to exonerate Yakoob Beg from the chief blame on this occasion, and if he had been a civilized European general, we should have made use of the phrase, that "It must ever remain a blot on his career;" but it would be the height of irony to apply such a phrase to this unscrupulous Asiatic, who, if not worse than the school in which he was brought up, was certainly not much better in a moral sense. As the fact stands, the seizure of Khoten, and the massacre of the unarmed leaders of that city, appear to have been acts as unnecessary as they were unjustifiable. Khoten may have seemed to the Athalik Ghazi of exceptional importance for several reasons, and he may have felt doubtful of the fidelity of Habitulla and his followers; but, so far as we are aware, the reasons for this action are shadowy in the extreme, even regarded from the point of view of political expediency. Down to the present day, too, the memory of this massacre, needless even in the eyes of a people accustomed to the shortest cuts to power by wholesale slaughter, has rankled in the minds of the inhabitants of Khoten and Sanju, and the Athalik Ghazi was least popular in that part of his state in which, according to the traditions of his predecessors, his action had been most sweeping, and accordingly most safe. This was early in the year 1867, and the Athalik Ghazi had now an opportunity for settling his relationship with his eastern neighbours, the Tungani. The Tungan movement proper originated, as explained in the last chapter, in the Chinese provinces of Kansuh and Shensi, and then extended with scarcely a check to Turfan south of the Tian Shan and to Urumtsi north of that range. The flame soon spread from Turfan to Karashar, Kucha, and Aksu, and at all of these towns it was fomented by the appearance of the new element of the Mahomedan Khokandian, and native settlers, acting in combination with the Chinese Tungani. North of the Tian Shan the movement received a temporary repulse; and it is necessary to say something in explanation of the course of the Mahomedan revival in Ili before we proceed to discuss the earlier wars of Yakoob Beg with the Tungani. As early as 1860 serious complications had arisen in that province, although the Chinese had always been more firmly situated there than in Kashgar. In that year a plot was concocted to murder the Chinese viceroy and to upset the existing government. It was discovered, however, and fell through. There appear to have been more causes at work in Ili to produce discontent than in the southern state, and it was not so much a question here between Khitay and Tungani, as it was between a people clamouring for work, for less taxation, and for payment for what they had done, and an administration that was unable to satisfy the demands made upon it from all sides. That last resource of a government at its wits' ends for money, the depreciation of the current coin and the issue of fictitious paper, was adopted by the Viceroy of Ili. The