Serindia : vol.3 / Page 63 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

0063	Serindia : vol.3

descent towards Kan-chou, I came upon small camps of what I took on my rapid passage to be Pastoral
half-Chinified Mongols, grazing cattle and ponies on the forest-girt uplands between the Cha-ho tribes at
and Li-yüan Ho.¹¹ I was struck at the time by the fact that their number and that of their herds north foot of
seemed distinctly small as compared with the available grazing and the manifold advantages of the Nan-shan.
ground, and also by what I may call the general 'tameness' of their ways. But the true explana-
tion of their presence here, and of the exception which it appeared to form to the conditions
imposed by Chinese border policy on this ground, became clear to me only later from a very
interesting publication of Colonel (now General) C. G. E. Mannerheim, the distinguished Finnish
officer.¹² This showed me that these were the summer camps of a small and now rapidly dwindling
tribe, calling themselves Shera Yögurs and speaking a Mongol dialect, whom the Chinese
administration of the seven centh century had purposely transplanted to the Kan-su border from
'outside the Wall' in order to provide itself with useful 'barbarian' auxiliaries against Dzungar
inroads from the north-west. The Shera Yögurs consider themselves closely related to the still
smaller community of the Sarö Yögurs. These undoubtedly speak a Turkish tongue and are
scattered in a few pastoral settlements over the grazing grounds of the sandy steppe which, as
Map No. 91, B-D. 2–3 shows, stretches south of the Su-chou–Kan-chou high road, between Shuang-
ching-tzŭ and the Kao-t'ai oasis.¹³⁰

For the origin, racial characteristics, and present conditions of these small tribes, it must suffice Ancient
to refer to General Mannerheim's valuable ethnographic publication. What interests us here is settlements
that they afford an instructive modern illustration of a process which is likely to have occurred of Little
more than once since the Chinese Empire, in the interest of its Central-Asian policy, took possession Yüeh-chih.
of this 'passage land', as Ritter has long ago rightly called it,¹³ along the foot of the snowy
Nan-shan. We have direct evidence of this process in a Chinese historical notice which, though
it relates to the tenth century, helps to throw interesting light also on the conditions here
prevailing in a much earlier period. Kao Chü-hui, when describing the journey along this border
of the Chinese mission which started for Khotan in A.D. 938, tells us: 'From Liang-chou, going
500 li westwards, one arrives at Kan-chou. Kan-chou is the camping-place of the Hui-ho (Uigurs).
The mountains which are about a hundred li to the south are the territory where, in the time of the
Han dynasty, there resided the ancient people called the Little Yüeh-chih. There is a race different
from this people, called Sha-t'o from the mountain of the deer forest; they are said to be descended
from the Ch'u-yüeh race.' ¹⁴

The Sha-t'o 沙陀 to whom Kao Chü-hui's relation refers here were a tribe of the Western Sha-t'o tribe
Turks, first settled in early T'ang times to the east of Barkul, and after A.D. 808 transferred to the once settled
northern borders of Kan-su for the sake of protecting them from inroads.¹⁵ Their mention here by on Kan-su
border.

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

Citation Information

OCR Text

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