The Rashīdī History 7.4.5

7.4.5

That a land of this nature should support only a small population, and be too poor, as Mirza Haidar tells us, to maintain an army on its own produce, is not surprising. Whether its weakness as a State is owing to this or to whatever other cause, it has always been an easy prey to invaders, and has seldom had a native ruler within historic times. Its population has been a Turki one for ages past, and the Uighur branch of that race may be regarded (as far as historic times are concerned) as the original owners of the soil, and the parent stock of the bulk of the present inhabitants. That in later times, at least, they were not an aggressive race appears evident from the little we hear of them, and that they had some capacity for crafts and literature seems also to be established. No doubt the tendency of such a people would be to live peaceably under any government strong enough to repel external enemies; so that when Mirza Haidar tells us that Alti-Shahr was "free from the discord of men and the trampling of hoofs, and became an asylum for the contented and the prosperous," he is probably drawing a picture of the country not only true of his own time, but one that serves for several centuries both before and after it.