114 Notes on Central Asia. [No. 3, & 
Shan-bey-Lu (the region to the northward of the Celestial mountains, | 
consisting of the districts of Tli, Tarbagatai, Gobdo, &e.) and like- 
wise 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 Kast, 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 Hast 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 
