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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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The Uighur kingdom of Qocho 79<br />

country produces the five principal types of cereals....The nobility eat horseflesh,<br />

while the rest of the population eat mutton, ducks, and geese.In music,<br />

they play a sort of mandoline and a five-chord guitar.The men enjoy horseback<br />

riding and archery....Their calendar is the Chinese one published in the<br />

seventh year of the kai-huang period (= 587)....Those who like to take long<br />

walks never forget to bring along a musical instrument.There are some fifty<br />

Buddhist monasteries, and their names are written on their gates: these names<br />

were given to them by the Tang emperors.In one of the monasteries there is a<br />

large number of Buddhist books, the Chinese dictionaries Tang-yun and Yupien,<br />

and the Ching-in.There are in Kaochang (= Qocho) several collections<br />

of [Chinese] imperial decrees; in a locked box they keep a decree written personally<br />

by the emperor Tai-tsung [627–50].There is a Manichaean temple<br />

called Ma-ni-se or the Temple of the Pearl; the priests are from Persia, they<br />

strictly observe their own rites and qualify the Buddhist books as wai-tao (“alien<br />

doctrine”).There are no destitute people in the kingdom: those who cannot<br />

provide for themselves are cared for by public welfare.Many people reach<br />

advanced age. 1<br />

In other respects, however, a fairly rapid process of symbiosis and<br />

fusion did take place.The Indo-European “Tokharian,” deprived of its<br />

official status, faded into oblivion as the population adopted the newcomers’<br />

language.On the other hand, if the Uighurs were victorious on<br />

the linguistic level, they mostly succumbed, as we have said, to the<br />

natives on the religious and cultural level: they converted to Buddhism,<br />

and gave up their rune-like alphabet for the local one, which eventually<br />

and rather incongruously became known as the Uighur script.Their<br />

kingdom adapted and further developed the Buddhist civilization that<br />

they found there, with its hallmarks of tolerance, propensity for sacred<br />

figural art and painting, and a literature which was chiefly religious but<br />

which also included some belles-lettres and legal documents.<br />

Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity were allowed to exist beside<br />

the dominant Buddhist faith, and both – especially the former – have<br />

also left valuable examples of texts and art.The heyday of the Uighur<br />

kingdom of Qocho coincided with the final stage of the florescence of<br />

Buddhism in China, and the Silk Road functioned as one of the two<br />

principal avenues between that religion’s holy places in India and the<br />

Celestial Empire, with pilgrims and scholars frequently passing through<br />

way stations like Qocho.The result was a strong impact of Chinese<br />

Buddhist culture, and a lively translation activity of Sanskrit texts into<br />

Uighur Turkic through their Chinese versions.We may also add a third<br />

1 S.Julien, “Relation d’un voyage officiel dans le pays des Ouigours (de 981 à 983) par Wang-yente,”<br />

Journal Asiatique 4 (1847): 50–66.

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