A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

80 A history of Inner Asia
factor here, the frequenting of Qocho by Sogdian merchants: for the city
was one of the most important hubs of the Silk Road trade and concomitant
travel – an aspect that intensified its physiognomy as a gallery of
cultures and religions.
Some of this art and literature has survived, mostly stored in temples
at Qocho or other sites, such as the cave monasteries of nearby Bezeklik
or the more distant Kyzyl and Tunhuang; since the beginning of the
twentieth century these cultural depositories have been the goal of
archeological expeditions from several European countries as well as
Japan and now China itself.The finds brought back have become a treasure-trove
for philologists and cultural historians, and their study and
publication still continues.We have already mentioned the interest
which texts in “Tokharian” hold for the study of this unique Indo-
European tongue; here we need to stress the role played by the much
larger collections of texts in Uighur Turkic, dating from between the
tenth and fourteenth centuries: they are invaluable documents for
Turcologists, but also for historians of Manichaeism, a religion persecuted
to extinction and even to the destruction of all trace of it in the
areas of its origin and subsequent spread, whether in Iraq, Egypt, or
France.In a previous chapter we have mentioned the transformation
wrought by conversion to Manichaeism among the Uighurs during their
imperial period in Mongolia (744–840).The process resumed in this
second and much longer incarnation of Uighur statehood, and the
psychological effect is palpable in the mass of Manichaean and Buddhist
literature written in Uighur.
As we have said, the philological interest of this literature is at least as
great, for it documents the rapid process of Turkicization of the area.A
characteristic case is the aforementioned biography of Hsüan-tsang.In
addition to the Chinese original, there is also an Uighur translation
made in 932 by a certain Singqu Sali of Bishbalik.By then Buddhism
had peaked in China, and the flow of Buddhist missionary and cultural
activity, which had been reaching Sinkiang from India, now began to
reverse itself and stream in from China.Thus many Uighur texts, originally
Sanskrit, were actually translated through their Chinese intermediary.In
the case of Hsüan-tsang’s biography the Chinese version was
of course the original.It may be worthwhile to quote one of the two colophons
of the Uighur translation in order to illustrate the linguistic
climate as it was perceived by its contemporaries:
Now in the blessed great land of China the disciple Hui-li, who has fully penetrated
the Doctrine of the Three Treasuries, became inspired and created [this