Serindia : vol.3 / 72 ページ（白黒高解像度画像）

0072	Serindia : vol.3
セリンディア : vol.3

Shih-êrh-tun and Hu-hai-tzŭ runs more or less parallel to a route still occasionally followed to the
present day by Mongols and others who wish to proceed to Hāmi by a direct track crossing the
Pei-shan east of the An-hsi–Hāmi high road.⁵ For those who follow this track from the side of
Hāmi, Shih-êrh-tun is the first inhabited place reached on the Kan-su borders. Hence it is likely
to have already had its own 'Gate' station in ancient times. But whether this fact had anything to do
with the later transference of the name Yu-mên to the district headquarters now located at Yü-mên-
hsien remains doubtful.

Road from
San-tao-kou
to Bulungir. From Shih-êrh-tun I regained the present highway at the village of San-tao-kou to the north-
west of Yü-mên-hsien (Map No. 83. D. 3). The march which thence took me on September 22 to
Bulungir led over ground abundantly watered from branching beds of the Su-lo Ho, as well as by
marshy springs gathering at the foot of the gravel glacis further west. Extensive areas of abandoned
cultivation now overrun by scrubby jungle, as far as Ch'i-tao-kou ('the seventh canal'), attest the
ravages here produced by the great Tungan rebellion. Beyond this there spreads a wide grassy
steppe traversed by marshy depressions and affording fine grazing, which in times gone by must
have had its attractions for nomadic invaders. From the high ground to which the road keeps here
I sighted far away to the north a line of ruined towers, extending along the right bank of the deep-
cut Su-lo Ho bed. In view of the definite proof gained at Shih-êrh-tun there could be little doubt

Limes line
along north
bank of
Su-lo Ho. that they marked the line of the Han Limes. The necessity forced upon me by various practical
reasons of quickly gaining An-hsi prevented my examining these ruined posts at the time and
searching for remains of the Limes wall. But subsequently, when Surveyor Rai Rām Singh had
been relieved by R. B. Lāl Singh at An-hsi, I was able to send back the latter for a rapid recon-
naissance. This rendered it possible to indicate in Map No. 83. B, C. 2 the position of the least decayed
of the towers. The careful survey I effected myself in 1914 along the whole line right through to
Shih-êrh-tun has supplemented the evidence thus gained in various ways. But it has shown also
that, owing to excessive wind-erosion in some places and the effect of moisture in others, the traces
surviving of the Limes agger are very scanty indeed until its line passes on to firm gravel soil west
of the abandoned station of Ch'iao-wan-ch'êng (Map No. 83. D. 2).⁶

Fortified
station of
Bulungir. The massive walls of Bulungir, enclosing an area about 1,100 yards square, appear to have
sheltered during the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries an important Chinese garrison. The place,
now almost deserted, had evidently served as an advanced base for the operations by which the
Chinese, under the great Manchu Emperors K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung, pushed back the threatening
power of the Dzungars and finally conquered the 'New Dominion'.⁷ A strong garrison holding

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