114 Notes on Central Asia. [No. 3, 



Shan-bey-Lu (tlie region to the northward of the Celestial mountains, 

 consisting of the districts of Tli, Tarbagatai, Gobdo, &c.) and like- 

 Avise the Russian districts of Alatavsk, Kopal and Ayaguz, which 

 now constitute the new Semipalatinsk region. The whole of this 

 country, including, both Chinese and Russian Djungaria, forms 

 that most obscure and unknown portion of the interior of Asia 

 which contains within it the very centre of the Asiatic continent, 

 namely the gigantic mountain group of the Tengri-Tag, (a part of 

 the Celestial mountains) situated at equal distances from the Black 

 Sea, on the West, and the Yellow Sea on the East, the Obi Bight on 

 the North and the Bay of Bengal on the South, and lying in the 

 centre of the straight line connecting Cape Severovostochui in Siberia 

 with Cape Comorin in India. 



This region offers, moreover, special interest in physical as well as 

 in ethnographical and historical aspects. Physically, it forms a dis- 

 tinct limit between the highland and the depressed portions of Asia, 

 and is remarkable for the contrast it presents between its gigantic 

 mountain groups of the Bogdo and Tengri-Tag in the Celestial range, 

 which tower far above the limits of eternal snows and are crowned 

 with large alpine glaciers, and the low sandy and sterile steppe of the 

 Bedpak-Dala, on the South West of lake Balkhash, which, in common 

 with all the other sandy wastes of the Aralo-Caspian depression, bears 

 the character of a bed of an inland sea, dried up during a very recent 

 geological period. In ethnographical respects this region offers a 

 contrast no less marked, between two numerically preponderating 

 central Asiatic races — the Mongolian and Turkish, — whose rulers are 

 Chinese and Russians, strangers from the far East and West, occupy- 

 ing, in the same alluvial plain of the Balkhash, small populated oases 

 in the midst of an indigenous population alien to themselves in speech 

 and habits, and who are powerful not by reason of their numerical 

 superiority, but by the weight of their civilisation, and the magnitude 

 of their respective Empires, the most colossal on the face of the globe. 

 Lastly, from an historical point of view this country presents features 

 of a no less interesting character. It has served from time immemo- 

 rial as the point of departure for migrating races from the highlands 

 of Asia, the cradle whence they sprang, to the low arid steppes 

 of the Aralo-Caspian depression, and to the still more distant and 



