iv 
PREFACE. 
and he attaches more importance to the sayings and doings of the “ holy 
men 33 among his characters than to events that had a serious influence 
on the fate of his country. Visions, prophecies, tombs and shrines 
pervade the pages to a depressing extent, and much space is devoted to 
the speeches of saintly personages and anecdotes concerning them, while 
history, properly so called, is relegated to a secondary place. All that 
there is, however, has been embodied by Mr. Shaw in the epitome, 
while most of the rest lias been judiciously omitted. Throughout the 
impression is conveyed that the author had a very slight acquaintance 
with anything bearing upon the nations outside the narrow limits of 
the western cities of Eastern Turkistan, which were under Khoja rule. 
He only mentions briefly and incidentally the affairs of the neighbour¬ 
ing states with whom his countrymen were almost constantly at war, yet 
without a glance at their history it is impossible to gain a complete 
view of the period. 
Of the Qalmaqs, their Kingdom and their rulers, who were usually 
the suzerains of the Khojas (as will be explained lower down) of the 
Kirghiz and the Chinese, the information he doles out is most meagre. 
It has been necessary therefore to go to other sources in order to con¬ 
nect his history with that of these nations, and to elucidate the 
brief references he makes to them. In dates the book is entirely want¬ 
ing : beyond the mention, on the first page, of the year in which it was 
written, not one date is to be found in the course of the narrative and 
there is nothing to point to the author having read the works of other 
Asiatic writers. The pervading tone is one of gloomy superstition and 
fanaticism, the outcome of that class of spiritualism or miracle-work¬ 
ing, of which the Khojas of Central Asia were the chief exponents 
during several centuries. 
The principal, and indeed the only, value of the book lies in its 
being a more or less authentic narrative dealing with a period in the 
history of Central Asia which has hitherto been scarcely known ; for 
when divested of magical tales and the irrelevant speeches of “ holy men 33 
it becomes possible, as Mr. Shaw has done in his epitome, to construct a 
story containing some degree of sequence and some historical links. The 
Tarthh-i-Rashidi brings down the history of Eastern Turkistan and 
the neighbouring countries to the middle of the 16th century, while 
from about the middle of the 18th when the Chinese become masters 
of these regions, we have very full and authentic accounts, derived from 
their annals and from the writings of the Roman Catholic missionaries 
in China, who were, in many cases, eye witnesses of what took place. 
