HISTORY OF KHOTAN 
785 
ho-lo is the same word as T akla ; and there can be 
hardly a doubt, that the towns which I discovered, and 
which the indigenous inhabitants call, as indeed they 
call the entire desert, Takla-makan, were inhabited by 
this people. Finally, the little village of Tokhla near 
Khotan, the place in which the inhabitants of the buried 
cities found refuge from the invading sand, also keeps 
alive the name, if not the memory, of that once powerful 
people, a race who, according to Klaproth and Vivien 
de S. Martin, were of Tibetan origin. 
To return to the Chinese chronicle Tai-thsing-i-tung-tsht. 
After the year 632 it makes no further mention of the 
worship of Buddha at Khotan. It does however contain 
other notices of Khotan. For instance, in the year 964 it 
is said that the people of Khotan venerated the spirits ; 
and in the years 1094—97 that the inhabitants of Khotan, 
Arabians, Romans, and other people, regularly sent tribute 
to the Emperor of China. The Arabians had conquered 
the town many years before that. The Arab chieftain 
Kuteybeh Ibn Muslim took Kokand in West Turkestan 
in the year 712; and then passed on and conquered the 
whole of East Turkestan, and thence spread abroad the 
faith of Islam. Chronicles, called teskereh, which narrate 
these events, are preserved at the tombs of the holy imams. 
I was fortunate enough to acquire one of these teskereh 
from the tomb of Imam Jafer Sadik, north of Niya. But 
it cost the Arabs a contest of twenty-five years’ duration 
to overcome the people of the oasis of Khotan and force 
them to embrace the new faith. Possibly the magnificent 
temple, described by the Chinese traveller in the year 400, 
was then levelled with the ground, for the Mohammedans 
abhor the temples of idols. And anything they spared 
would most certainly have perished when the oasis was 
devastated, and the city captured, by the Mongol hordes 
under Jenghiz Khan in the year 1220. 
However that may have been, it is incontestable that at 
the present day Khotan does not possess a single relic of 
ancient architecture, nor does it appear that any survived 
even in the time of Marco Polo. He passed through the 
