66 Annual Address. [Feb. 



try that the antiquities we now possess have been procured. Some 

 were obtained in Kuchar, but mosfc of them came from the Takla 

 Makan Desert, lying nortb of Khotan. That desert is, by the 

 jiatives of Kashgharia, believed to have been once a fertile 

 and cultivated country. There is a tradition that before the intro- 

 duction of Muhammedanisra, in the eleventh century A.D., forty- 

 one cities flourished in that region, but that by reason of the obstinate 

 disbelief of the inhabitants, who were mostly idolaters, their country 

 was suddenly and miraculously destroyed by a sandstorm. It is 

 -certain that the town of Katak, which probably lay about midway 

 between Kuchar and Khotan, was buried and destroyed by the sands 

 about 1330 A.D. But this process of submersion under the " moving 

 sands " as they are fitly called by the natives, has been going on for 

 centuries, as we know from the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang 

 who travelled through Eastern Turkistan in the middle of the seventh 

 century. Very graphic accounts of the appearance and action of the 

 moving sands are given by Dr. Bellew, Captain Younghusband and other 

 travellers. " During the spring an'd summer months a north or north- 

 west wind prevails. It blows with considerable force and persistence 

 for many days consecutively. As it sweeps over the plain, it raises 

 the impalpable dust on its surface, and obscures the air by a dense haze 

 resembling in darkness a November fog in London, but it drives the 

 heavier particles of sand before it, and on the subsidence of the wind, 

 they are left on the plain in the form of ripples like those on the sandy 

 beach washed by an ebbing current." In course of time there is formed 

 " a perfect sea of loose sand advancing in regular wave lines from north- 

 west to south-east. The sand dunes are mostly from ten to twenty 

 feet high, but some are seen like little hills, full a hundred feet high, 

 and in some spots higher. They cover the plain, of which the hard 

 clay is seen between their rows, with numberless chains of two or 

 three or more together in a line, and follow in successive rows one 

 behind the other." It is these moving sands that have engulfed 

 whatever of the ancient civilization of Eastern Turkistan escaped the 

 devastations of consecutive wars and conquests. 



That civilization must have been of a very mixed kind ; for Eastern 

 Turkistan was the meeting place of the culture of India, Ciiina and 

 Western Asia. Indian civilization was carried there by Ihe early 

 Buddhist propaganda about the commencement of our era. Some- 

 what later the semi- Greek culture of Parthia and Armenia and the 

 indigenous civilization of China were brought into the country by the 

 merchants and soldiers that travelled or marched by the two great 

 trade-routes a,lrearly referred to. These were followed still later, from 



