Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/157

 126 hands of the Kalmáks, and finally passing to the rule of the Manchu Emperors of China.

Thus the Kirghiz were amply avenged on their ancient enemies, and began to form the great confederacies that have endured to the present day.

They and their kinsmen, the Kazáks, not only prospered in their own way, but multiplied, so that at the present time they represent a large section of the population in the Russian Asiatic dominions. Both families are found spread over the whole of the provinces of Central Asia, north of the Sir and the western Tian Shan, in large, if somewhat scattered, communities. Thus, of the Kirghiz proper (the 'Black,' or 'Hill,' Kirghiz of the Russians), the estimates compiled by Mr. P. Lerch in 1873, from various sources, show a total of about 176,000 persons, while a good many more, for whom no numerical estimate is forthcoming, are known to exist in the Chinese provinces to the east of the Russian possessions, and in the hill tracts of Southern Farghána and the Pamirs. The Kazáks—the Uzbeg-Kazák of Mirza Haidar—are even more numerous. For those who are still nomadic in their mode of life, sufficiently ample statistics were available, about twenty years ago, to enable Mr. Lerch to sum up their total numbers, in Russian territory, as some 867,000 souls. But to this section also, some addition would have to be made for communities living in Chinese territory. Moreover, the figures furnished refer only to the nomads among both the Kazák and the so-called Kirghiz proper. There are, however, sections of settled Kazáks who are fairly numerous in the Zaráfshán valley, Kuráma, etc., but they are so much intermingled with the Uzbegs and Tájiks of those regions, that their strength was not (at the time Mr. Lerch wrote) to be ascertained with any degree of certainty.

At the same time the other tribal enemies of the Moghuls—the Uzbegs proper—who had become established in Transoxiana since the early part of the sixteenth century, continued their sway under the dynasty then founded, down to a date about coeval with the break up of the Moghul kingdom; while, indirectly and after many vicissitudes, they gave rise to the line of Bokhara Khans now reigning. Mirza Haidar's own