e know scarcely anything.
Yet the vision of Warren Hastings and of Thomas Manning remains
unfulfilled.

North of the Karakoram there were no similar incentives. Mr. Moorcroft
who, fifty years ago, resided in Ladakh, does not appear to have
manifested any desire to pierce the iron barrier to the north, although
towards Ruduk and Tibet he turned as if irresistibly fascinated. The
character which the brothers Michell gave Little Bokhara, or Eastern
Turkestan, expressed a fact, which long deterred any traveller from
attempting to explore it. "Little Bokhara," they said, "was a country
where every man carried his life in his hand, and there were indubitable
excuses for each successive traveller who recoiled before the hardships
and dangers of a journey through that country." But although no
Englishman traversed the dizzy passes of the Karakoram and the Kuen Lun,
now and then the people from Sanju, Khoten, and the neighbourhood came
to Ladakh, where they brought intelligence of the political events that
were taking place further north. Their intelligence was often completely
false, it was always vague and exaggerated, but it, at all events, told
us whether peace or war, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, was the
existing circumstance in Eastern Turkestan. It was known in a general
sense that China was the nominal ruler of this vast region; but the
exact relations China held there, how she conquered the country and
when, and by what means she retained her conquest, all these were
unascertained. There had, indeed, been one break in this state of
darkness when the learned traveller, Adolph Schlagintweit, in 1857,
penetrated, with a few native followers, into Kashgar. The initial
difficulties were successfully overcome, and fortune seemed at first
disposed to smile upon his enterprise. Herr Schlagintweit had come,
however, at a singularly inopportune moment. The Khoja Wali Khan had
just invaded Kashgar, and his forces had spread as far south as Yarkand,
when the traveller approached that city. He appears to have been able to
report himself to the Aksakal, representing Cashmere at Yarkand, who, in
turn, communicated with the Chinese Amban, for permission for him to
enter the city; but while detained outside the walls he was captured by
a roving party of Wali Khan's army. He was at once hurried off to Wali
Khan's head-quarters at Kashgar, where that despot, in a fit of fury,
brought about by excess in "bang," ordered him to be execut