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In its northern part a river called the Tarim flows from west to east. It is formed by the Yarkand-darya and the Khotan-darya on the south, and receives other affluents along its course, for water streams down from the snowfields and glaciers of the wreath of mountains enclosing Eastern Turkestan.
We know now that it consists of an inextricable entanglement of valleys, the mean altitude of which exceeds three thousand metres; we know that it is dominated by the peaks of Gouroumdi and Kauffmann, twenty-two thousand feet high, and the peak of Tagarma, which is twenty-seven thousand feet; we know that it sends off to the west the Oxus and the Amou Daria, and to the east the Tarim; we know that it chiefly consists of primary rocks, in which are patches of schist and quartz, red sands of secondary age, and the clayey, sandy loess of the quaternary period which is so abundant in Central Asia.
In a mud house I found also a whole collection of Chinese manuscripts, which threw much light on the state of the country at the time when men could exist there. These writings were more than 1600 years old. The explanation of the lake's wanderings is this. At the time of high water the Tarim is always full of silt, and the old lake was very shallow.
4 The reign of the empress Wu: Buddhism and capitalism The pressure of the western Turks had been greatly weakened in this period, especially as their attention had been diverted to the west, where the advance of Islam and of the Arabs was a new menace for them. On the other hand, from 650 onward the Tibetans gained immensely in power, and pushed from the south into the Tarim basin.
The Hsiung-nu were indirectly threatened by Chinese foreign policy, for the Chinese concluded an alliance with old enemies of the Hsiung-nu, the Wu-sun, in the north of the Tarim basin. This made the Tarim basin secure for the Chinese, and threatened the Hsiung-nu with a new danger in their rear.
Just at this spot the Tarim bends southwards, falling farther down into a very shallow lake called Lop-nor. The whole country here is so flat that with the naked eye no inequalities can be detected. Therefore the river often changes its bed, sometimes for short and sometimes for long distances.
The greatest military success were the campaigns of General Li Kuang-li to Ferghana in 104 and 102 B.C. The result of the campaigns was to bring under tribute all the small states in the Tarim basin and some of the states of western Turkestan.
Traversed by several copious streams from the Nan Shan mountains, and the moisture-laden currents from the Bay of Bengal and the Brahmaputra valley, its “desert” stretches are not the dismal solitudes of the Tarim basin or the “Black” and “Red” sands of central Asia. Water is found almost everywhere near the surface, and springs bubble up in the hollows, often encircled by exterior oases.
Formerly the river did not bend southwards, but proceeded straight on eastwards, terminating in another lake also called Lop-nor, which lay in the northern part of the desert, and which is mentioned in old Chinese geographies. The peculiarity of Lop-nor is, then, that the lake moves about, and, in conjunction with the lower course of the Tarim, swings like a pendulum between north and south.
The lake, therefore, was silted up with mud and decaying vegetation, and by the same process the bed of the river was raised. At last came the time when the Tarim sought for an outlet to the south, where the country was somewhat lower. The old bed was dried up by degrees and the water in the lake evaporated. The sheet of water remained, indeed, for a long time, but it shrank up from year to year.
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