536 Chinese Turkistan : Past and Present [May 9^ 



preserved Chinamen were found, clothed in the picturesque garments 

 of the Tang dynasty. No garments so ancient as these liave been 

 preserved by the Chinese in China Proper. Specimens of silk and 

 fragments of embroidery have also been unearthed, and these afford 

 valuable information on the condition of the textile industry in China 

 ages back, and should be of enormous interest to the weavers and 

 spinners of the present day. Manuscripts, many in forgotten and 

 now unknown tongues, have been unearthed, and are a mystery save 

 to a few famous scholars of Oriental languages. In addition to these 

 records, which are on paper, birch, white leather, wooden tables and 

 silken cloths, a number of frescoes, or wall paintings, from ancient 

 Buddhist temples have been recovered, all things of great interest 

 because they show some of the stepping-stones by which the Grseco- 

 Buddhist art of North-west India advanced across China to Japan. 

 Our own Christianity is not unconcerned in these archaeological dis- 

 coveries, as there were once Nestorian Christians in Turkistan, and 

 fragments in Syriac of the New Testament Bible have been yielded 

 up by these sands, which can well become a " storehouse " for the 

 preservation, in a desiccated form, of the remains of many bygone 

 cultures. Turkistan stands alone in the possession of a climate 

 sufficiently dry to preserve from decay the more perishable, but by 

 far the most instructive, records of human activities and human 

 thought. Who knows what pages of history — ancient, but as yet 

 unrevealed — still lie hidden under the sands of Turkistan ? 



[The Lecture was illustrated by a series of lantern slides, show- 

 ing the approaches into Turkistan along the British- Indian route to 

 Yarkand and Kashgar, crossing the Himalayas diagonally, starting 

 from Rawal Pindi, in the plain of the Punjab ; the method and 

 various ways of travelling over the heights and plains of the 

 journey ; the towns and townsmen met with on the way ; the nomadic 

 tribes and their self-made huts ; the inhabitants of the plains 

 at the skirt of the mountains of Turkistan ; the ways of life of a 

 people whose habits and character are subject to their physio- 

 graphic surroundings ; the many relics and shrines referred to in 

 the Lecture.] 



[G. M.] 



