gar as he found it
on his return journey.[494] The inhabitants were sincere Buddhists and
there were more than a thousand monks of the Sarvastivadin school. But
their knowledge was not in proportion to their zeal for they read the
scriptures diligently without understanding them. They used an Indian
alphabet into which they had introduced alterations.

According to Hsuan Chuang's religious conspectus of these regions,
Kashgar, Osh and Kucha belonged to the Small Vehicle, Yarkand and
Khotan mainly to the Great. The Small Vehicle also flourished at Balkh
and at Bamian.[495] In Kapisa the Great Vehicle was predominant but
there were also many Hindu sects: in the Kabul valley too Hinduism and
Buddhism seem to have been mixed: in Persia[496] there were several
hundred Sarvastivadin monks. In Tokhara (roughly equivalent to
Badakshan) there was some Buddhism but apparently it did not flourish
further north in the regions of Tashkent and Samarkand. In the latter
town there were two disused monasteries but when Hsuan Chuang's
companions entered them they were mobbed by the populace. He says that
these rioters were fire worshippers and that the Turks whom he visited
somewhere near Aulieata were of the same religion. This last statement
is perhaps inaccurate but the T'ang annals expressly state that the
population of Kashgar and Khotan was in part Zoroastrian.[497] No
mention of Nestorianism in Kashgar at this date has yet been
discovered, although in the thirteenth century it was a Nestorian see.
But since Nestorianism had penetrated even to China in the seventh
century, it probably also existed in Samarkand and Kashgar.

The pilgrim Wu-K'ung spent five months in Kashgar about 786, but there
appear to be no later data of interest for the study of Buddhism.

The town of Kucha[498] lies between Kashgar and Turfan, somewhat to
the west of Karashahr. In the second century B.C. it was already a
flourishing city. Numerous dated documents show that about 630 A.D.
the language of ordinary life was the interesting idiom sometimes
called Tokharian B, and, since the Chinese annals record no alien
invasion, we may conclude that Kucha existed as an Aryan colony
peopled by the speakers of this language some centuries before the
Christian era. It is mentioned in the Han annals and when brought into
contact with China in the reign of Wu-ti (140-87 B.C.) it became a
place of considerable importance, as it lay at the junction[499] of
the wester