East Turkestan

“ The dress is that customary in West Turkestan. But the habits of the people differ to some extent and the women enjoy greater liberty than in other Mohammedan countries : they go in the streets unveiled ; free marriages, contracted for short terms, are not un- frequent. As a rule, the position of women is more independent a feature noticed even by the earliest travellers in the country. The aggregate population of East Turkestan, estimated between 575,000 and 1,500,000 in 1825, is now (1887) hardly more than 1 ,000,000. ”

“ Turkestan is bounded on the east by the empire of Tarsae, to the west by Khorasmin or Khuaresm, and to the south it extends to the desert which forms the northern frontier of India. In this country there are few good towns; but many extensive plains, which afford excellent pasturage to cattle, and the inhabitants are almost universally shepherds and tenders of cattle. They dwell mostly in tents, and in huts which can be transported from place to place. They cultivate only a small quantity of corn, and have no wine. Their drink is beer and milk, and they subsist upon meat with rice and millet. ”

“ The census-taker is unknown in Central Asia, except in the cities and towns; even there he does not enumerate the whole population, but only the heads of families and the men capable of bearing arms. Turkestan includes all the country between the Caspian Sea and the 110th degree of longitude east, and from Siberia southward to Persia, Afghanistan, and Thibet. ”

“ Turkestan, the native region of these nomads, lies north-east of the Caspian, but their tribes are widely dispersed over Persia, Asia Minor, and Syria. Their horses are large, swift, and possess extraordinary powers of endurance, though their figures are somewhat ungainly. When a Turkman starts on an expedition, he takes with him some hard balls of barley-meal, which are to serve both him and his horse for subsistence until his return. ”

“ West TurkestanAn immense trapezoidal depression occupies the angle on the west where the great plateaus meet, and this depression is West Turkestan. Its south-eastern limits are the Hindu-Kush and the Tian-Shan; on its south-western edge it has the Iranian plateau; and its north-west and north-east boundaries correspond with the edge of the Ust-Urt and the Irtish and Aral water-parting, which separates it from Siberia. The trapezium is 1100 miles long from south-west to north-east, and 900 miles wide from south east to north-west. ”

“ Turkestan means 'The land of the Turks.' On the maps it is generally divided into Eastern and Western Turkestan, the former lying partly in the Chinese Empire, and the latter covering the vast plain of the Caspian and Aral seas. The population is variously estimated at from eight to twelve millions. Russia has absorbed nearly all of Western Turkestan, and the Russian officials think they have at least eight millions of people in their new possessions. ”

“ It proved to be of extraordinary artistic interest, not to mention its historical importance both as the centre of Moslem learning and of Russian experiments in civilizing Central Asia. Russia looks with a jealous eye upon the traveller, and a special permit has to be obtained in order to travel through Turkestan, even on the railway line. ”

“ Travellers going any distance by carriage continue day and night without stopping longer than for meals and to change horses, but it must require an iron constitution to do this. Nearly every one at Tashkent seemed to ride or drive; in fact we learnt that it was considered quite infra dig to go on foot anywhere in Turkestan.
The town boasts two good new hotels; a fine public library, especially rich in works on Central Asia; an observatory; a museum; two large public schools; an experimental agricultural station and school ”

“ In Turkey, Egypt, and Arabia the Moslem woman who leaves her face uncovered commits an act of great impropriety, but this is not the case in Turkestan. Many of the women are quite pretty in their youth, but their good looks do not last long. The men are of good height and figure, and their manners are grave and dignified. The hair and beard are dark, and the complexion may be set down as a light shade of brown."
Frank asked how many tribes and people were included in Turkestan or Central Asia, and how great was the population. ”

“ It is doubtful though whether those early Turkish tribes, if they had come under the influence of Christianity instead of Islam, would have advanced any further on the path of culture than they have arrived to-day. Though they have been in contact with the West since the seventh century, though they conquered the Empire of the East and made its Christian peoples their subjects, and from the City of Constantine overflowed Eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna, yet the Turk has learnt nothing. ”

“ The people of Northern Persia no longer live in constant terror of Turcoman raids; the slave markets of Central Asia are closed, and doubtless forever." T. W. Knox, Decisive Battles since Waterloo, chapter 22. "There is a vast tract of country in Central Asia that offers great possibilities for settlement. Eastern Afghan, and Western Turkestan, with an area of 1,500,000 square miles, have a population which certainly does not exceed 15,000,000, or ten to the square mile. Were they peopled as the Baltic provinces of Russia are—no very extreme supposition—they would support 90,000,000. ”

“ There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. ”

“ Samarcand and Bukhara
Russian Central Asia has ten million inhabitants and an area twelve times as large as the British Isles. The part which is called Turkestan extends between Eastern Turkestan and the Caspian Sea, the Kirghiz Steppe, Afghanistan, and Persia. The greater part is occupied by blown sand, the "Red Sand" and the "Black Sand." Right through the desert flow the two rivers, the Syr-darya and Amu-darya. Two railway lines cross Turkestan, one from the Kirghiz Steppe to Tashkent, the other from the Caspian Sea to Tashkent and Ferghana. ”

“ There is also an import and export trade to and from Urumchi and China, via Kulja and Ak-su.
Population.—Turkestan has been the theatre of so many migrations and conquests that its present population could not fail to be very mixed. Both Aryans and Mongols have their representatives there, the former settled for the most part, the latter chiefly nomad. The Ural-Altaians are numerically the predominant element, and consist of Turkomans, Kirghiz, Uzbegs and Sarts. The Turkomans inhabit chiefly the Transcaspian region. They number less than a quarter of a million. ”

“ Turkish literature, as pointed out in our general introduction, is of a less advanced character than that of most of the Semitic literatures from which it is sprung. An epigrammatic summary of the Turkish character has said that every fourth word of Turkish is Arabic, every third idea Persian, and every second impulse Mohammedan. This, while not seeming to leave much of the original Turk, is perhaps not an unfair estimate of the extent of the Turks' indebtedness to the earlier races and religion upon which their civilization is built. ”

“ Pledged by the very principle of their existence to barbarism, the Turks have to cope with civilized governments all around them, ever advancing in the material and moral strength which civilization gives, and ever feeling more and more vividly that the Turks are simply in the way. They are in the way of the progress of the nineteenth century. They are in the way of the Russians, who wish to get into the Mediterranean; they are in the way of the English, [Pg 223] who wish to cross to the East ”

“ In the Khanats themselves this Russian policy has not passed entirely unnoticed. Princes and people are well aware of the danger that threatens them, and it is only Oriental indifference and religious enthusiasm that lull them in the fond sleep of security. {438} The majority of the Central Asiatics with whom I conversed upon this subject, contented themselves by observing that Turkestan has two strong defences: (1) the great number of saints who repose in its territory, under the constant protection of the 'noble Bokhara;' (2) the immense deserts by which it is surrounded. ”

“ The Kudatku Bilik (about 1065) gives a picture of life in Eastern Turkestan after the conversion to Islam, but still showing many traces of Chinese influence. But after this period nearly all the Turks (except a few obscure tribes like the Yakuts) adopted the Perso-Arabic civilization. Some however, such as the Kirghiz, Turkomans and Yürüks of Asia Minor, have not yet abandoned the nomadic life. The Turks seem to be everywhere characterized by their innate sense of discipline and their submissiveness to their own authorities; councils or assemblies have rarely assumed importance among them ”

“ The appearance and establishment of the Turks in a land which was not that of their origin follows their life as nomad tribesmen of the vast steppeland of central Asia. They were men at large upon the world’s largest continent, the northerners of the east who naturally and unconsciously went forth in quest of the greater comforts afforded by southern regions. The flatlands which gave birth to their race lie open to the frozen gales of the north. ”

“ The Ottoman Turks, that is, the Turks who founded the present Turkish Empire, were a Tartar or Turanian tribe from Central Asia who adopted the Mohammedan faith and began their conquest of the Mohammedan world about the year 1300. ”

“ The Turkomans are notorious among all the races of Central Asia as the most restless adventurers, and rightly; for not only there, but throughout the whole globe, hardly can a second nation be found of such a rapacious nature, of such restless spirit and untameable licentiousness as these children of the desert. To rob, to plunder, to make slaves, is in the eye of the Turkoman an honourable business, by which he has lived for centuries. ”

“ This he has in Europe, this he has in Bokhara, this he has in Egypt; so that his love for looking-on and enjoying the labour of others is what he shares with the rest of the world, whereas his preference of a shepherd’s life to a cultivator’s is a habit rather than instinct. In the few parts of the original Turk area, where the conditions of soil and climate are favourable to agriculture, and where he is no dominant lord, but only an ordinary occupant, the Turk is as good a farmer as the generality. If he be not so in Asia Minor it is due to the insecurity of the fruits of his industry. ”

“ The position of Turkey is certainly an anomaly. It is an Asiatic power planted in Europe. It is a Mohammedan power ruling over millions of Christians. It is a government of Turks—that is of Tartars—over men of a better race as well as a purer religion. It is a government of a minority over a majority. The Mohammedans, the ruling caste, are only about one-quarter of the population of European Turkey—some estimates make it much less, but where there is no accurate census, it must be a matter of conjecture. ”

“ Further north, on the banks of the Oxus river, the border line that divides Afghan from Russian Turkestan, are Turkoman and Usbàk tribes. The Turkoman is, as the name implies, of Turk descent. This people lived to the south of the Thian Shan or Celestial mountains, and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries overran Bokhara, Armenia, and Georgia. Physically they are immensely strong men, taller than the Hazara, of rough manners and coarse fibre, seeming more or less insensible to pain or sorrow: their cold insensible nature contrasting strongly with the more amorous nature of Afghan and Persian. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say that this human tax has been levied on almost every family of the Caucasus, western Asia and the countries of the Balkan peninsula. Today the net result of this variegated intermixture is that the Tatar origin of the average Turk, so called, is entirely concealed by the mingling with Mediterranean, Armenoid-Alpine and even Nordic elements. Except in a few isolated instances the Turki type of central Asia is rarely met within Turkish boundaries. Clearly no valid claim to racial distinctiveness can be set up by the Turks.
In religion the Turk is no innovator. ”

“ These form at this day the greatest and most powerful tribe of the Turkomans. They are separated into two principal encampments--the first at Akhal (to the east of Tedjend) , and the second at Merv. According to the best accounts, they have sixty thousand tents. Possessing less land that is capable of being cultivated than the other Turkoman tribes, they are, so to say, almost forced by nature itself to commit acts of robbery, and are a real scourge in the hand of God to the north-easterly portions of Persia, to Herat and its neighbourhood. ”

“ Someone has said: "The greatest enemy of Turkey is the Turk." I have too much love for the Turkish people, too much sympathy for them, to adopt this pessimistic attitude without great inward opposition; but unfortunately it is only too true. We have seen how the Turkey of Enver and Talaat has reacted sharply against the Western-minded, [Pg 263] liberal era of the 1876 and 1908 constitutions, and has turned again to Asia and her newly discovered ideal, Turanism. To the Turks of to-day, European culture and civilisation are at best but a technical means; they are no longer an end in themselves. ”