The Mufti, deluded by the friendly treatment bestowed on
his emissaries, came with many of his relations and followers into the
camp of the Kashgarian general. At first, we are told, they were treated
with every mark of respect and kindness; they were feasted and clothed
in precious garments, but all these honours were but the preliminaries
to the concluding ceremony. During the progress of the evening meal they
were disarmed, and led out to execution, while an attack was made from
several quarters on the town. Even then the resistance was prolonged,
and the slaughter by the infuriated soldiery of the Athalik Ghazi
continued long after all serious opposition had ceased. It is impossible
to exonerate Yakoob Beg from the chief blame on this occasion, and if he
had been a civilized European general, we should have made use of the
phrase, that "It must ever remain a blot on his career;" but it would be
the height of irony to apply such a phrase to this unscrupulous Asiatic,
who, if not worse than the school in which he was brought up, was
certainly not much better in a moral sense. As the fact stands, the
seizure of Khoten, and the massacre of the unarmed leaders of that city,
appear to have been acts as unnecessary as they were unjustifiable.
Khoten may have seemed to the Athalik Ghazi of exceptional importance
for several reasons, and he may have felt doubtful of the fidelity of
Habitulla and his followers; but, so far as we are aware, the reasons
for this action are shadowy in the extreme, even regarded from the point
of view of political expediency. Down to the present day, too, the
memory of this massacre, needless even in the eyes of a people
accustomed to the shortest cuts to power by wholesale slaughter, has
rankled in the minds of the inhabitants of Khoten and Sanju, and the
Athalik Ghazi was least popular in that part of his state in which,
according to the traditions of his predecessors, his action had been
most sweeping, and accordingly most safe. This was early in the year
1867, and the Athalik Ghazi had now an opportunity for settling his
relationship with his eastern neighbours, the Tungani.

The Tungan movement proper originated, as explained in the last chapter,
in the Chinese provinces of Kansuh and Shensi, and then extended with
scarcely a check to Turfan south of the Tian Shan and to Urumtsi north
of that range. The flame soon spread from Turfan to Karashar, Kucha, and
Aksu, and at all of these towns it