on the east. (Thomsen, Inscriptions de l’Orkhon, 98, 126, 140.) Mr. Thos.  Watters tells me that the Tartars are first mentioned by the Chinese in the period extending from A.D. 860 to 874; the earliest mention I have discovered, however, is under date of A.D. 880. (Wu tai shih, Bk. 4.) We also read in the same work (Bk. 74, 2) that ’The Ta-ta were a branch of the Mo-ho (the name the Nu-chen Tartars bore during the Sui and T’ang periods:  Ma Tuan-lin, Bk. 327, 5).  They first lived to the north of the Kitan.  Later on they were conquered by this people, when they scattered, a part becoming tributaries of the Kitan, another to the P’o-hai (a branch of the Mo-ho), while some bands took up their abode in the Yin Shan in Southern Mongolia, north of the provinces of Chih-li and Shan-si, and took the name of Ta-ta.’  In 981 the Chinese ambassador to the Prince of Kao-chang (Karakhodjo, some 20 miles south-east of Turfan) traversed the Ta-ta country.  They then seem to have occupied the northern bend of the Yellow River.  He gives the names of some nine tribes of Ta-ta living on either side of the river.  He notes that their neighbours to the east were Kitan, and that for a long time they had been fighting them after the occupation of Kan-chou by the Uigurs. (Ma Tuan-lin, Bk. 336, 12-14.) We may gather from this that these Tartars were already settled along the Yellow River and the Yin Shan (the valley in which is now the important frontier mart of Kwei-hua Ch’eng) at the beginning of the ninth century, for the Uigurs, driven southward by the Kirghiz, first occupied Kan-chou in north-western Kan-suh, somewhere about A.D. 842.”]

NOTE 3.—­CHORCHA (Ciorcia) is the Manchu country, whose people were at that time called by the Chinese Yuche or Niuche, and by the Mongols Churche, or as it is in Sanang Setzen, Jurchid.  The country in question is several times mentioned by Rashiduddin as Churche.  The founders of the Kin Dynasty, which the Mongols superseded in Northern China, were of Churche race. [It was part of Nayan’s appanage. (See Bk.  II. ch. v.)—­H.  C.]

NOTE 4.—­The idea that a Christian potentate of enormous wealth and power, and bearing this title, ruled over vast tracts in the far East, was universal in Europe from the middle of the 12th to the end of the 13th century, after which time the Asiatic story seems gradually to have died away, whilst the Royal Presbyter was assigned to a locus in Abyssinia; the equivocal application of the term India to the East of Asia and the East of Africa facilitating this transfer.  Indeed I have a suspicion, contrary to the view now generally taken, that the term may from the first have belonged to the Abyssinian Prince, though circumstances led to its being applied in another quarter for a time.  It appears to me almost certain that the letter of Pope Alexander III., preserved by R. Hoveden, and written in 1177 to the Magnificus Rex Indorum, Sacerdotum sanctissimus, was meant for the King of Abyssinia.