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With the Uighurs Securely in His Corner Chingis was ready to launch a full-scale invasion of Xi Xia. The people of Xi Xia, known as Tanguts, founded the Xi Xia Dynasty, or “Great State of White and High,” in 1038. The Tanguts were a people of Tibeto-Burman extraction who had developed a prosperous agrarian and livestock breeding culture and occupied well-fortified towns and cities. They aspired to some level of culture and soon developed their own Writing System , based on Chinese ideograms, which they used to translate both Tibetan Buddhist texts and the Chinese Classics. While espousing Chinese culture they also practiced Tibetan-style Vajrayana Buddhism. They also maintained a large army and at their height were one of the strongest military powers in Inner Asia. Like the Uighurs they sat astride the Silk Road, controlling the vital Gansu Corridor, a narrow strip of land between the rugged mountains to the south and the inhospitable deserts to the north through which Silk Road cara...

By the close of the year 1215 Temüjin, the Mongolian chieftain known to the world as Chingis Khan, was sitting pretty. Nine years earlier, in 1206, he had succeeded in defeating and bringing under his rule most if not all of the nomadic peoples of the Mongolian Plateau, and in a Great Assembly of the tribes on the Onon River he had been confirmed as Chingis Khan, the Great Khan of the Mongols. He then cast his gaze to the south, to the great sedentary civilizations of China which for over a thousand years had been the plundering grounds of the nomads to the north. As early as 1205 his forces had raided the borderlands of the kingdom of Xi Xia, centered around the modern-day Ningxia and Gansu provinces of China, and returned with huge hauls of camels and other livestock. In the autumn of 1207 an more ambitious raid raked in more plunder and even managed to capture the town of  of Wolohai, near current-day Tingyuan, in the Alashan region. Still not ready for a full-scale assault on X...

The Autumn Equinox Lady You are all probably busy making your plans for the celebration of the   Autumn Equinox , which occurs here in Mongolia on Thursday, the 23rd, at 11:09 AM. Here on the 23rd the sun comes up at 6:40 in the morning and sets at 6:49, making a day of twelve hours and nine minutes. Lately I have going each morning to the summit of Zaisan Tolgoi , near my hovel, to observe the sunrise and will undoubtedly be there on Thursday morning. I usually leave my hovel at 5:30, while most of you sluggards are still on bed, and arrive at the summit at about 6:00. Oddly enough, I am not alone at this hour. Three other people, two Mongolian men and a Mongolian woman, all looking to be in their sixties, also come to the summit each morning. The woman circumambulates the summit several times, stopping at each of the cardinal points to make prostrations. The men appear to be engaged in various and sundry meditations.  The summit of Zaisan Tolgoi Although I  intend to c...

Zoroastrianism , founded in Persia in perhaps the 6th century BC by the mysterious character known as Zoroaster , a.k.a Zarathustra of “ Thus Spoke Zarathustra ” fame, is probably the world’s oldest “revealed” religion, and as such Zoroastrians are even regarded as “People of the Book”, along with Christians and Jews, by at least some Muslims (sorry, Buddhists remain garden-variety Idolators). The major premise of Zoroastrianism, as you no doubt know, is the vast cosmic struggle between   Ahura Mazdah ,   the God of Light (very roughly speaking), and  Ahriman ,   the principal of Darkness and Evil.  Zoroastrianism was very widespread in the Transoxiania and Khorezm regions before the arrival of the Islam in the eight and ninth centuries.  For an utterly titillating account of Zoroastrianism see In Search of Zarathustra . For still more see Magi .  Zoroastrian Burial Practices are of special interest. Bodies were placed on high hills or...

The next morning I wended my way through the streets of the Old City, heading westward toward the Ata Darzava , or Master Gate. As I mentioned, the Old City is one vast museum, with people living within it. Early risers like myself can see many families, all in their pajamas, sleeping on their front porches, enjoying the fresh night air. Out of respect for the privacy of these people I will not include photos.  Street in the Old City Just to the east of the Master Gate and in front of the Muhammad Amin Khan Madrasa is the Kalta Minaret, also known as the Guyok (Green) Minaret. The Khivan Ruler Muhammad Amin Khan ordered its construction in the early 1850s. According to plan, this was to be the grandest minaret in Transoxiania, with a height of 70 to 80 meters (230 to 262 feet), but it was not finished when the Khan died in 1855. There are two legends as to why the minaret was not completed. One says that the Khan halted construction after he suddenly realized that anyone on the top...

Below are some photos (cropped versions of the originals) by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) who traveled through the Russian empire, which then included modern-day Uzbekistan, in the years 1909–1912. The photos in Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand were taken around 1910. Who knew they had color photography back then?  Prokudin-Gorskii used an experimental color process which had apparently been invented in Russia.  Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan)  A group of Jewish children with a teacher in Samarkand A boy sits in the court of Tillia-Kari mosque in Samarkand For the original versions of these photos and many more see Photos of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii . Thanks to a fellow Wanderer in Virginia USA for sending along this link . . . 

The entire inner city of Khiva, an area covering seventy-five or so acres, is one vast open-air museum. At least fifty historic buildings—mosques, tombs, palaces, caravanserais, etc.—and several hundred domestic dwellings have been refurbished and restored. Admittedly, this creates somewhat of a sterile atmosphere, but if you accept the place as a museum—which indeed is what it advertises itself as—then it has to rank as one of the world’s more intriguing museums. Reportedly some 3000 people live within The Walls of the Inner City —that is to say within the museum—and most visitors also stay in guesthouses in the Inner City, making them live-in patrons of the museum. Most of the guesthouses are either refurbished eighteenth and nineteenth century merchants’ houses or replicas of merchants’ houses. And these old Silk Road merchants liked to live in style. Many of their homes qualified as mansions; today they make extremely comfortable guesthouses. Most of the guest houses seem to be...