shan or Trans-Ordos.[1] This region is covered with bare sand-drift, extending on the west to the River Etsina,[2] on the south to the lofty mountains of the province of Kan-su, and on the north disappearing altogether in the unfruitful clay flats of the central Gobi desert. These are the natural as well as the political boundaries of Ala-shan, which is bordered by the Khalka[3] and Urute countries on the north, and by the province of Kan-su and a small part of Ordos on the other sides.
Topographically Ala-shan is a perfectly level plain, which, like Ordos, in all probability once formed the bed of a huge lake or inland sea. This fact is evidenced by the level area of the whole region, its hard saline clay and sand-covered soil, and lastly the salt lakes, which are formed in the lowest parts
- ↑ Trans-Ordos is, I presume, a name given by the traveller himself, but it is a very inconvenient style of nomenclature. The trans in this case is not even from the Russian, but from the Peking standpoint. — Y.
- ↑ The Etsina river runs northward into the desert from the vicinity of Kanchau, and on its banks no doubt stood the city of Etzina, 'on the verge of the Sandy Desert,' of which Marco Polo makes mention in the route to Kara-Korum. — Y.
- ↑ The Khalkas form another and the most important of the modern great divisions of the Mongol tribes. The name was given apparently in the latter days of the Ming dynasty (circa 1600), to the tribes on the north of the Gobi, then independent of China; and those bearing it extend over 30 degrees of longitude, from the Manchu country westward to the Hi. — Y.
maks. The Turgut branch of the Eleuths, early in the eighteenth century, carried their conquests and migrations westward to the Volga; and it was this horde which in 1771 made that extraordinary re-migration in mass to the Chinese territory of which T. de Quincey has given such an extraordinary description. The Eleuths of Ala-shan were, according to Timkowski, settled there by the emperor Kang-hi in 1686, having been driven from their own seats by Galdan Khan, of Dzungaria. — Y.
