routes, which remained unknown to the Western conquerors. It will be scarcely possible to discover the exact highway followed by the Greek traders; but Bactra being at that time the great emporium, the route indicated by Ptolemy most probably penetrated eastwards through the Upper Oxus valley across the southern portion of the Pamir, thence descending by one of the head-streams of the Œchardes (Tarim) to the present basin of Kashgaria. Attempts have been made to identify the Tash-Kûrgan, which lies on a tributary of the Yarkand in Sarikol, with the "Stone Tower" spoken of by the old traders. At the beginning of the Christian era, when their military power was most flourishing, the Chinese subdued Western Tatary, and while their armies were crossing the Tian-shan passes, their merchants and pilgrims were traversing the rougher routes over the "Roof of the World." Hwen-T'sang, the most famous of these pilgrims, describes his journeys with sufficient minuteness to enable us to follow his footsteps across the Pamir and the Upper Oxus valley. Marco Polo also, after leaving Bactra (Balkh), followed a route differing litle from that of his Greek predecessors, and running north-east across "the plain of the Pamier, which they say is the highest place in the world." Beyond Yarkand he skirted the Gobi district on the south, entering China proper about the sources of the Hoang-ho. This journey of Marco Polo across the continent from west to east still remains unrivalled after a lapse of six hundred years. As an imperial functionary he also visited most of the Chinese provinces and East Tibet, penetrating into Burmah through the still little-known regions separating Yun-nan from Indo-China. By his enthusiastic account of China, its great cities and eastern islands, he contributed more than any other traveller to stimulate the love of enterprise, and by him was conjured up the phantom pursed by Columbus across the western waters to the goal of a new world.
When Marco Polo was making his way over the Pamir, another more northern route to Mongolia had already been traversed by numerous other merchants, missionaries, and envoys. In the middle of the thirteenth century the centre of gravity of the Mongol Empire lay about the neighbourhood of the Altaï. Hence the main commercial highway naturally converged on Karakorûm, capital of the state, and this was the road already followed by the Mongol and Tatar hordes north of the Tian-shan, and along the valley of the Sir-darya. It was also traversed by Plan de Carpin and Rubruk, envoy of Louis IX. Western adventurers now crowded round the imperial tent, and so numerous were the relations of the West with the great Eastern potentate that there was question of founding a chair of the Mongolian language in the Paris Sorbonne.
But the empire was soon broken up; Karakorûm ceased to be a capital, and its ruins were forgotten in the sands. Still the route to China along the northern slopes of the Tian-shan, and through Zungaria, remained open to trade. Pegolotti and others followed it in the fourteenth century, and it might have ultimately acquired real commercial importance, had the attention of the Western nations not been diverted to the great oceanic discoveries round the Cape of Good Hope to India, and across the Atlantic to the New World. The long and dangerous highways of Tatary, Zungaria, and Mongolia were now forsaken, and the work of
