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* Illustrated on Plate IX of Fayûm Towns and Their Papyri. See Dr. Stein's Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan, London, 1903.
Instead we collected all the dry branches we could find and made a blazing fire as a beacon for Islam, and to attract attention from the east, for we knew that a caravan road ran along the Khotan river. At four o'clock on May 4 we moved on again, but after five hours we were utterly exhausted. We threw ourselves heedlessly on the sand, for Kasim was unable to dig the usual burrow.
Materials for forming a picture of Indian life under his rule are not plentiful but it was clearly an age of fusion. His hereditary dominions were ample and he had no need to spend his reign in conquests, but he probably subdued Kashmir as well as Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar.
This "Khotan Buddhism" had special influence on the Buddhist Turkish peoples. Big translation bureaux were set up for the preparation of these translations into Chinese, in which many copyists simultaneously took down from dictation a translation made by a "master" with the aid of a few native helpers.
I seize the telegram, which has been waiting for me for some days. Is it a reply to my wire sent from Merv, relative to the mandarin Yen Lou? I open it. I read it. And it falls from my hand. This is what it said: "Claudius Bombarnac, "Correspondent, "Twentieth Century. "Khotan, Chinese Turkestan.
From Kashgar, Marco Polo diverged a little to the west, to Samarcand, a large town inhabited by Saracens and Christians, then to Yarkand, a city frequented by caravans trading between India and Northern Asia; passing by Khotan, the capital of the province of that name, and by Pein, a town whose situation is uncertain, but in a part of the country where chalcedony and jasper abound.
It is best estimated in the often-quoted words of Sir Henry Yule, whose edition of his book is one of the great works of English scholarship: He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom, which he had seen with his own eyes, the desert of Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongol steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been established at Cambaluc: the first Travellers to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders with all their eccentricities of manners and worship; of Tibet with its sordid devotees; of Burma with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns; of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin China, of Japan, the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that Museum of Beauty and Wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the Indian Archipelago, source of those aromatics then so highly prized and whose origin was so dark; of Java the Pearl of Islands; of Sumatra with its many kings, its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of Nicobar and Andaman; of Ceylon, the Isle of Gems, with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl and its powerful sun; the first in modern times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, to speak, though indeed dimly, of Zanzibar with its negroes and its ivory and of the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the Dark Ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities; and in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears and reindeer-riding Tunguses.
He is also said to have been incarnate in Atîsa, the Tibetan reformer, and in Vairocana who introduced Buddhism to Khotan, but, great as is his benevolence, he is not so much the helper of human beings, which is Avalokita's special function, as the personification of thought, knowledge, and meditation. It is for this that he has in his hands the sword of knowledge and a book.
But it must have been flourishing there about the time of the Christian era, since it spread thence to China not later than the middle of the first century. There were two schools representing two distinct currents from India. First the Sarvâstivâdin school, prevalent in Badakshan, Kashgar and Kucha, secondly the Mahâyâna in Khotan and Yarkand.
Grenfell and Hunt, just as the contents of the houses of the ancient Indian rulers of Chinese Turkestan, at Niya and Khotan, with their store of Kha-roshthi documents, have been preserved intact in the dry Tibetan desert climate and have been found by Dr. Stein. There is much analogy between the discoveries of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt and those of Dr. Stein in Turkestan.
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