Provisions for two or three months are taken on pack-camels. Returning home laden with spoil, the first act of the robbers is to implore God's forgiveness, and the more easily to obtain it they ride off to the lake, where they buy, or perhaps appropriate without payment, a quantity of newly-caught fish, and throw these back into the waters.
According to the Mongols the Kara-Tangutans began to plunder this country and Tsaidam about eighty years ago, and since that time have continued uninterruptedly this mode of gaining a livelihood. The Chinese governors of Kan-su are bribed by the robbers to give a certain degree of countenance to their proceedings, so that the complaints of the Mongols are never listened to. A local Mongol tradition on the origin of the Kara-Tangutans and Mongol-Oliuths of Koko-nor runs as follows: —
Several hundred years ago a people of Tangutan race lived on the shores of Koko-nor, called Yegurs,[1] who professed Buddhism, and belonged to the red-capped sect.[2] These Yegurs were continually plundering the caravans of pilgrims on their way
- ↑ These might be the Uigurs, were not they of Tangutan, not Mongolian race. [I do not clearly understand this note. The Uigurs are generally understood to be typical Turks, and in great measure the progenitors of the present people of the Kashgar basin. But it is possible that the existence of these Yegurs in Tangut may have to do with the thesis so obstinately maintained by I. J. Schmidt that the Uigurs were Tibetans. — Y.]
- ↑ Buddhists in Tibet are divided into two sects, the red-capped and yellow-capped. The radical difference between them is that while the former allow their lamas to marry, the latter oblige them to live single. [This definition is not to be relied on. — Y.]
and invasion was a regular practice of the mediæval Tartars. See 'Marco Polo,' 2nd ed. i. 256. — Y.
