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Reuter. "It is officially reported in St. Petersburg that a force of Chinese soldiers and villagers surrounded the house of a Russian subject named Said Effendi, near Khotan, in Chinese Turkestan. "They fired at the house and set it in flames. There were in the house about 100 Russians, many of whom were killed.
This paragraph ought obviously to have followed the account of Cashgar. Cotan, Cotam, Hotum, Khoten, Khotan, from which the useful material of manufacture, cotton, takes its name. But instead of being between the east and north-east direction from Yarkand, as in the text, or E.N.E. it is actually E.S.E. E. Called likewise Ciarciam, Ciartiam, and Sartam, in different editions.
Extract from Jacopo of Acqui's Imago Mondi, quoted ibid., Introd., p. 54. M. Ch.-V. Langlois in Hist. Litt. de la France, XXXV , p. 259. For tributes to Marco Polo's accuracy see Aurel Stein, Ancient Khotan and Ruins of Desert Cathay ; Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia ; and Sven Hedin, Overland to India . Yule, op. cit., I, Introd., pp. 106-7.
Near that same fortieth parallel of latitude on which our Asiatic journey was begun and ended, we now struck, at its extreme western limit, the Great Wall of China. The Kiayu-kuan, or “Jade Gate,” by which it is here intersected, was originally so called from the fact that it led into the Khotan country, whence the Chinese traders brought back the precious mineral.
Here they met with some obstacle and turned from Hormuz, and traversed successively Kerman and Khorassan, Balkh, and Badakhshan, by the way of the upper Oxus, to the plateau of Pamir; thence crossing the steppes of Pamir, the three travellers descended upon Kashgar, whence they proceeded by Yarkand and Khotan to the vicinity of Lake Lob; and, crossing the desert of Gobi, they reached the province of Tangut in the extreme northwestern corner of China, or Cathay.
Then the wood suddenly came to an end and the bed of the Khotan river lay before me. But the bottom was dry, as dry as the sand in the desert! I was at the summer margin of the river, where water only flows when the snow melts on the mountains to the south. But I was not going to die on the bank; I would cross the whole bed before I gave myself up for lost.
We sighted only one stream of importance, the Kara-kash, on which appeared a few drifting rafts, and files of horses and asses at the fords between the pebbly banks. The railroad crosses it about a hundred kilometres from Khotan, where we arrived at eight o'clock in the morning. Two hours to stop, and as the town may give me a foretaste of the cities of China, I resolve to take a run through it.
We had struggled bravely, but now the end was near. But when the sun rose we saw a dark line on the eastern horizon. The sight filled us with thankfulness, for we knew that it must be the wood on the bank of the Khotan river. Now we exerted ourselves to the uttermost, for we must reach it before we sank with thirst and exhaustion. A number of poplars grew in a hollow.
Being dissatisfied with the reception that they met with in the country of the Ourgas, who are not a hospitable people, they took a south-easterly course towards a desert country, where they had great difficulty in crossing the rivers; and, after a thirty-five days' march, the little caravan reached Tartary in the kingdom of Khotan, which contained, according to Fa-Hian, "Many times ten thousand holy men."
Buddhism, quite apart from the special case of "Khotan Buddhism", underwent extensive modification on its way across Central Asia. This religion did not gain a footing in China; only traces of it can be found in some Buddhistic sects in China. Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, developed into a true popular religion of salvation.
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