Tiir cthnolooy of south eastern am a. 



to the Amur, About A. D- 216 the southern Hums were expelled 

 from their country by an eastern tribe called Siaro-pi* and they 

 then moved north and west. The subsequent history of the Turks 

 belongs chiefly to Western Asia and Europe, but the Mongolian 

 armies which conquered Mongolia, Tibet and China a thousand 

 years later, appear to have been chiefly composed of Turks* 

 The ancient history of the Mongols is still more obscure than that 

 of the ^unprtisi and Huns, Their tribes appear to have occupied 

 some districts in the vicinity of Lake Baikal, and they must have 

 been comparatively insignificant and probably subject to the Hum 

 and Turtgusi, for they cannot be clearly traced beyond Chingis- 

 khan, when tb** became a nation of conquerors, and, in the course 

 of a short period, established a dominion embracing the greater 

 part of Asia, and extending from middle China to Germany. 

 It aecrai probable that the movements of the Lau tribes called 

 Ahom and Khamti into the basin of the Irawadt and Brahmaputra 

 in the beginning of the 13lh century, were consequent on the 

 devastating invasion of Tibet and China by Chingis-khan.t The 

 dominion of his successors in China gradually extended, and in 

 1280 Kublai-khan had conquered the whole empire, invaded 



• Who we™ the Sian or Sicnpi? What, was their subsequent career? Did 

 they contJnnn to occupy the Hun lands north of China until the !3th century when 

 the Mongol movement commenced? Prichard supplies no answer to these 

 question*. According to him the date of the dispersion of the II una was also that 

 of the final occupation of the desert of Goht and the northern provinces of the 

 Chinese empire by the tribes who have since possessed the country and who over 

 China itself nave raised several imperial dynasties (IV. 307.) Th is* U very indefinite. 

 From the beginning of the ISth century this region has been occup ied by Mongols. 

 But who were the northern ni-iglibnura of the Chinese end Tibetans^ it ring the 

 thousand years that Intervened hetween the dispersion of the Huns and the rise of 

 the Mongols? Ahel-Remusat incidentally says the Sian -pi were Tanguniana 

 (Recherches stir 1st ZatiQue* Tartar*,) In an extract which he erives from a 

 Chlnete author the U-honn are said to have predominated after the Hlung-nu 

 became enfeebled. They destroyed the Sian-pi and then they with the Juan-Juan 

 and Wei were the masters of the country. The Juan-juan were destroyed, and the 

 Thu-kum (Turks of the Altai) began to appear. They were subdued by Chinese, 

 when the Khlfan held the supremacy until the rise of the Mongols. It would 

 appeur 1'rom (his. and from ih* names of the northern tribes wifh whom the Chinese 

 were frequently at war during the 1,000 years in question, that Turkish hordes 

 were sometimes the occupants of the northern frontier. The Chinese like the 

 Europeans did not clearly distinguish between the different nomadic races to whete 

 incursions they were from age to age exposed. Many q/ the names applied to the 

 different hordes are probably as generic as Saka, Sakai, Qai, Scohti, 8cyth&, 

 Tartar fee. Are the former names notipreserved and Identified aa a genuine Turkish 

 designation in Saiha, Sochalar, the native name of the YaktttL? A tribe of the 

 same race once existed On f he upper Ycnesei also called Sokha. It is by no means 

 certain, not withstanding the opinions of those German ethnologists who have been 

 followed bv Humboldt and Prichard, that the majority of the nomadic tribes who 

 preceded the Huns in W. Aaia were of Indo-European race, any more than the 

 present Iranian looking Osmanli. 



t The Khamti probably belonged to Muang Kamaret. The following passage 

 in Dn HahSe, if it do not mfer to the first movement of the Khamti In tie 13th 

 century, at least illustrate* the manner in which that movement was probably pro- 

 duced/ "When the Tartars attempted to make themselves masters of China a 

 great number of Chinese fagttfcrea from the Province of Yuu-nan dispossessed their 

 neighbours of rheir land and settled there themselves, and the inhabitants of 

 Kamarct were forced to abandon their city." 



