Aksu

Aksu takes its name from the 'white water' of the river that runs down from the Tian Shan to an oasis on the northwestern rim of the Tarim Basin. The Han knew it as the small kingdom of Gumo, and when the pilgrim Xuanzang came through in 629 he found a land called Baluka with some tens of Buddhist monasteries and a trade in fine cotton and hemp cloth. The town sat where the northern Silk Road met the hard mountain route over the Muzart Pass into the Ili valley.

Aksu submitted to Chinggis Khan in 1207–08 and later fell under the Chagatai khans. When their authority faded in the mid-14th century, the Dughlat amirs, hereditary lords of Aksu, Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan, divided the western Tarim among their kin, though Aksu itself passed to the khans of Moghulistan. It then fell to local warlords and later to the Khoja factions and the Dzungars. Qing armies crushed the Dzungars in the late 1750s, and in 1758 an imperial resident was installed at Aksu to oversee the Tarim oases.