Don Croner’ World Wide Wanders: China | Xinjiang Province | Khotan

On his way back from India to China the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through Kashmir and then entered the Pamir Mountains. He would have went right by 24,388-foot Muztagh-Ata, the second highest peak in the Pamirs. In 1999 I traced his path from Muztagh-Ata to Kashgar.

24,388-foot Muztagh-Ata

Xuanzang claimed that there was a stupa on the top of Muztagh-Ata built in memory of an arhat who had lived in a trance since the time of the Buddha. This was almost certainly a legend only.

The River Gez where it debouches into the Tarim Basin

From the plateau around Muztagh-Ata he dropped down into the Tarim Basin via the canyon of the Gez River and moved on to Kashgar, where at that time, in 644 A.D., there were still hundreds of monasteries, most of them followers of the Hinayana school.

The Pamirs from the road to Kashgar

Two weeks after leaving Kashgar by camel he arrived in Khotan. Xuanzang:

This country is renowned for its music; the men love the song and dance. Few of them wear garments of skin and wool; most wear taffeta and white linen. Their external behavior is full of urbanity; their customs are properly regulated. Their written characters and their mode of forming their sentences resemble the Indian model; the forms of the letters differ somewhat; the differences, however, are slight. The spoken language also differs from that of other countries. They greatly esteem the law of the Buddha. There are about a hundred sangharamas with some 5000 followers, who all study the doctrince of the Great Vehicle.

Xuanzang mentions that about 10 li south of the city there was a monastery built in honor of Vairochana. In Xuanzang’s time the city of Khotan itself was located at a place now known as Yoktan, about ten kilometers south of the current city. This old city is now completely covered with cultivated fields and no ruins remain. About 25 kilometers south of the modern city are found the ruins of a monastery now known to Uighurs as Melikawat. Thus is it possible that Melikawat are the ruins of the monastery mentioned by Xuanzang. Although I was warned that only a few broken down walls remained of the Melikawat monastery I hired a cab and went out to take a look. The dirt road follows the Khotan, or White Jade River, as it is also known, south. The Khotan River begins in the Kun Lun Mountains on the border between Tibet and Xinjiang and flows north across the Taklamakan Desert to the Tarim River, although it often dries up completely before actually reaching the Tarim. The river supplies most of the water for the very extensive irrigation system around the Khotan oasis (some water comes from wells).

People have been searching for jade in the Khotan River for at the very least the last two thousand years and continue to do so today. Reportedly only a few kilos of top-quality jewelry-grade jade are found a year, although low grade jade, not good enough for jewelry, is sold rather cheaply. I bought two hen’s egg-sized chunks of jade, one black and one white, from jade hunters on the river bank for ten yuan a piece.

The Khotan River can just be seen on the upper left hand corner of the photo. To the right can be seen the spoil from 2000 years of digging through the river gravels in the search for jade.