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Self-Strengthening, episode 4

The Kingdom of Kashgar

While the Qing were fighting the Taiping, the Muslims of the northwest and southwest rose too, and by 1865 a soldier of fortune from Kokand named Yaqub Beg had made himself ruler of a kingdom at Kashgar, a sixth of the empire gone. The episode follows Yaqub Beg from his arrival with a handful of men to treaties with Russia and Britain, and Zuo Zongtang, sent west in 1867 to crush the Muslim risings in Shaanxi and Gansu, and asks whether the empire could, or should, win back its far west. It leans heavily on foreign observers, many of them British visitors to Yaqub Beg's court who wanted him to survive, with Zuo's side heard a little; the rebels' own words are thin.

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Yunnan Gansu Tashkent Hotan Kashgar Leh
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Transcript

Last time, a crowd in Tianjin killed the French consul, ten Sisters of Charity and between thirty and forty Chinese who worked for the mission and its orphanage, and the court paid for it with sixteen heads and a rebuilt cathedral. Zeng Guofan was moved to Nanjing, and Li Hongzhang took his place as viceroy of Zhili, where he would stay for a quarter of a century. It had begun when the French consul, in a fury, fired a pistol in front of the emperor's commissioner at Tianjin, and then, against the commissioner's advice, rushed out into a threatening crowd. And Li had warned the throne, a few years earlier, that China could not think of facing the foreigners while there were still rebel and Muslim risings in the provinces. This episode is about those Muslim risings. To tell it, we have to step back in time, and step a very long way west, away from the coast and the treaty ports and the gunboats, into mountains, deserts and oasis cities that most of the people in this story never saw. This episode also stands on the letters of the young British consular officer Augustus Margary, on Demetrius Charles Boulger's life of Yaqub Beg, and on the travels of the tea planter Robert Barkley Shaw. We start in the far southwest, in the mountains of Yunnan, a little after the fighting there had ended. Augustus Margary had left Shanghai for the Burmese frontier, and he wrote letters home to his parents as he went. He had been sent, that winter of 1874 and 1875, to meet a British expedition coming up from Burma, and he was one of the first Europeans to make that journey across southwest China. Hold on to his name, because he is going to matter to this season a great deal. In the old city of Dali, Margary visited the Manchu general in command, in what had lately been the palace of a rebel. That rebel had ruled a kingdom of his own at Dali for fifteen years, and the last stronghold of his people, Margary wrote, had become a scene of slaughter not long before. Yunnan is the great mountain province in China's far southwest, bordering Burma and Laos, rich in copper, silver and tin. And it had a large Muslim population, the Hui, Chinese speaking Muslims whose ancestors had come into China centuries before, and who lived alongside Han Chinese neighbours in the towns and the mining camps. In 1855, a dispute between miners, Muslim and non Muslim, set off a religious war in the province. The killing went both ways, and local officials, far from stopping it, sometimes joined in on the side of the Han. Out of that war came a Muslim state with its capital at Dali, led by a Hui scholar named Du Wenxiu, who took the title of sultan. For years the Qing could do little about it, with their armies and their silver tied down by the Taiping war and the other risings of those years. Du Wenxiu's state was not simply a Muslim war on the Han. He ruled from Dali as sultan, with Islamic law for his Muslim subjects, but he took Han Chinese and hill peoples into his government and his army, and many of his followers were fighting the Qing as much as anyone. For a time his state held much of western Yunnan, while the Qing clung to the provincial capital, Kunming, in the east. And the outside world noticed. Britain went as far as recognising the sultan at Dali as a ruler, just as it treated the kings of Burma and Siam as independent princes, though in Chinese eyes they were the emperor's vassals. When the Qing finally came back with strength, at the end of 1872 and the start of 1873, Dali fell, and the sultan took poison before he gave himself up. Of the Muslims who formed the garrison of Dali, thirty thousand were put to the sword in a deliberate massacre lasting three days. Their last stronghold, Tengyue, near the Burmese border, fell on the tenth of June 1873. By one estimate, the population of Yunnan fell in those years from sixteen million to no more than six. And the ruthless, indiscriminate killing that ended the rebellion is supposed to have revived the bubonic plague, which came back to one town of the province every year for some years afterwards. Margary also called on another general, and had a very civil reception. The general was famous for a daring feat: he had climbed the rocky heights behind the city and dropped down into its rear. Margary wrote, "I was very curious to see the intrepid man who scaled the rocky heights behind the great city, and dropped down in its rear." What he found was a man with a calm face like a sphinx's and a charming smile, and who had killed thousands of Muslims that day without quarter. It was the general's birthday when Margary called, and a play was being put on in front of the audience hall, so the interview took place in front of two or three hundred townspeople crowding the courtyard. Another officer came to visit with his little boy, and Margary, almost out of presents, gave the child a pair of tortoiseshell cufflinks, which delighted him. He liked these military men, he told his parents; they had none of the stuck up pride of the scholar officials. And the country he rode through was nothing like the China of the coast. Four stages further on he passed through a beautiful valley of a people called the Payi, a mixture of Chinese who had settled there five hundred years before and the Shan peoples who covered the whole country between Burma, Siam, Cambodia and China. They lived in little principalities under their own hereditary chiefs, with Chinese officials watching over them, and in each one Margary was the chief's guest. The women, he noticed, were not shy like Chinese women, and would talk to a stranger, and he could not keep his eyes off their towering turbans, which he compared to a grenadier's bearskin. This was the empire's edge: a frontier of many peoples, held by Qing generals and Qing garrisons, and only as loyal as the last war had made it. That is Yunnan: a charming general, a little boy with cufflinks, and a province emptied by war. Keep that picture in mind, because the same story, on a far larger map, was playing out across the whole of the empire's northwest.

Go north from Yunnan, past Sichuan, and you come to Shaanxi and Gansu, the old northwestern heartland of China. Shaanxi was where Chinese civilisation began, the land of the old capitals, and Gansu was the long narrow corridor that runs out from it to the northwest, between the Tibetan mountains and the Mongolian steppe, the road the Silk Road traders had taken for two thousand years. Both provinces had large Hui communities, Muslim towns and villages scattered among Han ones, sharing markets and water and old grudges. In 1862, with the Taiping war at its height and Taiping columns raiding into the northwest, those grudges broke open. In Shaanxi, Han militia bands raised to fight the Taiping turned on their Hui neighbours, and the Hui armed themselves in turn. In Gansu, a riot in a small village that year was put down with some loss of life, and then a much larger disturbance broke out at Hezhou, a Muslim centre in the province. Before the end of 1862, the Hui of Gansu had set up a government of their own. And then the killing started in earnest. The Muslim rising spread across the northwest, and unarmed Chinese were massacred right and left. The Han militias did the same to Muslim villages wherever they had the strength. The rebels took control of the whole of Gansu, and their forces pushed into Shaanxi and even as far as Hubei, in the middle of China. For years the Qing could do little but hold the big walled cities. In Shaanxi the Hui bands besieged the provincial capital, Xi'an, the ancient capital of China, and for about two years the city held out only behind its walls. The court sent one of its best Manchu generals to relieve it, and he broke the siege in 1863, only to die of his wounds the next year, fighting another rebel army in the province. After that, the Hui of Shaanxi, or those still alive, fled west into Gansu, and the war moved with them. The Hui were not one army under one leader. They were dozens of local bands, some led by religious teachers, some by village strongmen, some by men who had simply survived, and some of them were ready to make terms with the Qing while others fought to the end. Many of the most stubborn followed the New Teaching, a strict Sufi order with its centre at Jinjipu, a fortified town in the Ningxia region of northern Gansu, led by a teacher named Ma Hualong. Ma Hualong was a merchant as well as a holy man, and his followers traded along the Yellow River up into Mongolia, which made him rich and well informed. In 1866 he even made a formal submission to the Qing and took a new name that declared his loyalty, while his followers went on fighting, and nobody on either side was quite sure what his submission meant. A Sufi order was a Muslim brotherhood that followed a line of spiritual masters, and its followers owed their teacher a deep personal loyalty. I want to be careful here, because it is easy to tell this as a story of Muslim against Chinese, and it was more tangled than that. Hui and Han had lived side by side for centuries, often peacefully. What broke it was a collapsing state, an empire too busy with the Taiping to keep order, and local feuds that suddenly had nobody to stop them. The result was one of the great catastrophes of the century. Whole districts of Shaanxi and Gansu emptied, their towns burned and their people killed or fled, and the population of the northwest never recovered its old numbers in the lifetime of anyone in this story. And the rising did not stop at the edge of Gansu. It ran on, along the old roads, into Xinjiang.

Xinjiang means the new frontier in Chinese, and it was the newest and the farthest part of the Qing empire. The Qianlong Emperor's armies had conquered it in the late seventeen fifties, a vast region of mountains, deserts and oases larger than France, Germany and Spain put together. It falls into two halves. North of the great Tianshan range lies Zungharia, steppe and grassland, with the valley of the Ili River on its western edge, where the Qing military governor of the whole region had his seat. South of the Tianshan lies the Tarim Basin, a desert ringed with oasis cities, Kashgar, Yarkant, Khotan, Aksu and Kucha, whose people were Turkic speaking Muslims, farmers and traders of the old Silk Road. The Qing held all this with garrisons of Manchu bannermen and Chinese troops, and they ruled the southern oases through local Muslim nobles called begs, who collected the taxes and kept order for them. A beg was a local Muslim official or lord; it is also part of the name of the man this episode is about. It was always an expensive frontier, paid for with silver sent from the interior, and when the Taiping war cut off that silver, the garrisons were left to fend for themselves. It was also a place of punishment. Officials who fell out of favour in Beijing were sent to Ili in exile, and some of you may remember one of them, Lin Zexu, the commissioner who had tried to stamp out the opium trade at Guangzhou and been banished there after the war with Britain. At Ili, the Qing governor tried to fill his treasury by debasing the coinage and issuing paper money that was worth nothing, and that only added fuel to the flame. The Qing had also moved Muslim farmers from the southern oases up to the Ili valley, generations before, to grow grain for the garrisons, and those farmers, the Taranchi, had no love for the officials who taxed them. In 1863 and 1864 the Hui of Xinjiang rose, following the example of the Hui in Gansu, and the Turkic Muslims of the oases rose with them. In 1863 the Hui drove the representatives of China's rule out of a large part of the south. In 1864 the people of the southern oases threw off Chinese rule altogether. Chinese power collapsed, and the Chinese in the oasis cities were massacred, if anything with even greater cruelty than in Gansu. At Ili, the Qing governor's disciplined soldiers beat the rebel crowds in the open field, but within a few days a fortress fell to the insurgents. But each victory left him weaker, with no reinforcements coming from the east and no silver to pay the men he had. The governor held out as long as he could. In the end he destroyed himself, and many of his followers and his attackers with him, by setting fire to a mine of gunpowder under his own palace. Ili surrendered in January 1866, and a new government of Hui and Turkic Muslims was formed there. By then, the Qing had lost nearly all of Xinjiang. The towns of Kucha, Karashahr and Turpan, in the east of the southern basin, and the eastern part of the north, fell to the Hui. At Urumqi, the main Chinese city of the region, a Hui leader proclaimed himself king of a Muslim state of his own, and for a while the Hui towns of the east looked to him. Kashgar, the greatest of the western oases, fell to Büzürg, the heir of the family that had once ruled it. And here is where our man comes in, because Büzürg did not take Kashgar on his own.

Yakub Beg
Yakub Beg. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Büzürg was a Khoja, one of a line of Sufi saints who had ruled Kashgar before the Qing came. His family had spent the century since then in exile across the mountains, in the khanate of Kokand, and every so often one of them had crossed back over with an army to try to take Kashgar back. The most famous of those raids had come in 1826, when Büzürg's father led an army out of Kokand and took Kashgar and the western oases, and held them for some months before a Qing army drove him out; later he was caught, carried to Beijing and put to death. The raids went on into the next generation. In 1857 another Khoja chief was besieging the Chinese garrison of Kashgar, and when a German traveller came over the mountains from India, the chief had him murdered. The traveller's servants made it home to India with the news. So when the Qing collapsed in the south, the old family across the mountains saw its chance at last. Kokand was a Muslim khanate in the Fergana valley, west of the Tianshan, in what is now Uzbekistan, and by the eighteen sixties it was being swallowed, piece by piece, by Russia. In 1864 the man who really ran Kokand was its regent, Alim Quli, and he was fighting the Russians for his life. When word came from Kashgar that the Chinese were finished there and that a Khoja was wanted to lead the faithful, Büzürg asked Alim Quli for help to go and claim his family's old kingdom. Alim Quli could spare no army. But he gave Büzürg the services of one officer, to act as his commander in chief: an officer named Muhammad Yaqub, whom history knows as Yaqub Beg. Yaqub Beg was in his forties, a soldier who had risen in the service of Kokand, governed one of its frontier forts, and fought the advancing Russians on the steppe. And Alim Quli was glad to see the back of him. He was the one man in Kokand that Alim Quli feared as a rival, and sending him off on a hopeless errand to Kashgar was a way to be rid of him. In the last days of 1864, the two of them, the prince and the soldier, set out from Tashkent to recover a kingdom. Tashkent was the great trading city of the region, and within months it would fall to the Russians. They left Tashkent six strong. By the time they reached the city of Kokand, their numbers had risen to sixty eight. Sixty eight men, setting out to conquer a country. Few at the time would have bet on them. In the first days of January 1865, this band of adventurers crossed the Kokand frontier into the Tarim Basin, in the depth of the mountain winter. They had one great advantage: friends inside. The merchants from Kokand who lived and traded at Kashgar did more than anyone else to make the invasion succeed. Kashgar's old Muslim town was by then in the hands of a Kirghiz chieftain from the mountains, who had asked for a Khoja to give his rising a respectable face, and who soon found he had invited in more than he bargained for. Within weeks Yaqub Beg had pushed the Kirghiz chieftain out, and Kashgar's old town was his. The Qing garrison still held out in Kashgar's new city, the walled fortress where the Chinese troops and officials lived apart from the old Muslim town. Yaqub Beg besieged it for months. In the end the defenders agreed to surrender, but their commander would not. He gathered his family and his dependants around him and blew them all up with a mine he had built underneath them. This was in September 1865, nine months after Yaqub Beg had first arrived. The surrendered soldiers were made to profess Islam, and after their conversion they were called the New Muslims. Think about what that meant for those men, and what it said about who now held Kashgar. Many of them took the new faith, and some of them went on to serve in Yaqub Beg's own army. In a little more than twelve months Yaqub Beg held Kashgar, Yangi Hissar and Yarkant, the three great cities of the west. And now the prince he had come to serve was in his way. Büzürg turned out to have little interest in ruling, and plenty in pleasure. Yaqub Beg had him seized and held under guard, and some eighteen months later, when Büzürg was caught plotting his murder, banished him to Tibet. Yaqub Beg was publicly proclaimed ruler, and his friend the chief religious judge of the city, the Sheikh ul Islam, gave his blessing to the people's choice. In 1866 the emir of Bukhara gave him a title: Atalik Ghazi, the Champion Father. The man who had come over the mountains with sixty eight followers had made himself a king. And he was not done. A king at Kashgar with rivals all around him had two choices: swallow them, or wait for them to swallow him.

But the kingdom was not yet complete. To the east of Yarkant, under the mountains that wall off Tibet, lay Khotan, an old oasis famous for its jade and its silk, which had risen against the Chinese on its own and set up its own ruler. That ruler was Habibullah, an old religious scholar who had taken the title of khan. Habibullah's Khotan was a small, hospitable place. In 1865 its ruler had welcomed a British surveyor named Johnson, who was working in the mountains nearby, and given him a very hospitable reception. Drawn to the region, a British traveller and his companion pushed on as far as Ladakh in 1867, hoping to follow Johnson to Khotan with the help of some merchant of note who could introduce them. Ladakh was a high Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas under the rule of Kashmir, and the caravans from Central Asia came over the passes to trade there every summer. Beyond the snowy wall of the Himalayas lay a land that, as far as the visitor knew, almost no European since Marco Polo had seen. The road there climbed through narrow gorges and glacier passes onto the high table land of Tibet, at the height of Mont Blanc. It reminded him of a British soldier's remark about Abyssinia: "Well, if it is a table, it is a table with all the legs uppermost." Everything was bare gravel, mountains and plains alike, with here and there a few blades of harsh grass poking through the stones like porcupine quills. Water and wood were the great needs, and a guide would lead you into some fold of the hills where a stream from a distant snowfield fed a thicket of brushwood two feet high. On the way, the news met him. Khotan, he learned, had been invaded, and its chief killed by Yaqub Beg, the new ruler of Kashgar and Yarkant. The news of what had happened that winter had been brought over by the first party to cross the mountains when the snows and the spring floods let them through. Here is what had happened. Early in 1867 Yaqub Beg marched on Khotan, and he did not begin with a battle. He invited the old ruler and his party to his camp as guests, and he feasted them. During the evening meal, they were disarmed, and led out to execution. Then Khotan was his. It was as unnecessary as it was unjustifiable. And it was not forgotten. The memory of that massacre rankled for years among the people of Khotan and the nearby district of Sanju, where Yaqub Beg was least popular of anywhere in his kingdom. Its people neither forgot nor forgave; they only kept their grievances quiet while he was strong. With Khotan, the kingdom of Kashgar was his, the whole western half of the Tarim Basin, from the Pamirs to the edge of the great desert. Notice the pattern, because it runs right through Yaqub Beg's career. Remember that dinner, because it tells you a great deal about the man.

Then he turned east. His army took Kucha, but Yaqub Beg's own son, a young man of little more than twenty who had led the attack from the rear, was killed in the confusion as they entered the city. And then, one after another, the ruling councils of Karashahr, Turpan, Hami and Urumqi humbly sent in their submission. Where towns resisted, the districts around them were laid waste and their people massacred. By the end of 1867 his kingdom ran east as far as Kucha, and he ruled it from his capital at Kashgar. He made Kashgar known through the whole of Asia by the way he governed. So what was it like to live in his kingdom? The tea planter got to Kashgar in the end, and was kept there for months as a guest who was not allowed to leave. He crossed the mountains late in 1868, and he and another British traveller, a rival who came over at the same time, were the first Englishmen to reach Kashgar. Every morning, he wrote, all the ruler's officers came to pay their respects. Yaqub Beg sat on a raised floor in a sort of veranda, and his officers came up five at a time and saluted him, and he answered each group with the same words of greeting. Then the lesser officers and most of the garrison came up to the outer gate twenty or thirty at a time to salute him from a distance, and those with a petition waited until the ceremony was over to have it heard. After that, he usually went out and sat in the great roofed gateway of his fortress, where any of his subjects could come to him. And here is how the visitor described that: "They have the greatest freedom in speaking to him, but woe betide any too forward individual who takes advantage of this liberty to trouble his Majesty with trifling or untrue complaints." That sentence is the whole kingdom, really. Open, and terrifying. There was no fixed term in prison; every so often the jailer brought up the prisoners' names, and the king released those he thought had been punished enough. Prison was not much used anyway. Petty thieves had their hands cut off, and serious crimes were punished with death, by hanging for thieves and by the knife for the rest. One of the Afghan officers serving at Kashgar claimed that when Yaqub Beg thought his men were getting too independent, he would cut a few throats and leave the bodies lying about, to encourage the others. He had two old men as his chief councillors, but he generally took counsel of himself alone. His officers were ranked as commanders of five hundred and of a thousand, and his four viziers, his chief ministers, all came from the old Khoja family whose prince he had pushed aside. A vizier was a chief minister in a Muslim court. And yet, the visitor added, the treatment of the people was not tyrannical. Most of the city governors were Andijanis, not men of the oases, and they ran the country for him. This was a strict Muslim state. Yaqub Beg enforced the religious law, kept a large standing army, and taxed his oasis farmers heavily to pay for it. And he looked west, to the greatest Muslim power of the age, for recognition. He acknowledged the overlordship of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, Abdülaziz, and to make the point he issued new coins bearing the sultan's head. The sultan, for his part, gave the ruler of Kashgar the high title of Commander of the Faithful, and Yaqub Beg proclaimed himself emir of Kashgar. The Ottoman Empire was the great Muslim empire centred on what is now Turkey, and its sultan claimed to be the caliph, the leader of all Muslims. To the British envoys who came later, order was supreme, discipline was as plain in the palace as in the barrack yards, and his friends and kinsmen from Kokand, whose fortunes hung on his, were staunchly loyal. And the Chinese? The visitor was assured, he wrote, that the ruler never killed prisoners of war, except those he counted as political offenders. But he was afraid that a good many exceptions had to be made to that rule. Of the Chinese who had lived in the southern oases, all who would not become Muslims were killed, nearly forty thousand of them, it was said, soldiers and civilians together. Only a small part of them fell to Yaqub Beg's own sword, at the garrisons of the new city of Kashgar and a few others; the rest had already been massacred by the Hui and the local people before he came. So how did the people of the oases feel about their new king? Here the sources disagree. One British visitor, who watched him hear his subjects day after day, found a stern king whose treatment of his people was not tyrannical. Others describe a conqueror whose rule was resented, as at Khotan, long after the first killings were over, and whose wars laid whole districts waste. What is clear is that his kingdom rested on his army and on him, and that it had shallow roots among the people it ruled. And he was buying time for that army. His envoy to the Ottoman capital brought back rifles, cannon and a few Turkish officers to train his troops.

Zuo Zongtang
Zuo Zongtang. Boiarskii, Adolf-Nikolay Erazmovich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now let us go back east, to the man who would have to deal with all this. Zuo Zongtang was one of the great men of the age, and one of the most difficult. If Li Hongzhang was the man of the coast, Zuo was the man of the interior. He was a Hunanese scholar like Zeng Guofan, born in 1812, and he had failed the highest examinations three times and gone home to farm and read geography and military history instead. He came into the Taiping war late, in his forties, as an adviser and then a general under Zeng, and he turned out to be one of the best commanders the Qing had, proud, prickly and ferociously able. He was famously sure of himself, so sure that as a young man he signed his letters as a modern Zhuge Liang, the great strategist of the Three Kingdoms whom every Chinese reader knew. Zeng Guofan valued him and quarrelled with him, and the two great Hunanese ended the war barely on speaking terms. By the end of the war he had won back Zhejiang from the rebels, and as viceroy on the southeast coast he founded the Fuzhou Navy Yard, the empire's first great shipyard, in 1866. Then the court sent him west. He was in his middle fifties when he set out, and he would spend most of the rest of his working life in the northwest. In 1867 Zuo was given the task of crushing the Muslim risings of the northwest. His campaign began that year at Xiangyang in Hubei, and from there he would have to fight his way across two provinces, Shaanxi and Gansu. First, though, he had to help finish the Nian, the horsemen of the northern plain, and only in 1869 could he give the Muslims his full attention. Zuo had learned one lesson above all from the Taiping war. If he did not destroy the rebels root and branch, he reasoned, they might destroy him. So he did not hurry, and he did not make deals that left rebels in arms behind him. He went city by city, valley by valley, and he punished the cities that had rebelled with wholesale massacres and, at times, outright treachery. To feed his army so far from home, he would make his own troops grow their food, as they did through the long siege that ended his campaign. And he paid for it with money from the eastern provinces and loans from foreign banks, arranged for him through a Shanghai merchant who managed his supplies. He took the New Teaching's stronghold at Jinjipu after a long siege in 1871, and had Ma Hualong and his family executed. It had cost him dearly. His best general, Liu Songshan, a Hunanese like himself, was killed in front of Jinjipu, and Liu's young nephew, Liu Jintang, took over his troops, a name to remember for later in this season. He took the Hui centres in southern Gansu and Xining the next year, and some of the Hui leaders surrendered and came over to the Qing side, and lived. Those who surrendered, Zuo moved away from the Han, onto land of their own in the poorer hill country, so that the two peoples would not live mixed together again. And to keep his army armed so far from the coast, he set up an arsenal at Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu, where mechanics brought up from Guangzhou made and repaired guns and shells. Zuo, the man who had founded a navy yard by the sea, was now building self strengthening in the middle of Asia. The rising was too big for one army, and for a time it pulled in the other great general of the age as well. In 1870, Li Hongzhang himself had set out with his troops to put down the rebellion in Shaanxi, only to be called back east when the crowd at Tianjin changed everything. It was a costly march for Li in more ways than one: he left home with his troops that year and never saw his mother alive again. In the end, the war came down to the far western end of Gansu. The last rebel stronghold in Gansu was the city of Suzhou, far out at the western end of the province, and Zuo came before its walls in 1870. Zuo's armies laid siege to it, the siege dragged on for nearly three years, and in the end he brought up heavy foreign siege guns to finish it. In October 1873 he captured the city, reduced it to a heap of ruins, and killed men, women and children without distinction. Six years after he set out, the rebels had lost Shaanxi and their last stronghold in Gansu. It was the quiet of a graveyard, and Zuo had made it. Remember what Zuo had learned from the Taiping war: leave no root or branch. In the northwest, he had done exactly that. And it had cost a fortune. In that decade, Beijing put more than a fifth of all its customs revenue into the military campaigns in the west. But all of that had only brought Zuo to the edge of the desert. Beyond Suzhou lay the Gobi, and Hami, and Turpan, and Urumqi, and beyond them the kingdom of Kashgar. And while Zuo had been fighting his way across Gansu, the foreigners had been moving into Xinjiang from the other side.

Gerasim Alexeievich Kolpakovsky
Gerasim Alexeievich Kolpakovsky. С фотографии М. Буланже рисовал П. Ф. Борель, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Russia had been pushing into Central Asia for two decades, swallowing the Kazakh steppe and then the Muslim khanates one by one. It had taken Tashkent in 1865, the same year Yaqub Beg took Kashgar, and the Russian frontier now ran right up against the Ili valley. And the Ili valley, the Qing's chief seat in Central Asia, now had a Muslim ruler of its own, Abul Oghlan, in the town of Kuldja. Russia's governor in the region was General Kolpakovsky, the commander of the Seven Rivers country just north of Ili. The Ili valley was the richest land in all Xinjiang, well watered and green, and it held the passes through the Tianshan to the south, so whoever held Ili held the gate to the whole region. The Russians had watched Yaqub Beg's rise with alarm, and they resolved not to be beaten to Kuldja, either by him or by the Hui states to the east. In 1871 Russia moved troops into Kuldja and occupied the whole of the Ili region. The invading army was tiny, only one thousand seven hundred and eighty five men and sixty five officers. The campaign lasted only eight or nine days. On the fourth of July, the sultan of Kuldja presented himself at the Russian outposts and gave himself up. He had one request for General Kolpakovsky. He trusted in God, he said, and then: "If any crime has been committed, punish the sovereign, but spare his innocent subjects." The Russians took him away into their own territory, where he lived out his days on a Russian pension, a sultan without a country. The Russians declared slavery abolished in the territory, and that alone, they said, freed seventy five thousand people. Then came the diplomacy. Put yourself in the court's place when that news reached Beijing. Zuo was still fighting his way through Gansu, Li Hongzhang had been pulled back east to face the French at Tianjin, and the war in the west was already eating into the customs revenue. There was no army anywhere near Ili, and no prospect of one. To the Qing in Beijing, Russia gave an assurance: the occupation was temporary, and the territory would be given back to China when China was in a position to keep order there itself. Few in Saint Petersburg expected China ever to be in that position. The Qing, after all, had not held Ili for five years, and between Zuo's army and the Ili valley lay a thousand miles of desert and the whole of Yaqub Beg's kingdom. And on the spot, General Kolpakovsky's own proclamation annexed Kuldja in perpetuity, whatever had been promised in Beijing. So now the Qing had lost their far west twice over. The south to a Muslim kingdom, and the richest valley in the north to a European empire which had promised, very politely, to give it back one day. Hold on to Ili, because it is going to come back and nearly start a war.

Alexander von Kaulbars
Alexander von Kaulbars. ru:user:Netelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And Russia was not finished with Yaqub Beg. Having taken Ili, it wanted to know what kind of neighbour it now had, and on what terms it would deal with him. Above all, the Russians wanted to secure the trade of his kingdom for themselves, and to get there before the British. So in early May 1872, a Russian officer named Kaulbars set out from Kuldja with a large collection of presents for the ruler and his chief advisers, and reached Kashgar without mishap in June. Kaulbars had already explored the sources of the Syr Darya, and Russia could have sent no better diplomat to represent it for the first time at Yaqub Beg's court. At the first audience Yaqub Beg greeted the Russians with a flourish. He told them, "Sit upon my knees, on my bosom, or where ye like; for ye are guests sent me from heaven." Then he showed them his army. He had his troops put through their manoeuvres, and Kaulbars said he was surprised at their military exactitude. And Yaqub Beg made sure the point was not missed. He exclaimed, "I look upon the Russians as my dearest friends; if I had not, should I have shown you my military power?" Which is a very friendly way to say: look what I can do. The Russians came away impressed, and his care to hide how weak his hold on the country really was seems to have worked. What they wanted was not his friendship but his market, and a treaty that would keep the British out of it. On the eighth of June 1872, at the new city of Kashgar, Yaqub Beg set his seal to a treaty of commerce with Russia. Russian merchants could now enter his kingdom freely, paying a duty of two and a half per cent of the value of their goods. And by making the treaty, Russia had recognised Yaqub Beg's authority. It was the moment his kingdom started to look like a state that the powers would deal with as an equal. The mission raised him, in the eyes of the world, to the level of the emir of Afghanistan, which was rather more than his real position deserved. And it meant that the Qing were no longer only trying to win back a rebel province. They were trying to win back a country that other empires had begun to treat as real.

Thomas Douglas Forsyth
Thomas Douglas Forsyth. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The other empire was not going to let Russia have Kashgar to itself. To the British in India, Central Asia was a chessboard, and every Russian advance toward the mountains looked like a step toward India. The rivalry had a name, the Great Game, and Kashgar was now one of its squares. The British had tried once already: in 1870 a mission from India under Thomas Douglas Forsyth, a senior official of the Indian government, had crossed the mountains to Yarkant, only to find that Yaqub Beg was away at war and would not see them. Now Forsyth was sent again, with the important task of undoing the effects of the Russian treaty. This time it was a big mission: in camp there were three hundred people and four hundred animals. It brought soldiers and surveyors, a doctor who studied the people and their languages, and a train of presents for the emir. They crossed the high passes into his kingdom, and on one of them the last hundred feet of the climb was a sheer wall of ice, up which the horses and mules had to be lifted by hand; that one climb took more than a day. On the fourth of December 1873, Forsyth rode into Yaqub Beg's capital, the first English envoy ever to do so. They dismounted, as etiquette required, about forty paces from the gateway, and walked slowly in behind the chamberlain. And then, Forsyth found himself on the threshold of a very common looking room, bare of any ornament at all. A tall, stout, plainly dressed man came in. Forsyth took him for an official, perhaps a chamberlain, and bowed to him politely. The man seized him by both hands, and at that moment, Forsyth wrote, "I knew that I was standing before the far-famed ruler of Eastern Turkestan." The ruler broke a loaf of bread and shared it with them, and then said "Khush, amadeed", which means you are welcome. Forsyth had brought a letter from Queen Victoria in a casket of quartz. The emir took it with unconcealed satisfaction, several times repeating, "God be praised." And he said what he wanted plainly. He said, "I particularly desire the friendship of the English. It is essential to me." He meant it. He had Russia on one side and China gathering on the other, and Britain was the one great power that might want him to survive. On the second of February 1874, Yaqub Beg set his seal to a treaty of commerce with Britain. Its sixth article let the British appoint a representative at the court of the emir. Forsyth's officers stayed on into the spring, mapping the country and riding up toward the Pamirs, the high plateau where the borders of the Russian, British and Chinese worlds met. Then they went home over the passes, carrying the treaty and a very favourable picture of the emir and his kingdom. So by early 1874, the Muslim kingdom of Kashgar had treaties of commerce with both Russia and Britain. It had the Ottoman sultan's blessing and a letter from the Queen of England. Seen from Beijing, this looked very different from the way it looked in Calcutta or Saint Petersburg. Britain had already recognised a rebel sultan in Yunnan, and now it was dealing with a rebel emir at Kashgar the same way, and what it bred among the Chinese was a veiled hostility toward Britain. The Qing still claimed every oasis in Xinjiang as their own, and nobody at Kashgar, in Calcutta or in Saint Petersburg had asked them about any of it. Nor could the Qing do anything about it, yet. And on the other side of the desert, at Suzhou, stood Zuo Zongtang and his army, with Hami and the kingdom of Kashgar still ahead of them. So here is the question this episode leaves hanging over the court in Beijing. Could the empire win back its far west? And even if it could, should it, when every tael spent marching across the desert was a tael not spent on ships and guns to defend the coast, where the foreigners actually came from? That argument is coming, and Zuo and Li Hongzhang will be on opposite sides of it. Zuo would argue that Xinjiang shielded Mongolia, and Mongolia shielded Beijing, so that to give up the far west was to leave the capital open. Li would argue that the empire could not afford to fight in the desert and on the coast at once, and that the coast was where the danger lay. Both of them were right, which is what made it such a hard choice. It is one of the great questions of this season: should the empire look inland, to its old frontiers, or out to sea, where the new enemies came from? In this episode, the answer was being given by events. Out west, the frontier had been lost, and a Qing general was grinding his way back toward it. On the coast, the foreigners were already inside the gates. So next, we go back east, to the coast, where Li Hongzhang, now the court's man for anything modern, was looking for a way to win back not land but money, starting with steamships. Next time, merchants and students: Li's China Merchants company, and a Yale graduate who takes a party of Chinese boys to New England.

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