XXXVI., p. 188.

KHOTAN.

Sir Aurel Stein writes (Ancient Khotan, I., pp. 139-140):  “Marco Polo’s account of Khotan and the Khotanese forms an apt link between these early Chinese notices and the picture drawn from modern observation.  It is brief but accurate in all details.  The Venetian found the people ’subject to the Great Kaan’ and ‘all worshippers of Mahommet.’  ’There are numerous towns and villages in the country, but Cotan, the capital, is the most noble of all and gives its name to the kingdom.  Everything is to be had there in plenty, including abundance of cotton [with flax, hemp, wheat, wine, and the like].  The people have vineyards and gardens and estates.  They live by commerce and manufactures, and are no soldiers.’  Nor did the peculiar laxity of morals, which seems always to have distinguished the people of the Khotan region, escape Marco Polo’s attention.  For of the ’Province of Pein’ which, as we shall see, represents the oases of the adjoining modern district of Keriya, he relates the custom that ’if the husband of any woman go away upon a journey and remain away for more than twenty days, as soon as that term is past the woman may marry another man, and the husband also may then marry whom he pleases.’

“No one who has visited Khotan or who is familiar with the modern accounts of the territory, can read the early notices above extracted without being struck at once by the fidelity with which they reflect characteristic features of the people at the present day.  Nor is it necessary to emphasize the industrial pre-eminence which Khotan still enjoys in a variety of manufactures through the technical skill and inherited training of the bulk of its population.”

Sir Aurel Stein further remarks (Ancient Khotan, I., p. 183):  “When Marco Polo visited Khotan on his way to China, between the years 1271 and 1275, the people of the oasis were flourishing, as the Venetian’s previously quoted account shows.  His description of the territories further east, Pein, Cherchen, and Lop, which he passed through before crossing ‘the Great Desert’ to Sha-chou, leaves no doubt that the route from Khotan into Kan-su was in his time a regular caravan road.  Marco Polo found the people of Khotan ‘all worshippers of Mahommet’ and the territory subject to the ‘Great Kaan’, i.e.  Kublai, whom by that time almost the whole of the Middle Kingdom acknowledged as emperor.  While the neighbouring Yarkand owed allegiance to Kaidu, the ruler of the Chagatai dominion, Khotan had thus once more renewed its old historical connexion with China.”

XXVI., p. 190.