their
numbers were increased by discharged soldiers, who remained as military
settlers sooner than return to Kansuh. In the course of a few
generations their numbers became much greater, until, at last, in the
cities we have named, they formed the majority of the inhabitants. In
Kuldja, too, they were very numerous, but south of the Tian Shan they do
not seem to have advanced westward of Kucha in any great force. At Aksu
the Andijan influence, supreme in Western Kashgar, presented an
impassable barrier to the Tungani, who, it must be remembered, had no
sympathy with Khokand. The Tungani were, therefore, Mahomedan subjects
of China, originating in Kansuh, but who had also, in the course of
time, spread westward into Chinese Turkestan and Jungaria. They were
employed in the service of the country without restriction, nor can we
find that they were subjected to any unfair usage, after the measures
taken against them in the earlier days of Keen-Lung. They may not have
been as highly favoured as the Sobo tribes, and they may have been
subjected to some ridicule in Kansuh; but in Jungaria they were on an
equality with all the other Chinese, and immeasurably better placed in
the political scale than the Andijanis or Tarantchis. The Chinese had
just grounds for believing that no danger to their rule in Eastern
Turkestan or Jungaria would ever be caused by the Tungani, and it is not
easy to explain how their reasonable anticipations were falsified. The
Tungani were fervent, if not the most orthodox in form of, Mahomedans,
and it would appear that they were not free from a belief in their own
superiority to the Khitay. This feeling was fostered by the "mollahs,"
or priests, who became very active within the Chinese dominions, when
these had been extended by conquest into the heart of Asia. As if in
retaliation for a Khitay conquest the Mahomedan religion was undermining
the outworks of its rival's power slowly, but surely. The impulse given
to trade by the security and patronage that accompanied Chinese rule
was, at least from a purely Chinese point of view, neutralized as an
advantage by the admission into the empire of energetic and eloquent
preachers of the superior merits of Mahomedanism. It required many
generations before the effect of their efforts became perceptible, and
it was not until the power of China fell into an extraordinary
decline--a decline which many thought, with some show of reason, was to
herald the fall, b