Serindia : vol.3 / 83 ページ（白黒高解像度画像）

0083	Serindia : vol.3
セリンディア : vol.3

historical times either by climatic changes or by those diversions to which river-courses are
peculiarly liable in deltaic regions. On the other hand, Hāmi must at all times have been
particularly exposed to hostile inroads from the north. The ground along the whole north slope
of this portion of the T'ien-shan, being subject to a much less arid climate, affords plentiful grazing,
as I was able to realize fully on my passage to Bar-kul and Guchen in 1914. It must for this
reason always have attracted nomads and facilitated raiding exploits. Abundant evidence in the
Chinese historical records of Han and T'ang times shows how strong and prolonged the hold of
the Huns and their nomad successors was upon this ground. Passes practicable at all seasons,
both to the east and to the west of the Karlik-tāgh, give ready access from the north to the plain
of Hāmi and, no doubt, greatly facilitated raids. Thus from the Bar-kul-dawān (Map No. 72. c. 3),
which is easy enough to be crossed by carts, the central oasis can be reached in a single day's ride.

This constant liability to northern attack, from which Hāmi has suffered whenever Chinese
power in Central Asia weakened, is fully illustrated by its chequered history, as recorded in the
Chinese Annals, and right down to our own times. To follow in detail these péripéties in the fate
of I-wu 伊吾, as Hāmi was known to the Chinese from Han to T'ang times, does not come within
the scope of my task here.⁷ As regards the former period, it will suffice to point out that within
four years of the first establishment of a Chinese military colony in A.D. 73 I-wu was lost again to
the Hsiung-nu;⁸ reoccupied between A.D. 90–104, it suffered once more the same fate.⁹ The notice
concerning the re-establishment of a military colony there in A.D. 131 brings out clearly the strategic
value which the Chinese rightly attached to Hāmi.¹⁰ But obviously their hold upon it ceased when
imperial control over the 'Western regions' was abandoned after the middle of the second century.
The submission of Hāmi to the last Emperor of the Sui dynasty, in A.D. 608, proved equally short-
lived, the Western Turks soon recovering their hold upon it.¹¹ But when the great T'ang Emperor
T'ai-tsung about A.D. 630 commenced those operations against the Western Turks which within
twenty years led to the extension of Chinese political control over the whole of Eastern Turkestān
and even beyond, we find the chief of Hāmi among the very first to seek protection under the
Empire.¹²

We know little or nothing as to how Hāmi fared during the troubled times of the eighth century
when the Turks from the north and the Tibetans from the south were ever threatening, and at last
completely severed, the communications between China and the Western countries it endeavoured
to 'protect'. But when, nearly a thousand years later, the extension of Chinese power into Central
Asia was started afresh by the Emperor K'ang-hsi's operations against the Dzungars, Hāmi once
again suffered much in its accustomed rôle as an advanced base contested by both powers.¹² How

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