NOTE 2.—­According to Hammer’s authority (Rashid?) Kublai had seven wives; Gaubil’s Chinese sources assign him five, with the title of empress (Hwang-heu).  Of these the best beloved was the beautiful Jamui Khatun (Lady or Empress Jamui, illustrating what the text says of the manner of styling these ladies), who bore him four sons and five daughters.  Rashiduddin adds that she was called Kun Ku, or the great consort, evidently the term Hwang-heu. (Gen. Tables in Hammer’s Ilkhans; Gatibil, 223; Erdmann, 200.)

["Kublai’s four wives, i.e. the empresses of the first, second, third, and fourth ordos. Ordo is, properly speaking, a separate palace of the Khan, under the management of one of his wives.  Chinese authors translate therefore the word ordo by ‘harem.’  The four Ordo established by Chingis Khan were destined for the empresses, who were chosen out of four different nomad tribes.  During the reign of the first four Khans, who lived in Mongolia, the four ordo were considerably distant one from another, and the Khans visited them in different seasons of the year; they existed nominally as long as China remained under Mongol domination.  The custom of choosing the empress out of certain tribes, was in the course of time set aside by the Khans.  The empress, wife of the last Mongol Khan in China, was a Corean princess by birth; and she contributed in a great measure to the downfall of the Mongol Dynasty.” (Palladius, 40.)

I do not believe that Rashiduddin’s Kun Ku is the term Hwang-keu; it is the term Kiun Chu, King or Queen, a sovereign.—­H.  C.]

NOTE 3.—­Ungrat, the reading of the Crusca, seems to be that to which the others point, and I doubt not that it represents the great Mongol tribe of KUNGURAT, which gave more wives than any other to the princes of the house of Chinghiz; a conclusion in which I find I have been anticipated by De Mailla or his editor (IX. 426).  To this tribe (which, according to Vambery, took its name from (Turki) Kongur-At, “Chestnut Horse”) belonged Burteh Fujin, the favourite wife of Chinghiz himself, and mother of his four heirs; to the same tribe belonged the two wives of Chagatai, two of Hulaku’s seven wives, one of Mangku Kaan’s, two at least of Kublai’s including the beloved Jamui Khatun, one at least of Abaka’s, two of Ahmed Tigudar’s, two of Arghun’s, and two of Ghazan’s.

The seat of the Kungurats was near the Great Wall.  Their name is still applied to one of the tribes of the Uzbeks of Western Turkestan, whose body appears to have been made up of fractions of many of the Turk and Mongol tribes.  Kungurat is also the name of a town of Khiva, near the Sea of Aral, perhaps borrowed from the Uzbek clan.

The conversion of Kungurat into Ungrat is due, I suppose, to that Mongol tendency to soften gutturals which has been before noticed. (Erdm. 199-200; Hammer, passim; Burnes, III. 143, 225.)