Serindia : vol.3 / 81 ページ（カラー画像）

0081	Serindia : vol.3
セリンディア : vol.3

asserts itself to the very end; for the two more days which it makes Hsüan-tsang spend *en route* before reaching Hāmi correspond exactly to the two marches now needed to arrive from Chang-liu-shui at Hāmi town, a distance of about 35 miles. Thus we can close the story as preserved in the *Life* with the gratifying assurance that even this chapter of the pilgrim's travels, which by its adventurous character might most readily have lent itself to exaggeration and fiction, has retained in Hui-li's biography the form in which it may well have been told by the lips of the Master of the Law himself.

SECTION II.—THE HISTORICAL RÔLE OF HĀMI

Hāmi has played so important a part in the story of China's relations with Central Asia that I felt particularly glad for the chance which the northern route chosen for my return to the Tārim Basin offered to visit this ground. But my stay at the main oasis of Hāmi, or Kumul, as it is known to Turkī Muhammadans, and my visits to a few of its outlying villages were far too short to justify any attempt here to review the present conditions of the territory or its past as a whole. Referring for the rapid impressions that I could gather of it and its people to my Personal Narrative,¹ I shall content myself with briefly calling attention to those essential geographical factors which account for that historical rôle of Hāmi and explain the importance of the territory notwithstanding the limited nature of its local resources.

Our records clearly show that Hāmi, or Kumul—to give its name as best known now to Turkī Muhammadans²—ever since Later Han times has, in respect of all Chinese enterprise directed towards Central Asia, occupied exactly the same position on the northern route as Lou-lan did on the southern from the beginning of Chinese expansion westwards and throughout the Former Han period. An examination of the map suffices to account for this striking analogy. Just as without Lou-lan as a bridge-head and base on the western side of the Lop desert the use of the most direct line of access to the Tārim Basin would have been physically impossible for the Chinese, thus, too, it would have been most difficult for them to open up and secure the direct route leading to the territories on both sides of the eastern T'ien-shan had not nature offered them, in the cultivable tract of Hāmi, a foothold to the north-west of the Pei-shan desert. Limited as the extent of arable land, or rather of irrigation, available must always have been during historical times, the agricultural resources of Hāmi developed with the help of Chinese military colonists have proved again and again of the utmost importance for the Empire's Central-Asian policy. Whenever since A.D. 73 China found strength to reassert its claim to Central-Asian dominion, it was Hāmi which served as the gathering-place and supply base for the Chinese forces sent to overcome hostile nomadic powers in the north, Huns, Turks, Dzungars, or to suppress rebellion, as last in 1876–7. In the same way trade and traffic of every sort would always, down to our own times, have found the Pei-shan desert a far more formidable obstacle had not Hāmi offered itself as a place where caravans could revictual and allow their animals a good rest.³

国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

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国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト 『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

引用情報

OCR読み取り結果

国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ