Turkestan: "the heart of Asia,"

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE I.—A Lesson In GEOGRAPHY . : : ; “3 I.—Tue Centran Asta Ramway . E Oe I1I.—Tue Turxomans anp Tuerr NeicHpours. 31 IV.—ASKABAD, THE CAPITAL OF TRANS-CASPIA . 46 V.—Merv, “QuEEN or THE AnciENT WorLD”. 61 VI.—Kuiva AND THE KirGHiz . : ae Hig Veta VII.—Tue Oasis or Boxwara . : : ark 09 VIII.—“ Boxnara THE NOBLE: THE SUBLIME” . 119

X.—TuHeE Bazaars or BoOKHARA . : : OOO EGI XI.—TAMERLANE AND His ConQugEsts ; . 186 XII.—Tue Mewmorrs or Timour THE TARTAR. 208

XITI.—SaMARKAND, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF ASIA 225 XIV.—Mosaques anp MAvusoLEUMS OF SAMARKAND 248

Chapter I A Lesson In Geography

LARGE section of the continent of Asia, which has been added to the Russian Empire by conquest within the last half century, is known as Turkestan. It lies south of Siberia, between the Caspian Sea and China, and touches the northern boundaries of Persia, Afghanistan, and India. Its distances are approximately sixteen hundred miles east and west, and about seven hundred miles north and south. Archzologists say that it has been inhabited for ten thousand years by successive races who have cultivated the soil and have raised cattle, sheep, and horses. The first settlers may have come from Mesopotamia, the cradle of our race, but it has been overrun by several human hordes of Chinese, Mongols, Tartars and Turks, who have occupied the territory for centuries at a time, and from there have spread over its western boundaries into Europe. It was known to the ancients as Bactria, and to the Greeks as Scythia; the Romans called it Tartary; and it derives its present title from the Turks, who were originally a tribe of nomadic Chinese, and were masters of the desert until they passed on across the Bosphorus. The residue that remained are known as Turkomans. 3

When the Russian conquest began in the ’60’s, Turkestan was divided into several independent khanates, governed by khans or emirs, which were conquered one after another and consolidated into a single province, under a viceroy, whose capital is the city of Tashkend, in the foot-hills of the Chinese mountains, twelve hundred miles east of the » Caspian Sea.

At several periods in their history the inhabitants of Turkestan have reached a high degree of wealth and culture. The latter part of the XIVth and the former part of the XVth centuries was probably their golden age, but war and neglect and misrule have left only a few ruins to remind the present generation of the prosperity and splendour of the past. It is now a closed country, a military despotism governed by the army of Russia, with a few civilians in charge of the finances and other peaceful departments. Foreign immigration is prohibited; foreign visitors are not desired.

By permission of the Russian Minister of War, I spent the spring and early summer months of 1910 in Turkestan, for the purpose of writing a series of letters which were published in the Chicago Record-Herald and other newspapers, and, with the approval of Mr. H. H. Kohlsaat, the editor, they are offered in permanent form in this volume.

The readers are indebted to Mr. John T. McCutcheon of Chicago for the admirable illustrations, which are made from Kodak pictures taken by him in the summer of 1906.

I acknowledge with pleasure my great obligations to Baron Rosen, Russian Ambassador to the United States, for letters of introduction, and especially for an open letter of commendation which was of the greatest service to me on several occasions when my identity and intentions were the subject of police investigation. Mr. Nicholas Tcharykow, the Russian Ambassador to Constantinople, also gave me helpful letters and much valuable information. Mr. W. W. Rockhill, United States Ambassador to St. Petersburg, was good enough to obtain for me the permit from the Minister of War, which was absolutely necessary. Without it we would not have been allowed to land at Krasnovodsk.

There are three ways to get to Turkestan — one by railway from St. Petersburg and Moscow over the Great Siberian road to Samara, and then southward by way of Orenburg to Tashkend, Samarkand, and Bokhara. Through sleeping cars run once a week from Moscow to Andijan, the eastern terminus of the Central Asia Railway.

A more interesting route would take you through the Cossack country in the valley of the Don, and along the northern side of the Caucasus Mountains to Baku, where steamers cross the Caspian Sea to Krasnovodsk, the western terminus of the Central Asia Railway.

A still more interesting route, and the one we followed, is to take a steamer at Constantinople, cruise along the north coast of Turkey, visiting Trebizond, the capital of an ancient empire, and several other interesting places, to the terminus of the steamship line at Batoum. From there we crossed the Caucasus by rail to Baku, a distance of five hundred miles, stopping at Tiflis, a most interesting city, from which a détour can be made to Erivan, at the foot of Mt. Ararat, a comfortable journey of eighteen hours by rail. From Baku we crossed the Caspian Sea to Krasnovodsk.

There is a large fleet of small vessels on the Caspian Sea, exclusively under the Russian flag. The largest, which are named in honour of two famous generals, Skobeleff and Kuropatkin, are twin-screw steamers, with electric steering apparatus and about 3,000 tons burden, but the majority are between 1,200 and 1,800 tons, and most of them are old-fashioned side-wheelers, which have been in service for a long time.

All of them have limited accommodations for first and second class passengers, and carry large numbers of third class passengers — Persians, Tartars, Turks, Afghans, Turkomans, Georgians, Armenians, Kalmucks, and other native races — who have a passion for travelling and camp out on the decks with big pillows and thick rugs, their pots and kettles, saddle-bags and baskets, scattered around them. The deck of a Caspian steamer for this reason is one of the most interesting sights you could see in that part of the world, and usually every inch of space is occupied by reclining passengers in picturesque garbs, so that the officers and crew have to step over them when they go about attending to their duties.

Even the first-class passengers are expected to bring their own bedding. ‘The cabins are clean and comfortable, with ordinary bunks and mattresses, but no sheets, blankets, pillows, or towels, although the stewardess will supply them from her own private stock if she is paid extra. It is customary, however, for travellers on railways as well as steamers to carry rolls of bedding, because they will need it at most of the hotels. The custom has probably grown up in that way, just as it has in India. There, outside of Calcutta and Bombay and other large cities, every hotelkeeper expects his patrons to furnish their bedding and towels, and in the interior your “bearer,”’ or body servant, takes care of your room, and waits on you at the table. The landlord and servants of the hotel leave you entirely to his tender mercies.

Excellent meals are served to the first-class passengers of steamers on the Caspian Sea, but there, as everywhere, the quality of the food and the character of the service vary according to the taste and the refinement of the captain, who is a dictator aboard his craft and has things ashe wants them. Our experience was entirely satisfactory. I do not know of a steamer in Europe or the United States, except perhaps those of the Great Northern line on the lakes, on which better meals are served than we had offered to us on the Caspian.

There are several important ports, and the territory and traffic seems to have been divided up among several steamship companies. Baku is the headquarters and startingpoint for the southern Caspian, and Astrakhan for the northern coast. A steamer sails every other day from Baku for Persia and visits five of the ports. Resht is the landing place for Teheran, the capital of Persia. The Russians have built a fine road all the distance between them and have established a line of diligences which make the journey in thirty-two hours; but it is a hard trip. The construction of this road, although a universal blessing to everybody who has to travel in Persia, was not entirely a benevolent act, and its chief purpose was to enable the Russian government to throw a military force into the Persian capital promptly whenever needed. The town of Kazvin, which is half way to Teheran, is an important commercial centre, and has an American school and a missionary settlement,

Other lines of steamers, and a much larger number, ply between Astrakhan, altogether the most important port upon the Caspian, and Krasnovodsk, the terminus of the Central Asia Railway, bringing the supplies needed by at least a hundred thousand troops who are occupying Central Asia, and carrying back cargoes of raw cotton, wool, and other natural products from a territory as large as the Mississippi valley. The Russian manufacturers now depend upon Turkestan for a large amount of their raw cotton and the product is increasing in volume rapidly. Moscow is the source of supply of all kinds of merchandise required in Central Asia, and a paternal government protects the manufacturers against the competition of the rest of Europe.

Tank steamers and barges carry crude and refined petroleum from Baku to Astrakhan and up the Volga River, which is navigable as far as Moscow. The interior of Russia is supplied with its burning fluid in that way. Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga, is a city of 200,000 inhabitants, and the centre of a large trade in wool, hides, sheep pelts, and other ranch products. Millions of sheep, cattle, and goats are pastured in that neighbourhood, and the steppe of the Kalmucks, which was formerly one of the wildest sections of the world, is now almost entirely under cultivation with American machinery and produces immense quantities of wheat, barley, and other grains,

Derbend and Petrovsk are both important towns upon the west coast of the Caspian, and a railway passes through them from Baku to Moscow, Odessa, and other parts of Russia. They have their share of the trade and are well equipped with docks and facilities for loading and unloading.

The Caspian Sea is a strange body of water. The geologists call it “a survival of former oceanic areas,” and show us how it was once connected with the Arctic Ocean by the way of the Sea of Aral and the river Obi.’ There seems to be no doubt of that fact, and it is demonstrated by several interesting signs. The Caspian Sea has seals, herring, salmon, and other marine life whichseems to be unmistakable evidence of its former communication with the ocean. At various places along the coast are water lines which show that it was much higher than it is now, and that the depression of its surface to its present level has been gradual through the ages. A slight elevation would again restore connection between the Caspian and the Arctic seas. A rise of 158 feet would bring the Caspian up to the level of the Sea of Aral; a farther rise of sixty-two feet, making 220 feet in all, would turn the waters of both into the Tobol, one of the tributaries of the river Obi, which flows into the polar sea. Between the Caspian and the Arctic Circle is only a low steppe or prairie, with depressions that were undoubtedly once filled with water. Strabo and other ancient geographers describe such communication between the Caspian basin and the northern ocean in unmistakable terms.

The mean level of the Caspian is now eighty-four feet - below that of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. Although it varies with the winter floods and summer droughts, it is gradually subsiding; so gradually, however, that it will take a thousand years or more to exhaust the water. The northern portion is extremely shallow and is being filled up with silt brought down from the interior of Russia by the Volga, the Ural, and the Kuma, three great muddy streams which traverse the steppes for thousands of miles. They have already converted the northern part of the Caspian into a salt marsh, and are encroaching upon the sea itself every year. The distance - in a straight line between the extremes of north and south of the Caspian is 740 miles. The average width is 210 miles, but at one spot the distance is 300 miles across. At one time the Caspian was more than 300 miles longer than at present, and the southern part was 130 miles wider. There are several spots on both coasts where signs of the subsidence appear very plainly; indeed, geologists say that the biography of no body of water, unless it be the Dead Sea, is written in language so clear as that of the Caspian. There is no outlet, and the drainage area is one of the largest of any body of water. The Volga River, which rises in northern Russia, alone drains an area of more than half a million square miles. The Ural drains the mountains of that name, an area of more than 300,000 square miles. These two rivers bring down more water than the Danube and the Don combined pour into the Black Sea; and on the west coast five great streams, the Kamu, Kur, and the Terek, which drain the Caucasus Mountains, the Arax — the Araxes of Scripture — and the Attruk, which drains the mountains of Armenia, pour enormous volumes of fresh water into the Caspian, which is diluting the original salt water to such an extent that its specific gravity is now only a little more than 1 per cent. This makes the Caspian, to use an Irish bull, the freshest body of salt water in the world. For quite a distance around the mouths of the rivers named the water is only slightly brackish, but on the eastern coast, which is a hopeless desert lined with bleak and barren mountains, the salt deposits are extensive and the water is very dense. |

You can imagine the rapidity of evaporation when I tell you that all the water poured into the Caspian every year is sucked up by the sun. Year after year the average level does not vary much, and is lowered in a slight degree with every passing season. The summer heat is intense, and frequently rises to 110 degrees in the shade, while during the winter a temperature of 30 degrees below zero is not considered remarkable, making a total range of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The shallow portions of the sea, including about one third of its area, are always frozen over from November to March, and the ice sometimes extends to the middle basin. The southern part, which is much deeper, and where the water is more dense, never freezes.

The Caspian is a stormy sea, particularly between October and March and between July and September, when the gales rage with such violence that navigation has to be entirely suspended for days. The water is usually rough at all seasons; a quiet passage is rare. There are no regular tides, but changes of level occur frequently, because of the atmospheric pressure being greater in one part than in another, the inequality of evaporation, and the floods of fresh water from the inflowing rivers.

A mysterious phenomenon isa current, always perceptible, running at an average rate of three miles an hour. It is about one hundred and fifty yards wide, and its limits are as distinctly marked as those of the Gulf Stream. It is more rapid in the summer than in the winter season. In periods of extreme heat it has been known to exceed five miles an hour, and in very cold winters it has been known to slow down to a mile and a half an hour. The native boatmen believe that this current is due to a subterranean abyss through which the waters flow either into the Persian Gulf or the Black Sea, a hypothesis for which there is not the slightest justification as long as water will not flow uphill, the mean level of the Caspian being eighty-four feet lower than that of either the Persian Gulf or the Black Sea. Although scientific observers are not entirely agreed in their explanation, the majority of them are convinced that the current is due to an indraught produced by the excess of evaporation in a basin or bay known as the Karaboghaz, on the central part of the eastern coast, about ninety miles across and almost entirely cut off from the main sea by a long, narrow spit of land. The entrance is not more than a thousand feet wide. The Karaboghaz is in a rainless and cloudless region, the area of the greatest extremes of heat as well as the greatest density of salt. Therefore it is natural that evaporation should be more rapid there than elsewhere, and the current is supposed to be caused by the attraction of the water in that direction.

A good deal of salt is taken out of the Caspian Sea — an average of about 400,000 tons every year — but the supply is inexhaustible because around it, particularly on the northern coast, are innumerable little salt lakes. They are supposed to have been at one time a part of the sea, and being left isolated by its subsidence gradually dried up by the action of the sun. Big beds of rock salt are sometimes found at the bottom of these little lakes, which receive enough water from the rain, snow, and streams to compensate them for the loss sustained by evaporation. ‘The most notable of the lakes, called Elton, lies about two hundred miles north of the present border of the Caspian, in a depressed area seventy-nine feet below the present level of the Caspian and 160 feet below that of the Black Sea.

For a radius of nearly four hundred miles north of the Caspian Sea the soil of the steppes contains a large admixture of salt, often associated with marl, shells, and fish bone. This leaves no doubt that the waters of the Caspian once covered the locality and in their recession left the sediment behind.

The Sea of Aral, about four hundred miles northeast of the Caspian, is also salt, but has been diluted by floods of fresh water from the Syr Daria (the ancient Jaxartes), which rises in the mountains on the Afghanistan frontier, and the Amu Daria (the ancient Oxus), which rises among the peaks of the Pamirs in Hindu Kush and then descends into the great Turkoman desert to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres in the oases of Merv and Khiva. A large proportion of both these rivers is withdrawn for irrigation before they reach the Aral Sea, and the supply they bring is not sufficient to keep it up to its normal level, so that, like the Caspian Sea, it is gradually receding.

The topography of the desert shows that the Amu Daria formerly flowed into the Caspian through a furrow which may still be easily followed along the southern border of the Ust-Urt, the great desert through which the Central Asia Railway now runs.

Russian engineers have a scheme to divert a portion of the waters of the Oxus back into its ancient bed and thus reclaim a large portion of what is now a desert of drifting sand. Like many other deserts, the soil is richly loaded with plant nourishment and produces with great profusion wherever water can be brought to moisten it.

We left Baku on the steamer Skobeleff at 8 o’clock in the evening and arrived at Krasnovodsk, the western terminus of the great Central Asia Railway, at 11 o’clock the next morning, after a delightful voyage, without feeling any of the annoyances which have given the Caspian Sea a bad reputation among seasick people. When we approached the dock we saw what looked familiar — a town of one-story whitewashed adobe houses, with wide, dusty streets, precisely like those along the line of the Santa Fé and the Southern Pacific railways in New Mexico and Arizona. If a’ Tombstone miner should drop down there in the night, he would feel perfectly at home in the morning, especially after the breeze comes up about 11 o’clock and what he is accustomed to call “real-estate activity” begins in the dusty streets. Krasnovodsk also resembles the mining towns on the nitrate coast of Chile, especially where the gloomy, barren mountains come down to bathe their feet in the water.

As far as you can see in every direction there is nothing but rock and sand. There is not a green thing within miles and miles of the place except a few struggling cottonwood trees that have been planted in a little park and are kept alive by constant irrigation. The water supply is furnished by companies which condense the contents of the Caspian Sea into vapour, as people are said to distill whiskey from corn, extract the salt, and sell the purged water by the quart and gallon from house to house as milk is sold in America,

Two or three hundred feet above the town, in a little crack in the mountain side, is a group of three iron tanks, put there as a safety reservoir and kept filled with water to be used in case a fire should break out upon the docks. Lines of hose are stretched through the different warehouses, but so far they have never been needed. There has been no damage of consequence from fire since the town was built.

Most of the houses are one story, with thick walls surrounding patios in the Spanish style, which experience has demonstrated is the coolest and most comfortable for a tropical climate. The exteriors of the houses are washed with blue, green, red, yellow, and other bright colours, in order to make the place look as cheerful as possible, and two or three government buildings have been raised to two stories.

There is no hotel, but stranded travellers who have no friends to entertain them can find lodgings in what are called “‘Numeras,”’ a name applied throughout Turkestan to houses where lodgings are let. Several respectablelooking restaurants supply meals, but altogether the best place is the railway station, where excellent luncheons and dinners are served. Unlike corresponding towns in America there are no saloons, gambling houses, dance houses, or other disreputable resorts. Krasnovodsk is strictly a “dry town.” The soldiers, sailors, railway employes, and dock-wallopers who furnish the greater part of the population are entirely protected from the temptations to which we permit the working classes in our frontier towns to be exposed. And, what is still more remarkable, Turkestan is a prohibition country.

Except in Bokhara, which is nominally an independent khanate still, Central Asia is “dry” in more senses than one. The native races have not been allowed to acquire European vices.

There are excellent bathing establishments along the shore of the Caspian, with clean and ¢commodious dressing rooms, and stairs that lead down into the water. There is a hard, sandy bottom, but very little surf, and every one is surprised because the water is not salty. It is only brackish.

There is deep water close to the shore, which of course is a great advantage to shipping, and long piers extending out into the sea are covered with warehouses filled with military supplies and merchandise brought down from Moscow and other parts of Russia by boats on the Volga River. These are to be sent to Samarkand, Bokhara, Tashkend, Andijan, and other cities in Central and Eastern Asia, to be distributed among the native tribes as far as the Chinese border, even across into Persia, British India, Afghanistan, and Thibet.

The outgoing freight brought down on long trains from Central Asia is piled up neatly, awaiting shipment. Vast stacks of baled cotton are on their way from Tashkend and the Merv oasis to the mills of Moscow and other manufacturing towns of Russia. It will be carried by steamers to Astrakhan and there trans-shipped upon barges to be towed up the Volga River. There are immense quantities of wool and hides in bales destined for England, Germany, and even for the United States; for cotton, wool, and skins are the chief products of Central Asia and the most profitable. Thereis much rice also, but that is nearly all consumed in the cities around the Caspian Sea.

I noticed a good deal of railway construction material

WW WwWw_ Fk —— piled up along the docks, which indicates that the system is being extended; and there are rumours of new tracks being laid from certain points upon the main line of the railroad to the borders of Persia, Thibet, and Afghanistan. But that is a secret which the Russians are trying to conceal, because England is so jealous of her Asiatic territory and is almost frightened out of her wits whenever she sees the cap of a Russian soldier approaching boundary lines.

Immense quantities of sugar, coffee, hardware, furniture, cotton fabrics, and the other necessaries of life are shipped into Asia by Krasnovodsk, for that is the only port of entry for a vast territory and the chief outlet for the products of between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 people. The natives are beginning to need modern merchandise. They are acquiring a taste for foreign goods, and are thus providing a market of great value for the manufacturers of Russia, which is of course a very important consideration for a government. And there are at least 2,000,000 Russian emigrants living on the line of the Central Asia Railway whose wants must be supplied.

Therefore Krasnovodsk is a busy as well as an important town, and one of the most important in all Asia, although it is only a railway terminus and a military station and has nothing but manufactured water to drink. It was created for a single purpose, and no one would live there unless he were compelled to do so. The labouring element are Persians and Tartars and make good hands. They are energetic, muscular and willing, and are paid about thirty cents a day inour money. The machine and repair shops of the railway are manned by Russians and Armenians, more than one thousand in number. Nearly all the cars used on the Central Asia Railway are made in the shops there, but the locomotives are brought from Moscow in sections.

There is a garrison of about two thousand men, which constitutes almost one-half the population. During working hours, when the labouring element are busy, almost every person you meet upon the street isasoldier. There area few shops where the necessaries of life are sold, and the people get as much pleasure out of existence as they can, although conditions are not encouraging.

Chapter II The Central Asia Railway

HORTLY after the Russian occupation of Turkestan in 1865, the necessity of a railway for the transportation of troops and supplies was realized and various plans were suggested. In 1873 Ferdinand de Lesseps submitted to Alexander II the details of a scheme for a line from Moscow to Calcutta, a distance of about five thousand miles; that portion which lay west of India to be built by Russia and the remainder by England. De Lesseps formed a company with French capital to undertake the preliminary surveys, and the Russian government gave him a concession for six years while he unfolded the scheme, with the promise of a charter and a liberal guarantee. But the British government declined to concur in the project. When the French engineers reached the frontier of Afghanistan they were prohibited from proceeding farther and returned ‘to Europe. After a prolonged controversy De Lesseps dropped the project and transferred his attention to the Panama Canal. ey The necessity was too great, however, to permit the enterprise to be abandoned. In 1879 Russian military engineers surveyed the first section to Merv, and in 1880 General Skobeleff, who had been appointed commander-in-chief, was given carte blanche to go ahead with construction, which was completed to Samarkand in 1885 and to 19

Andijan in 1892. An American contractor named Berry offered to build the first section at his own expense with material from the United States, and operate it upon completion for an annual guarantee of $750,000; but, as the road was required for military purposes chiefly, the goverment rejected his proposal, and General Anenkoff, comptroller of the transport department of the Russian army, who had charge of all the transportation arrangements during the war with Turkey, was directed to take charge of the work.

The Central Asia Railway runs from Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, to Andijan, on the western boundary of the Chinese Empire, a distance of 1,256 miles. Two hundred miles west of Andijan the track branches off northward to Tashkend, the capital of Russian Turkestan, and the residence of the viceroy, and from there extends northward and westward along the shores of the Aral Sea to the city of Orenberg, where it connects with the Great Siberian Railway at Samara. It is possible to go by rail from Andijan to Moscow, or to Vladivostok, the Russian port on the Pacific, or Peking or Tien-Tsin. A line has been surveyed from Tashkend eastward to connect with the Great Siberian Railway at Omsk on the northern boundary of China, and sometime it may be built.

The Central Asia Railway extends about halfway across the continent of Asia, over “the roof of the world,” and through one of the oldest settled portions of that continent. A scientific commission from the Carnegie Institution at Washington, which spent two years among the ruins and the deserts of Khiva and Kizil-Kum and through the oases of Merv, Bokhara, and Samarkand, estimates from the