As for the general character of the population, I found the Chinese Tartar honest, timid, and, to speak plainly, bordering upon stupidity; his relation to the inhabitants of the other cities in Central Asia is about the same as that of the Bokhariot to the Parisian or the Londoner. Extremely modest in their aspirations, my fellow-travellers have yet often delighted me by the enthusiastic terms which they used when they spoke of their poor homes. The splendour and lavish expenditure discernible in Roum and Persia, and even Bokhara, displease them; and although they are governed by a people differing from themselves in language and religion, still they prefer their own to the Musselman government in the three Khanats. But it would really seem as if they had no cause to be dissatisfied with the Chinese. Every one from the age of fifteen years upwards, with the exception of Khodjas (descendants of the Prophet) and Mollahs, pay to Government a yearly capitation tax of five Tenghe (three shillings). The soldiers [Footnote 147] are enlisted, but not by compulsion; and the Musselman regiments have besides the advantage of remaining unmixed and forming a single body, and, except in some little external points, [Footnote 148] are not in the slightest degree interfered with. {404} But the higher officials do not escape so easily; they are obliged to wear the dress prescribed to their rank, long moustaches, and pigtail; and, most dreadful of all, they must on holidays appear in the Pagodas, and perform a sort of homage before the unveiled portrait of the emperor, by touching the ground three times with the forehead. The Musselmans assert that their countrymen filling high offices hold on such occasions, concealed between their fingers, a small scrap of paper, with 'Mecca' written upon it, and that by this sleight of hand their genuflection becomes an act of veneration, not to the sovereign of the Celestial Empire, but to the holy city of the Arabian Prophet. [Footnote 147: I am told, that there are at present in the four districts of Chinese Tartary about 120,000 soldiers, forming the garrisons of the four principal towns. One part of them, armed with spear and sword, is called _Tchan-ping_, the others, who bear muskets, are known by the designation of _Shüva_.] [Footnote 148: Such, for instance, as (1) the robes being made to reach the kaees, and of blue linen, a costume regarded by the Musselmans with abhorrence as distinctive marks of the Chinese; (2) the permitting the moustache to grow, whereas Islam rigidly enjoins that the hair covering the upper lip shall be cut close.]