# Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Yarkand

See also Yarkant, Yengisar, Tashkurgan, Guma, Yarkand River, and Sanju Pass on Wikipedia; Yarkand in the 11th Edition; and the disclaimer. For a map of the region, see Turkestan.
YARKAND, or Yarkend, the chief town of the principal oasis of East Turkestan, is situated on the Yarkand-Daria, in 38° 25′ N. lat. and 77° 16′ E. long., at an altitude of about 4100 feet above sea-level. The settlements of the Yarkand oasis occupy the south-western corner of East Turkestan, and are scattered along the numerous rivers which issue from the steep slopes of the Pamir in the west, and the Karakorum and Kuen-Lun Mountains in the south. The oasis of Kashgar limits it in the north, and a tract of desert separates it from the oasis of Khotan in the south-east. The Yarkand-Daria and its numerous tributaries, which are fed by the glaciers of the mountain regions, as also many rivers which no longer reach the main stream but are lost in the steppe or amidst the irrigated fields, bring abundance of water to the desert; one of them is called Zerafshan (“gold-strewing”), as much on account of the fertility it brings to the desert as of the small amount of gold discovered in its auriferous sands. Numberless irrigation canals, some of them of considerable length, carry the water of the rivers to the fields, which occupy a broad zone of loess skirting the base of the mountains. Higher up, in the spurs of the mountains, there are rich pasturages, where large numbers of goats, yaks, camels, sheep, and cattle are reared. On the whole, the oasis of Yarkand is regarded as the richest of East Turkestan, and its population probably numbers about 200,000 inhabitants (32,000 households in 1873). Wheat, barley, rice, beans, and various oil-yielding plants are grown in the fields, and the gardens supply abundance of melons, grapes, apples, and other fruits. The cotton tree and the mulberry are cultivated in the warmer parts of the oasis. There is no lack of gold, lead, and precious stones in the mountains, though only the first-named is at present extracted. A variety of petty trades are carried on in the towns; Yarkand is renowned for its leather-ware and saddlery. The population consists of Persians, who have almost given up the use of their mother tongue and now speak Turkish, and of Turkish Sarts.
The town of Yarkand, which has a population of about 60,000 according to Forsyth (5000 houses in the city, and as many in Yanghishar and the suburbs), is very favourably situated on the river of the same name, five days’ journey south-east from Kashgar. It is surrounded by a thick earthen wall, nearly four miles long, with towers in the Chinese style of architecture, and is well watered by numberless canals, which are drawn from the river and, after having irrigated the rich gardens of the city, lead to cisterns in which water is collected for the winter. The square fortress of Yanghishar, which was built by the Chinese, stands within four hundred yards of the walls of the town. The ten mosques and madrasas of Yarkand, although much poorer than those of Bokhara or Samarcand, enjoy a wide renown in the Moslem world. There is a brisk trade, especially in horses, cotton, leather-ware, and all kinds of imported manufactured goods.
Yarkand is surrounded by a number of smaller towns, the chief of which are—Yanghi-hissar, which has about 600 houses and is the centre of a populous district, Tashkurgan on the Pamir, now reckoned as belonging to the Russians, Posgam (1600 houses), Kargatyk, at the junction of the routes leading to Ladak and Khotan (2000 houses), Sanju (2000), Tagarchi, Kartchum, Besh-taryk (1800), Guma (3000), and several smaller ones.
Yarkand was but very imperfectly known until the second half of the 19th century. Marco Polo visited it between 1271 and 1275, and Goes in 1603; but the continuous wars which marked the history of the oasis (see Turkestan, vol. xxiii. pp. 637–640) prevented Europeans from frequenting it, so that until 1863 the information borrowed from mediæval travellers and from Chinese sources, along with that supplied by the pandit Mir Isset Ullah in 1812, was all that was known about the Yarkand region. The first European who reached it in the 19th century was Adolph Schlagintweit, who passed by Yarkand in August 1857, but was killed a few days later at Kashgar. The pandit Mohammed Hamid visited it in 1863 and determined its geographical position and altitude. The best recent information is due to Robert Shaw and G. W. Hayward, who stayed at Yarkand in 1869, and to Sir Douglas Forsyth, who first visited it in 1870. Three years later he visited it again with an expedition which had Gordon, Bellew, Chapman, Trotter, Biddulph, and Stoliczka as members, and afterwards published a detailed report upon the scientific results of the mission. In 1886, after a remarkable journey through East Turkestan, A. D. Carey reached Yarkand and spent the winter there.
* ↑ R. Shaw, Visits to High Tartary, Yarkand, and Kashgar, London, 1871.
* ↑ Report of a Mission to Yarkund in 1873, Calcutta, 1875, with numerous photographs.