The History of China - #313 - Qing 44: Frontiers, Pt. 2: The Vastness Devours Us - Mountain Monasteries & Money Pits

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

From the koan chants of monasteries tucked between Himalayan peaks, to wending caravan paths stretching endlessly across the arid expanses of the Taklamakan & trackless steppes of Dzungaria, we finish out our look at the four primary frontier regions of the Qing Empire as of 1800, where they'd come from, how they were operated, & the imperial tonnage of headaches for Beijing that came with both.Tibet - 00:01:21Xinjiang - 00:22:08 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and depression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history.

Look for the age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the history of China. Episode 313, Frontiers Part 2, The Vastness Devours Us, Mountain Monasteries, and Money Pits. Tibet is a land where the king's does not rule the monks, and the monks do not rule the king. Yet both rule the people. Jesuit scholar Ippolito desideri, Notizier Histori del Tibet, 1722. To lose Xinjiang would be a lasting shame. To recover it, we'll empty our coffers, but it must be done. General Zhou Zhong Tang, memorial to the Tongja Emperor, 1895.

In the deserts and the mountains, the state grows thin. Lille U. Travel Diaries of the Northwest, 1903. Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune, 1981. In the last episode, we covered Two of four of the Qing Empire's major, and increasingly majorly problematic, frontier regions,

that, by the turn of the 19th century, were already beginning to lay quite heavily upon the imperial dais. Manchuria, the beating ethnic core of the dynasty itself, now awash in and at risk of, being fully subsumed by the tide of non-indigenous Chinese settlers. And Mongolia, homeland of the cousin and partner people of the Manchus, but who were finding themselves increasingly rendered as subjects of the very regime they were instrumental in building, and hopelessly lost amid the sweeping scale of economic changes, leaving their traditional nomadic lifestyles in the dust. Today, then, we're aiming at finishing out this quartet of problematic acquisitions,

first with the most remote, and, till then at least, the least overall affected of the territories, distant hermetic Tibet. And then we'll complete the circle, returning at last to what I've referred to before as the anti-crown jewel of the empire, the ravening bottomless money pit in the sands of the Taklamakan, the new frontier of Xinjiang. So, let's launch right in. Almost unique among the territories administered by China, Tibet comes preloaded with an entire array of what we might generously call assumed knowledge and prejudicial suppositions.

And that remains more or less equally true, regardless of which side one comes from to the plateau, be that the east or the west. The name itself strikes many with a sense of strong emotional attachment one way or the other, to the point that it has itself become something of a political sticking point, and even more so in recent years. Though known to itself as Bo or Poe, it is very rarely called that name outside of the plateau itself. This is due in part, and I'm just going to come out and say it, because the way that name has been romanized. The most common phoneticization you'll come across for Tibetan is the Wiley version, created by Torel V. Wiley in 1959, and cursing everyone attempting to pronounce Tibetan names of anything ever since. Seriously, how does one get B-O-D out of a word pronounced as Woh or Poi? Your guess is as good as mine. Instead, it is referred to by both the West and the East by their own exonyms.

The name Tibet likely stems from the Mongolian name for the region, Tibiet or Tobed, and traces its use in English back to right around the time we're dealing with right now, 1827. The Chinese name for the region is Xi Zhang, literally meaning Western Zong, with Zang being the traditional name for the entire Himalayan Plateau region, including not just the modern autonomous region of Tibet, but neighboring Qinghai province as well. Hence, the location marker in the Chinese word, Lasha sits in the westernmost portion of Old Zhang.

This term has seen use in China since the late Ming Dynasty in the 1590s, whereas prior to that, it was referred to during the Song and Tong eras as Tufan or Tuba, far closer to the indigenous Bo or Poi. Tibet is probably most well known today for a few things. its remoteness, its isolation from the outside world, and its history of political and religious resistance to Chinese domination. In fact, apart from the sheer geographical factor of it being deep in the Himalayan highlands and thus definitely remote, the other two are far more recent and modern factors than many realize. Indeed, it has been argued that, to put it in the words

of Snellgrove and Richardson, quote, the 19th century is the only period when Tibet might just be called a forbidden land." As of 1800, it can be estimated that the whole population of ethnic Tibetans, who called themselves Boshya, was probably no more than 6 million, and with 4 million of those living under the direct administration of the Lawson government. By way of comparison, modern estimates put the total Tibetan population today at about 7.7 million worldwide, with just a little over 7 million in China, and the PRC reports 3.6 million people living in the Tibetan autonomous region as of 2020, 86% of which are Tibetan, rounding

out to a cool 3.1 million. That small but relatively stable population was traditionally supported by a combination of animal husbandry, especially with the Tibetan yak, and far more importantly, accounting for about five-six of the people's livelihoods, high plains cereal agriculture. Their food crops consist largely of buckwheat, peas, radishes, and mustards at higher altitudes, while the lower valleys proved suitable for other wheat varieties, fruits like apricots, peaches, and pears, and walnuts. Yet by far, the most important crop grown across Tibet must be the hardy, humble stock of barley, which can be reliably grown at altitudes as high as 14,000 feet. Sitting as it was in the very umbra of the largest rain shadow on planet Earth,

irrigation was obviously key to sustaining the people of this ever-difficult land. Quote, landowners who held estates from the Lhasa government cooperated in maintaining the systems of canals and conduits, while peasants supplied the labor in proportion to the size of their holdings. Good irrigated land was kept in almost continuous production, end quote. Sitting as it does astride the very roof of the world at the very juncture of Asia and India, it's little surprise that Tibet, for its small population, has historically encompassed multitudes. The westernmost regions of what have been held as the Tibetan cultural sphere, Ladakh, Kashmir, and Baltistan, for instance, were heavily influenced and peopled by the Shia Muslims

since as early as the 1300s. Meanwhile, the more central and eastern portions of Boi have ever been what most of us are far more familiar with, Lamaist Buddhists, of the same type, and indeed the same-parent church of Mongolian Buddhism, the Gelagspa, or Yellow Hat sect. This actually extends rather further than we might think, all the way out of the Tibetan highlands and into the jungle valleys of China's southwestern edges of Qinghai, Yunnan, Burma, and Batan. In the easternmost section, Omdo, had of course been fully rolled into the Qing system by the Kangxi Emperor as Qinghai, the Chinese translation of the region's Mongol name,

Kokonor, meaning the teal sea. Quote, this was a superintendency of China's Gansu province, and was inhabited by Tibetans, Olued Mongols, several smaller indigenous ethnic groups, and an increasing number of Han Chinese colonists, end quote. Their administration under Qing rule was very slack indeed, and for the most part, the indigenous peoples were left to their own systems and devices, paying tribute both to the dragon throne in Beijing and to the golden lion throne in Lhasa. Tibet proper, what we think of it today, consisted of four main regions, the western districts

of Kham, the east of which have been rolled into Shanghai, the central provinces of Wu and Tsang, the seat of Lhasa itself, the province of Nagari, and the largely uninhabited northern pastures called Changthang, both of which served as the kingdom's primary pasture lens. At the head of all this, both politically and religiously, was of course the Dalai Lama in his Potala Palace. At the beginning of the 19th century, this living Badasatva of compassion was in his eighth incarnation, living to the age of 46 and dying in 1804. The 9th Dalai Lama would reign for a subsequent 11 years until 1815 and the 10th until 1837, which pretty well encapsulates the period of focus we're going for today.

By this point, the Lamaist government, with Qing backing, had substantively transformed Tibet's hereditary territorial chiefs into a predominantly bureaucratized aristocracy. Still, it resisted Chinese encouragement to further liberalize its officialdom into allowing commoners into its hallowed halls of power, and maintained itself as a centrally administered thearchy. Nobility was intrinsically tied to birth, and the possession of agricultural lands and government posts. Quote, from the point of view of the Dalai Lama's government, nobility did not exactly

exist among the nomads or other pastoralists. Noble status was, in theory, connected exclusively with government service, and sons who did not succeed their father's positions were supposed to revert to the status of commoners unless they became monks, end quote. In practice, one hardly needs to stretch the imagination to think of creative ways that layabout and non-inheriting sons might find to skirt that little rule and avoid the dreaded commoner lifestyle. The civil administration system was set up, after all, to essentially maximize the deference and liberties allowed to the Lamaist nobility, whatever that might incur on the laypeople. It was, unsurprisingly, a system rife with stratification and abuse.

Quote, officials from the high nobility, who came from richer families, received large incomes while serving in low-ranking posts, while officials from poorer families had lower incomes, even while serving in upper echelon positions. officials were allowed to borrow funds from the government on favorable terms and invest them at higher rates of interest. As tax farmers, they paid stipulated amounts of revenue to the laws of government, but kept all collections in excess of these stipulated amounts. When being transferred, officials released special government allowances and were entitled to services

from the peasantry. They also found it easy to abuse their authority, requisitioning transportation service from the peasantry to carry items of their own private trade. quote. Noblemen commonly held positions of special privilege within the monastic establishment. Reincarnations were often found among the nobility, and noble monks had opportunities that were generally denied to monks of common origin. Monk officials from noble families enjoyed greater prestige than their fellows, and received more financial support from home. The monastic population of Tibet was, unsurprisingly, enormous relative to its overall population. Of the perhaps 2 million men living in the kingdom, it's estimated that about 760,000 of them, or just under 40%, became monks affiliated with the more than 2,500 monasteries dotting the plateau.

Males could join the clergy nearly irrespective of class, with a notable exception of the untouchable classes of funerary corpse cutters, butchers, fishermen, ferrymen, smiths, and even in the westernmost reaches, musicians, and, And people with physical deformities. As they were expected to at least partially pay for themselves, as well as monastic fees and providing periodic feasts for their congregations prior to any sort of promotion up the ecclesiastical ladder, support they received from their households went a long way in determining who made it high up the ranks, i.e. the already wealthy nobility, versus who stayed at the lowest levels of the piety, stuck to ministering to the common laity. And the very top positions, well, they were eternally sealed off from any new blood rising into their ranks. They weren't offices, after all, but incarnations of eternal entities. It was, as would be made very much political hay over the course of the subsequent 20th century, a very top-down feudal hierarchy with very few guardrails and in dire need of renovation. Such would be the basis of many of the justifications behind the tightening of controls of the area in the 1950s and beyond.

The Qing Empire's influence over Tibet reached its zenith as of about 1792, when the Qianlong Emperor had directly militarily intervened in the then-raging Tibetan-Nepalese war. But once that personal imperial attention had been turned to other pressing matters, overall Sinomanchurian influence began to ebb as well. Official Qing influence was overseen by the chief bannerman official, the Ambon, his assistant, and a small garrison in Lhasa. On paper, this acted as a direct conduit back to Beijing, from which the emperor was to personally name and appoint all replacements for vacancies within the local administration. In reality, this was little utilized. The emperor had better things to do closer to home, after all, and the respective ambands mostly just did their own thing, with the occasional report back to the Capitol for the official thumbs up on whatever their actions had been.

The specific relationship between the Qing Emperor and the Dalai Lama was, of course, a particular import and focus in all this. It was also one of deeply and fundamentally different perspectives. From the vantage point of Lhasa, the distant temporal sovereign of Qing was, quote, merely the Lama's secular patron, end quote. The holy incarnation of the very Bada Satva of compassion was in every way superior in position and nobility than a mere earthly potentate, obviously. Beijing's on the whole situation ship was rather different. The view from the dragon throne was that the Dalai Lama, quote, was a mighty ecclesiastic and a holy being, but nonetheless the emperor's protege, end quote. Now, to be clear here, both sides were

aware, or, especially in the case of Beijing, at least aware enough, of this little difference of rhetoric, and likewise, politically savvy enough to mostly leave well enough alone, so long as it was working for both sides. And given the undeniable mismatch in real-world power dynamics, Lhasa was for the most part content to not raise much of a fuss over Beijing's interpretation of their special relationship. The major issue for them, over time, was how to reconcile the interests of the Tibetan aristomonastic ruling classes, which were broadly aligned with those of Beijing, and those of the Tibetan populace as a whole, which were broadly hostile to Qing influence.

From Fletcher, quote, a perennial issue of this kind was the method of selection of reincarnations. In 1793, the Qianlong emperor had sent a golden urn to Lhasa, ordering that thenceforth the names of the leading candidates for recognition as reincarnations of the Dalai Lama, the Panchan Lama, and other high-incarnate lamas should be written on slips of paper and placed in the urn, then drawn by lot. The traditional method of selection had been based on a series of tests, such as the ability of the infant candidate to distinguish objects that had belonged to his previous incarnation. The winning candidate had customarily been a nobleman on whom the chief Tibetan officials had agreed, end quote.

The Qing's prerogatives were hostile to this practice on a number of lines. First, it flew in the face of established imperial procedure of bureaucratic technocracy that selected, by their own worldview at least, the best prepared candidates from everyone, including the commoners. Moreover, the closed-off Tibetan selection process threatened to exclude the very concept of imperial authority, which was unthinkable for such a powerful post within the realm. As such, the golden urn would become the symbolic link between the body imperial in Beijing and the Lamaist authority in Tibet, and a point of considerable friction

ever after. Lassa was obliged to reassure the local populace that the old methods were of course still being used to seek out and find their holiest of holies reborn, while at the same time reassuring Beijing that no, no, they were actually using the golden urn in a totally above-board transparent lottery process. It would never become terribly comfortable or believable for either side. Quote, Tibetans were willing to use the urn to keep up a semblance of Qing protection when imperial power was too weak to exercise any real authority. When the Qing were strong, however, the Tibetans left some doubt about the urn's use so as to emphasize Tibetan autonomy, end quote.

The ebbing tide of Qing power coincided with its overall loss of actual authoritative reach into Tibet over the course of the 19th century. Though the high watermark of imperial interest in the region had been 1793, by 1808, they were back to allowing the Tibetans to use the non-earned selection process to pick the 9th Dalai Lama, and beginning to get increasingly irregular with their provisioning and rotation of even their own garrison troops. More and more, official payments simply failed to materialize from Beijing, and the soldiers stationed there were forced to take loans from the local Lamaist authorities just to cover

their own expenses. And once that got too habitual, and the repayments too unreliable, the Tibetans just refused them further loans. Moreover, since true protations, usually set at three-year intervals across the Empire, fell off along with those payments, those that were already there were just kind of stuck. Many of the soldiers wound up marrying Tibetan women and starting families, which drove them further into poverty, and even more worryingly for the Qing, potentially muddying their loyalties. By just 1815, the Tibetan Qing garrison's purse had been starved for so long

that even the use of gunpowder had to be curtailed, and reductions were made in the frequency of drills. A final important point before moving on from these frigid holy peaks must be the ever-present headache for the Qing government of how to deal with and respond to the perennial issue of Nepal. And, surprise, surprise, if it isn't our old friends from the coast, the British East India Company. Nepalese merchants were long allowed to trade in Tibet. The British were absolutely not. and Lassa intended to keep it that way.

The British, however, saw the Himalayas less as a barrier than as a tantalizing commercial backdoor, a potential route into the Chinese interior, to its holdings of bullion, and even to new tea-planting zones. This posed a double danger. Any British advance into the region might threaten Tibet directly, but worse, it might prompt another round of Qing quote-unquote assistance of the sort Tibet had already endured over the course of the 1792 Nepalese War. That intervention had reasserted imperial authority over Lhasa, and nobody in Tibet was eager to invite a repeat performance from Beijing. The Nepalese, for their part, were perfectly willing to brandish

their tributary ties to Beijing whenever it suited them, especially during their war against the British in 1814-16. But the Qing response made the limits of imperial protection painfully clear. The Ambon bluntly informed Kathmandu that the emperor, quote, is not concerned with whether you honor the British, end quote, and that the Qing troops would not cross the frontier on Nepal's behalf. Paying tribute was acceptable. Direct entanglement, not so much. For the Qing court, inner Asia was a strategic buffer, not a revenue source or zone of active governance. By the early 1800s, British India, Nepal, Coquand, Maktem Zada networks in the Tarim Basin, and Russia, all pressed against the Qing Empire's frontiers. But from Beijing's vantage point,

these were still just distant murmurs, barely audible through the haze of its own increasingly frenetic domestic concerns. And so, Tibet found itself in a familiar yet precarious position, too weak to confront its own neighbors directly, and too wary to influence its own neighbors directly, and too wary to invite the Qing back in to do it for them. And besides, too remote for Beijing to pay much heat in any event. And with Tibet perched in this uneasy balance, remote, internally rigid, and only loosely tethered to the Qing, we now descend from the high plateau into an entirely different frontier. Not one marked by monasteries and aristocratic lineages, but by deserts, oasis towns,

and a financial black hole that the Qing court could neither abandon nor afford. Xinjiang, the umpire's most costly prize, awaits us. The sheer expansiveness of Xinjiang is staggering, on a scale that few really comprehend. We can boil it down to numbers. It's 1.6 million square kilometers. Or we can use figures. It's about one-sixth of China's total landmass. But that sort of abstraction can distract from just how immense it really is. After the Sahara, the second largest shifting sands desert in the world is the Taklamakon Desert, neatly contained within, and indeed virtually bisecting this one region.

It stands to reason, then, that it's not truly one region at all, but instead a fusion of two very distinct zones, diverging from the dizzying heights of the Tianshan range, the very mountains of heaven. South of these peaks is eastern Turkestan, a region, as Fletcher terms it, quote, belonging to the world of the sown, end quote, while north of the Tianshans is what had once been Zhenggaria, one of the last bastions of the once-endless open-step grasslands. These two regions, following the Qianlong Emperor's conquest in the 1750s, were designated by the Qing Empire into two military circuits, Tian Shan Nanlu and

Beilu, that is, South Circuit and North Circuit, respectively. This New Dominion, itself conceived and administered as an extension of the by now thoroughly integrated Gansu province, was rich in jade, gold, copper, and other earth minerals, but also renewable riches, such as cotton, pasture, and farming lands. It had, on paper, all the elements it needed to really be the crown jewel of the Manchu-Ching imperial project. Treasures abound, seemingly just there for the plucking. Yet, with these visions of glittering prizes in the desert, came an even greater wealth

of political, social, and military headaches for the ages. As with their Oirot-Mongol predecessors, Great Qing established its own administrative HQ in the Eili Prefecture, renaming the central city there to Ning Yun, though it still just as frequently went by its older Kazakh-Muzon. name Gulja, as well as beginning construction of a wholly new city even further west, Hui Yuan. This new construction would come to be the seat of the Qing military governor, or Jiang Jun, as of 1762, and was quickly nicknamed Little Gulja by its residence. Yet, for all the trappings and terminology of a bureaucratized imperial administration,

Xinjiang remained in function little more than a massive military garrison operating under martial law. In classic Qing style, this supposed authority also extended out virtually indefinitely, claiming loose rain over far-flung regions well beyond actual Chinese control, such as Kokand, Bukhara, and Afghanistan. The seeming contradiction of claiming peoples and territories that one neither did nor could actually govern was smoothed over by the Qing telling themselves that it was their own policies that stipulated that they should, quote, interfere as little as possible in the native people's internal affairs, end quote. This likewise meant that the imperial officials bunkered in Ning Yuan and little Golja

had very little reason or impetus to ever waste their precious time on trivial things, like learning how to communicate with such far-flung peoples. With Ning Yuan functioning as the central hub, the two greater regions of Xinjiang were each administered more locally from the garrisons at Oremchi in the north, and Kashgar to the northeast. These garrisons fielded a combined force of anywhere between 10 to 23,000 bannermen troops at any given time, along with nomadic auxiliaries from other frontier regions, although they mainly served the banners as horse and cattle breeders and suppliers to the regular troops, as well as being reinforced by green standard troops out of Gansu and Shanxi to the east. At the turn of the 19th century, on the eve of Kocan's rise to regional power,

and before Russia and Britain began to make themselves felt in Qing Central Asia, Eastern Turkestan, protected as it was by the Tianshans and the Pamirs, seemed to the Qing government as a political and military cul-de-sac. The imperial authorities focused their attention instead on the defense and development of the Tianshan Northern Circuit and regarded Altishar, the six cities of Eastern Turkestan, to the south, including Hami and Turfan, mainly as a huge tax farm to support the army. And support, it would definitely need plenty of. Garrisoning Xinjiang was, from the very outset, a tremendously costly endeavor.

The annual pay for the soldiers alone amounted to roughly three million silver tails, an amount already dwarfing the regional tax revenue, even in the best of times. A figure Fletcher uses for the amount drawn from the Alta Shar, again, Again, the area designated as the tax farm meant to fund the rest of the operation, amounted to, in money and raw extracted or combined, about 13.5 million pool, or local copper cash coins called Hong Qian, or red cash, by the Chinese, as they used local red-color copper, which exchanged over to the imperial currency at a rate amounting to just 62,000 silver

entails. Just under 0.5% of the necessary revenue to keep those troops paid up. Between that, foreign trade duties, annual grain revenues from Jungarian production, and all other forms of internal revenue generation, even for all that, suffice it to say it was never, and never would be, even remotely capable of paying for itself. The pastoral territories of the Tianshan Northern Circuit were culturally and historically an extension of Mongolia. Hereditary Jassaks ruled the nomad population under the watchful eyes of garrison officials in Ili, Kurkara Usu, Tarbaghachi, and Karashar. Like most of their Mongol brethren to the east and Tibet to the south,

its population were devotees of the Gelagspa Yellow Church of Buddhism, which, as elsewhere, played a very important role in daily cultural life. The Qing throne, as paramount patron of the faith, thus made regular gifts to the monasteries and temples that dotted the western steps, just as it did in its other primarily Lamaist regions. Even further west, out beyond the horizon of even the guard posts along the outermost edges of the imperial frontier, the steps stretched endlessly onward, sparsely populated, as they ever were, here and now by the Kazakhs, a Turkic-speaking Islamic nomad people.

They existed beyond any bound or interference from the self-described suzerain of this trackless expanse, and were regarded within Beijing as foreign tributaries rather than subjects, due to make their envoy to Qing lands to present their imperial gifts every three years. For that, they enjoyed a two-way trade monopoly with Qing, that is, the Qing only allowed the Kazakhs to trade with their Chinese agents, and the regional authorities of Jungaria guaranteed their exclusive, rights to do business across northern Xinjiang. This was all, of course, just about as theoretical as it was theatrical. In practice, eh, business is business. The Kazakh's specific status as tributaries

rather than vassals or subjects afforded them additional such rights and responsibilities besides. As such, they could pasture within the imperial frontier, and even could, if winters proved severe, even do so in the areas of the guard post lines. Not for free, mind you. Such considerations cost them, a flat 1% fee of their primary trade good, horses, each year. Yet because they retained their official status as foreigners, quote, the Qing named no Jasaaks among them

and made no attempt to divide them into banners. Those Kazakhs who pastured within the imperial frontier came and went at will, and while their chiefs enjoyed the benefits of being Qing tributaries, most of them simultaneously acknowledged themselves as clients of Russia." The closer tracks of Jungaria were populated, or more precisely, had been repopulated by the Qing authorities, with a variety of agriculturally productive peoples, a major part of Qing strategy across Xinjiang overall. After destroying the Jungar Khanate root and stem, the Qing began repopulating its empty pastures, with groups that they hoped would feed the armies

and stabilize the region. First came the Taranchis, Muslim farming families brought up from the oasis of eastern Turkestan to work the rich soil around Ili. By 1800, more than 34,000 taranches were growing grain for Qing troops. Alongside them were various military colonies, Green Standard troops, Sibbo, Solon, and Chahar Bannerman, all given land. to farm, in theory, while remaining soldiers in practice. They didn't produce enough. So the Qing dug new canals, expanded irrigation, and steadily turned Jungaria into an agricultural gridwork. But an even bigger demographic shift came from the east. By the early 1800s, tens and then hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese and Chinese Muslims, known variously as Tungens or Hui,

migrated into northern Xinjiang, attracted by generous land grants and economic opportunity. Around Urumqi, farmland expanded tenfold between 1775 and 1808. Craftsmen, miners, merchants, and farming families poured in, creating a chain of Chinese-speaking settlements across the northern foothills. The Tongan Muslims played a special role. Chinese-speaking Sunnis from Shanxi and Gansu, they sat culturally between China and the Muslim world, familiar with Chinese administration, able to trade with Kazakhs and Central Asians, and crucially trusted by the Qing officials. They opened restaurants and tea shops, ran caravans,

married Han women, and soon became one of the most influential communities in Ili and Arumchi. That growing prominence would later have explosive consequences. Meanwhile, Jungaria's mineral wealth, gold, copper, coal, and more, attracted private miners despite Qing attempts to officially limit its extraction. And administratively, the region wasn't even unified. Ili was run directly by the Xinjiang military governor, while Urumqi, barcole, and turfon were treated as extensions of Gansu province. Even on paper, this place called Xinjiang,

wasn't a single place. If the Northern Circuit was a story of military colonies, Bannerman, and the frontier being aggressively sinusized, the Southern Circuit, East Turkestan, was something else entirely. A world apart. It was little Bukarya, a long chain of oasis towns stretched along the edge of the Taklamakan, culturally and linguistically tied to China, not at all,

but rather the great Turk-Iranian world of his life. Islamic Central Asia. Crucially, it was overwhelmingly Turkic-speaking and Sunni Muslim. Persian lingered here and there in the more scholarly corners, but by the 1800s, even that was fading fast. Its total population was probably somewhere under 300,000 in total, with more than 70% hacked around the far-western Tarim basin, places like Kashgar, Yarkand, and Kotan. the more eastern oasis like turfan and hami were the actual outliers here in spite of their familiarity to china just as importantly none of these people thought of themselves as any kind of a unified group they weren't like weegers they were locals yurlake as they called themselves and their identity was first and foremost tied to their own small oasis communities they were kashgari yarkandhi turfondi turfan

To them, the mosaic was more important than the whole picture. Within even this oasis panoply were clusters of ever more distinct peoples. Dolans around Kucha and Aksu, Turkic speaking but with their own accents and customs. Nogaits, likely of Kyrgyz origin, living half the year in felt tents and half in villages. Belopnor peoples, which were semi-distinct and possibly not fully Muslim. Khadjiks, Wakhanis, and Gulchas of the mountains, who spoke Persian, were semi-nomadic, and still carried faint echoes of the pre-Islamic fire cults from more than a millennia prior. Foreign merchants, especially Kokandis, who married local women despite Qing laws,

and formed a mixed community, ultimately known as the Chalgerts. Suffice it to say, this region is impossibly ethnically complicated, economically interconnected, culturally deep and politically fractious. It was not any law, but rather geography, that set the limits here. Snow melt from the Tianshans, Pamirs, and Kunloan mountains fed the rivers. The Taklamakon drank up everything else. Oasis life was always a precarious balance between water and sand, life, and death. Still, somehow, it worked.

The region could reasonably be expected to produce its world-famous turf on raisins, hami-melons, its main tax crop of cotton, even silk mostly produced by women, wool, hemp, tobacco, and opium, as well as a range of minerals. Again, the old standards like copper and gold, but also new and increasingly important minerals such as sulfur and nitre. Probably most importantly of all to the Qing Imperial Authority was the Kotan jade, which the Qing effectively used as the region's imperial tribute. Agriculture was productive enough here, but far less efficient than in the Yellow or Yangza River

basins of China proper. Most labor was manual. The tools were primitive, and the crop rotation virtually non-existent. Even looking at East Turkestan alone, though, we actually have to break it down into two further sub-regions. The first is Wigaristan, consisting, primarily of Hamiyan Turfan. This was the old crossroads with China, and Qing control here was as deep as it was old. The local princes or jasaaks of Hamian Turfan were hereditary nobles within the Qing imperial order. They paid tribute to the throne, but ruled their own people, much in the style of Mongolian indirect rule, with the Qing technically on top, but with the locals doing most of the actual governing day-to-day. The Tarian Basin, or Alta Shar, was a totally different

story. This was direct imperial rule by proxy, a bureaucratic system staffed entirely by local Muslim elites, called Beggs, overseen by a Qing counselor in Kashgar, and ultimately the Ealing military governor. And the Qing were obsessive about keeping this region well insulated. There was no Han immigration allowed, no merchant colonization west of Hamei, no Chinese civilian settlements, no exile colonies, no attempt to. at cultural fusion. The only Chinese that were allowed in the area at all were the military garrisons, but they were regularly rotated to prevent the development of any local ties. This resulted in a truly strange duality. Virtually an empire within an empire. Muslim ruled,

governed under Hanafite law, yet ultimately subordinate to the Qing military imperial machine. Within every major oasis, though, the Qing were sure to build a separate-walled compound, the Manchu, or Chinese cantonment, physically outside of the native city. It functioned rather like an island, consisting of barracks, offices, stables, and administrative buildings, sealed off each night like a fortress. The locals couldn't enter without permission. Likewise, Qing personnel weren't allowed to wander the oasis streets after dark, Interaction between the two communities existed, but it was deliberately strict and rationed.

The Qing wanted stability here, not intimacy. The social breakdown of Altashar rested atop three pillars. The first is the Beggs or the administrative class, the second the Akhuns or the religious legal authorities, and the final being the alban kash, the common subjects. Though they once had been, Beggs were no longer hereditary nobility. Under the Qing, Beg came to mean official, not aristocrat. The Qing appointed them, often rotating men from other oases to avoid corruption, which was, of course, a convenient fiction. Corruption remained rampant throughout this period.

The Akun's administered Islamic law, taught the Madrasas and presided over mosques and courts. And finally, the alban kash was everyone else, farmers, artisans, merchants, tenants, bondsmen. And they were the ones who paid the alban, or head tax, that funded both the Cheng administration and, through various skimmed layers, the bags themselves. Taxes were heavy, varied, and grindingly constant. There was the monthly head tax, the alban. There were grain levies, cotton quotas, market tax. taxes, land taxes, special levies for repairing roads, fortifications, and funding inspection

tours, the Kyrklik, or the 40th tax collected by the local Beggs, and requisitioning for rations, supplies, and horses by the military garrisons. And corruption was simply in the air that everyone breathed. Beggs bought crops cheap and sold them high. They manipulated water rights, seized land through debt traps, accepted bribes upward and downward, and converted peasants into bondsmen when it was convenient for them. The Qing didn't really stop any of this. In many ways, they depended on it, needed it. It kept the local elite dependent, enriched, and loyal, and it kept the population divided. Trade was the Tarium Basin's nervous system. Goods flowed in from every direction, and then flowed right back out again.

Not through neat little official channels, but a thousand semi-legal, semi-official routes that kept the oases alive and the imperial accountants miserable. Imports were pretty much what you'd expect from a desert or oasis crossroads. Livestock and furs, wool and fruit, Indian opium and hemp. European manufacturers, which were mostly Russian, and shamefully, slaves trafficked in from the highlands, boys and girls transmitted via a caravan and then sold in Yarkand. The staple the Oasis wanted most, though, was tea. Boxed and brick tea from South China that arrived by horse caravan through Koton. Brick tea was cheap and for the poor. Leaf

tea was the truly aspirational commodity of the elite and learned. Their exports were a mirror, silks, precious stones, jade and raw bullion, the latter the main illegal outflow. Merchants from Shanxi, Shanxi, Jiangsu, and Jiajiang routinely carried Chinese wares into Altishar, bought local cotton, silk and cattle, and carried their profits back into China. Tea, bullion, gemstones, and silks were the big-ticket items people minded most, and the same things officials tried hardest to control. The tax rules here were an absolute mess that we won't even try getting into, but the math always favored the outsiders. In places where trade with China was legal, native sellers paid a higher ad valorem tax than foreigners.

Han merchants benefited from reduced rates, and foreign traders, the Kokandis, Bukarians, Kashmiris, and Ajani's, etc., often paid even less than that. The result was that silver flowed out of the oasis to pay for the imports, while local traders felt squeezed and systematically disadvantaged. Karashar was the odd city where both the imperial and local currencies circulated together, and where Han colonists were actually allowed to own land. It became its own weird legal island, a single gate through which some Han influence could leak westward. Otherwise, the imperial policy was segregation almost totally. Han civilians were excluded from most of Altashar, and where Chinese traders were able to do business in any capacity, it was usually because their networks carried goods that the system couldn't

efficiently tax or supply. Foreign merchants, especially Kokandis, dominated Kashgar's external trade. They were organized enough to appoint a single superintendent of trade, a man who functioned like a coast Tai Pan for Central Asia, and who, over time, became an instrument of Kocan's overall influence. That autonomy, plus customary exemptions and inside deals with local bags, made foreign traders powerful and lightly policed. Smuggling was, no big surprise here, absolutely endemic. official prohibitions on nitrate, sulfur, and short swords meant little on the ground. Border officials winked, inspections went partially undone, and tariff collections were often a function

of which pockets had been properly greased. The customs system, the concessionary tea trade, and the unlicensed Shanxi merchants together created a hybrid market that the chain could only regulate intermittently. All of this led to an entirely predictable political outcome. Native Altishari merchants were handicapped by discriminatory taxation, official interference, and bureaucratic predation. As such, many hid their profits, bought refuge in Ili or Urumchi, or tied themselves to foreign trading houses just to survive. In the long run, this trade regime enriched the trans-regional merchants and the local elite who colluded with them, while leaving the native trading class weakened, indebted, and deeply resentful.

The Qing had most certainly inherited the problem's endemic to Xinjiang when they'd taken it over, but few were more persistent, or more deeply rooted, than the legacy of the Naqshbandi Kodjas. Now, their story is one that stretched back centuries into the spiritual networks of Central Asia. Their influence had shaped Altashar long before the Manchu's had arrived, and it remained alive humming just beneath the surface all throughout the 19th century. The Nakhbandi Order was the most prestigious Sufi Brotherhood in Central Asia, with branches radiating outward from Bukhara. And among them, the most politically consequential were the descendants of the Maktoum i Azam,

known collectively as the Maktum Zadas. For generations, they had dominated the religious landscape of eastern Turkestan. Two rival lineages, the Ishaquia and the Afakia, spent both the 17th and 18th centuries battling control of the Tarikat. It had actually been the Afakia, who had once called in the Jungars trying to tip the balance in their favor, that had backfired catastrophically. That had brought about Jungar domination, and following that, of course, the Qing conquest. Ultimately, sending the surviving Afaki leaders fleeing back westward to Badakshan, as of some of 1759. Not all branches of the Naqshbandia resisted this new order. The Qing were able to co-opt several non-Afaki makdomzadas, ennobling them and relocating them to Beijing. Others, such as

the Naqshbandi line at Kucha, descending from Arshad al-Din, or the Mujahidi branch connected to India, caused the Qing little trouble. But the main Afaki line, the line that had once ruled Altashar outright, had been uprooted, their leaders killed in flight, and thousands of supporters trailing after them into Kokand territory. Yet for all that, they hadn't disappeared. Merchants from the Fergana Valley, especially Andajani traders, moved freely throughout Altashar, shuddling between Kashgar, Yarkand, Aksu, and the markets of Kokand. They carried much more than just tea, cloth, and silver. They also carried letters. gossip, and comforting assurances that the Koja families abroad had not forgotten their homeland.

Through these caravans, the exiled Ishaki and Afaki Kojas remained in steady communication with their followers. In Yarkand, the Isakia were still revered, their lineage anchored by the old golden cemetery, where generations of Ishaki saints lay buried. In Kashgar and Aksu, it was the Afakia who held the spiritual imagination. Every year, offerings traveled northward to Margilan, where exiled Ishaki leaders presided. And, by the turn of the 19th century, the Afaki faithful looked to the descendants of Koja Burhan al-Din, the Afakia patriarch whom the Qing had driven out decades earlier. His son, Samak Khosha, lived out his wandering exile in Kokhand, dying around 1798.

But he left three sons, and with them, a living claim. The eldest, Muhammad Yusuf, led a Kyrgyz-backed raid across the frontier in 1797, which was repulsed, but not forgotten. His later life trajectory grew only stranger. Some time after his father's death, he drifted across the Islamic world, Egypt, Baghdad, and Persia, and at one point was arrested and handed over to the British consul who shipped him to India. He managed to escape in Bombay, then resurfaced in Basra, then Iran, where he managed to charm the Qajar elite. By 1813, he was leading Turkmen tribesmen in open warfare against the Kajars, until a Turkman follower recognized him, shot him, and then touched off a grizzly

battle over the bounty on his head. At least that's the telling of it, according to the Persian Chronicles. Other reports hint that he might have survived, appearing again years later under an alias. What is certain is that Muhammad Yusuf would re-enter Xinjiang's history as of about 1830, very much alive and still a regional contender. His brothers managed to stay rather closer to home. Jahangir, the second son, seems to have spent his early adulthood in Bukhara, while the youngest, Baha ad-Din, lived in Kokand. Both maintained ties with Altashar's elites, and those elites were watching the frontier carefully. Some bags, notably Yunus, the Hakim bag of Kashgar, corresponded with Kokhan's ruler,

Mohamed Umar Khan, weighing the balance of power and the likelihood of a future Afaki return. Kokand, meanwhile, had its own interests. The China trade was lucrative, and the Kahnit preferred a quiet frontier, but it also knew the value of leverage. The Qing paid Kokan an annual subsidy in silver and tea, anywhere in value from 10 to 50,000 tails per year, ostensibly in exchange for restraining the Afaki claimants. Yet Koukan began to press for more, lower customs duties, formal recognition of a political agent in Kashgar.

and even judicial authority over co-cond merchants on Cheng's soil. When Kashgar's Hakim Beg, Yunus, appeared to support these demands, the Qing cracked down, forbidding any further communication between the Altasar Beggs and Kokand itself. By 1814, Qing authority in eastern Turkestan looked impenetrable on the surface. But beneath that veneer were frictions. Overburdened peasants. merchants disadvantaged by Cheng tariffs, and local begs who resented the revenues flowing north to Ili,

all nursed doubts about the permanence of Manchu rule. The most obvious leaders for rebellion were the sons of Samsak Koja. But as long as Kokand blockaded the passes, they would remain contained. Instead, the first spark came from the other side of that coin, the other lineage, the Ishakia. In early 1814, an Ishaki Sufi from Tash Malik, named Dia ad-Din, began gathering followers, locals and Kyrgyz alike, for a revolt aimed at restoring Muslim rule across the region. Tash Malik was a promising base, a mixed population, a Kyrgyz Hakim Beg, several hundred to regular Kipchak families, and easy access to step allies.

By autumn, Kyrgyz chiefs were swearing oaths on the Koron. on to support the uprising. The revolt broke out in the summer of 1815. The conspirators attacked garrisons, burned stables, and called on the population to rise up together, to almost no response at all. No one showed up. As such, when Qing forces counter-attacked, the Kyrgyz, sticking their finger up in the air and correctly determining which way this wind was blowing, decided to switch sides, helping

to instead capture Dia ad-Din and stamp out the rebellion virtually before it could even be born. Those who managed to escape this amazing betrayal were forced to flee into Kokand. The Qing responded predictably, with immediate mass executions and then painstaking investigations. Sorting out actual responsibility, as we are all now having listened to this quite empathetic to, proved quite difficult indeed, especially among the Kyrgyz, many of whom had played both sides. The Ishakia revolts had been small and brief. On its own, it was really nothing of note. But in the scope of history, it would prove to be the first tremor in a century that would shake Xinjiang again and again to its very core. Here, within the tangled loyalties of Sufi

lineages, frontier tribes, exiled princes, merchant networks, and the ambitions of Cochand lay the very pattern of almost every crisis to follow. And with that, we conclude at last our Grand Circuit of the Empire's frontier zones as they stood in the early 19th century. Each one different, each one a crisis in its own way, and all of them painful, expensive, and enduring. These were the borderlands that would keep the Qing awake at night, and would continue to haunt them in the century ahead. Next time, we move forward into the long-building decay of Qing authority, and the stirrings of rebellion that both preceded and accelerated the dynasties fall from celestial grace.

The century of humiliation awaits. Until then, as ever. Thanks for listening. Thank you.