Yarkand

Yarkand is a fertile oasis city on the southwestern rim of the Tarim Basin, watered by the river that flows down from the Karakoram. Roads from Kashgar and Khotan meet here, and mountain tracks lead toward the Pamirs, Ladakh and the upper Indus. Marco Polo, passing around 1273, described a Muslim land with some Nestorian Christians under the Chagatai khans, well stocked with food and above all cotton.

Under the Dughlat amirs, Mirza Abu Bakr established a kingdom at Yarkand in 1465 that came to include Khotan and, from 1480, Kashgar. In 1514 Sultan Said Khan of the Chagatai line took Kashgar, then Yarkand, and made it the capital of a new khanate. The Jesuit Benedict Göez, arriving with a Kabul caravan in 1603, called the city a mart of great note, where merchants formed the caravans bound for Cathay and carried lumps of jade to the Chinese emperor. In the 17th century rival khoja families gained sway over the oasis. Dzungar intervention ended the ruling dynasty in 1678, and Qing armies took the Tarim cities in the 1750s.