The Rashīdī History 9.3.4

9.3.4

The Ming-Shi, as we have just seen, refers to the two towns of Kara-Khoja and Lu-ko-tsin, as having been thought, by the Chinese, to be independent of Turfan, about a century before the date spoken of by Amyot, but during this interval the tendency of events in Uighuristan was towards consolidation of the kingdom, and centralisation of the power of the Khan. The date 1533 falls within the reign of Mansur Khan, who, we see from the histories of Mirza Haidar and that of the Ming dynasty, was the most powerful and prosperous ruler that the Khanate had had, and it cannot be regarded as likely that, during his reign, the country should have been split up into more independent divisions than there were towns in it, or perhaps into almost as many as there were villages. Had any disintegration been going on, Mirza Haidar could hardly have failed to notice it, and moreover. Sultan Said, then Khan of Moghulistan and Alti-Shahr (Mansur's brother) would scarcely have submitted (as Mirza Haidar reports him to have done in 1516) to a ruler whose kingdom had broken up into small States. In this instance it is far more likely that Père Amyot made use of some imperfect information, than that both the official history of the Ming dynasty and the independent one of our author, should be wrong. What we find from the latter to have been the case is, that after the death of Ahmad, and with the succession of Mansur, Uighuristan obtained a great increase of strength.