certain facts and statements which immigration
point to some substratum of truth in that direction also. In the first place, we have the from China.
interesting and much-discussed passage in the notice of Khotan given by the Annals of
the Northern Wei (386–532 A.D.), which tells us that 'the people of all territories west of
Kao-ch'ang (the present Turfan) had deep-lying eyes and prominent noses, and that the
inhabitants of this territory (i.e. of Khotan) were the only ones who did not present a very
strange appearance but had rather a Chinese look' ²⁸. 'Deep-lying eyes and prominent noses'
are certainly the features which would strike a Chinese observer most in physiognomies of the
so-called 'Aryan' type, and we may safely conclude from their mention that this was the type
then already prevailing in Eastern Turkestān.
The appropriateness of this description renders the exception made in regard to the
people of Khotan all the more significant. But can we accept with equal confidence the
statement made about the Chinese look of the latter? Would not the presence of those
features in a less pronounced fashion have sufficed to suggest to Chinese eyes something more
familiar in Khotanese looks, especially when the local tradition of an early immigration from
the East was remembered? These are questions to which in the present state of our know-
ledge we must hesitate to give even conjectural answers. Yet if we assign to the observation
of the Wei annalists this qualified bearing, and at the same time assume that the tradition
related to an element in its population which had come from the side of China but was
in reality rather Tibetan than Chinese, an explanation is furnished which would equally satisfy
tradition and the evidence of anthropological facts.
There can be little doubt that even the least Mongolian type of Tibetan, Mr. Rockhill's Chinese
'Drupa type' above described, with its broad thick nose and high cheek-bones, must approach view of
nearer to the Chinese than to any 'Aryan' type. Chinese tradition regards the Tibetans as Tibetans.
descendants of certain tribes who were exiled from China to the Koko-Nor region in a prehistoric
period ²⁹; in the legend of Khotan, too, the immigrants are represented as being led by a prince
exiled from China. We need not attach any weight to this point of similarity. Yet it might
help to explain how an immigrant element akin to the present Tibetans, which had reached
Khotan through Tsaidam at a very early period, could in later tradition figure as having been
of Chinese origin. That the presence of such an element would have been far more noticeable
in the racial appearance of the Khotan population at the time of the Wei dynasty than at present
does not need special explanation.
The same ethnic element would also account for an important fact not yet noticed here, Linguistic
the appearance in our oldest Khotan records, the Kharoṣṭhī documents from Niya, of numerous traces of
words, mostly titles or terms, which are certainly neither Indian nor Irānian nor Turkī, but Tibetan
often suggest a Tibetan origin ³⁰. The very fact that some of these words, though technical connexion.
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724
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