Sir A. STEIN writes (Ancient Khotan, I., pp. 14-15 n.):  “Sir Henry Yule was undoubtedly right in assuming that Marco Polo had never personally visited these countries and that his account of them, brief as it is, was derived from hearsay information about the tracts which the Mongol partisan leader Nigudar had traversed, about 1260 A.D., on an adventurous incursion from Badakhshan towards Kashmir and the Punjab.  In Chapter XVIII., where the Venetian relates that exploit (see Yule, Marco Polo, I., p. 98, with note, p. 104), the name of Pashai is linked with Dir, the territory on the Upper Panjkora river, which an invader, wishing to make his way from Badakhshan into Kashmir by the most direct route, would necessarily have to pass through.

“The name Pashai is still borne to this day by a Muhamadanized tribe closely akin to the Siah-posh, settled in the Panjshir Valley and in the hills on the west and south of Kafiristan.  It has been very fully discussed by Sir Henry Yule (Ibid., I., p. 165), who shows ample grounds for the belief that this tribal name must have once been more widely spread over the southern slopes of the Hindu kush as far as they are comprised in the limits of Kafiristan.  If the great commentator nevertheless records his inability to account for Marco Polo’s application of ‘the name Pashai to the country south-east of Badakhshan,’ the reason of the difficulty seems to me to lie solely in Sir Henry Yule’s assumption that the route heard of by the traveller, led ’by the Dorah or the Nuksan Pass, over the watershed of Hindu kush into Chitral and so to Dir.’

“Though such a route via Chitral would, no doubt, have been available in Marco Polo’s time as much as now, there is no indication whatever forcing us to believe that it was the one really meant by his informants.  When Nigudar ‘with a great body of horsemen, cruel unscrupulous fellows’ went off from Badakhshan towards Kashmir, he may very well have made his way over the Hindu kush by the more direct line that passes to Dir through the eastern part of Kafiristan.  In fact, the description of the Pashai people and their country, as given by Marco Polo, distinctly points to such a route; for we have in it an unmistakable reflex of characteristic features with which the idolatrous Siah-posh Kafirs have always been credited by their Muhammadan neighbours.

“It is much to be regretted that the Oriental records of the period, as far as they were accessible to Sir Henry Yule, seemed to have retained only faint traces of the Mongol adventurer’s remarkable inroad.  From the point of view of Indian history it was, no doubt, a mere passing episode.  But some details regarding it would possess special interest as illustrating an instance of successful invasion by a route that so far has not received its due share of attention.” [See supra, pp. 4, 22-24.]

XXX., p. 164.

“The Chinese Toba Dynasty History mentions, in company with Samarcand, K’a-shi-mih (Cashmeer), and Kapisa, a State called Pan-she, as sending tribute to North China along with the Persian group of States.  This name Pan-she [Chinese] does not, to the best of my belief, occur a second time in any Chinese record.” (PARKER, Asiatic Quart.  Rev., Jan., 1904, p. 135.)