The Ma were a family of Hui (i.e., Han Chinese Muslim) warlords in northwestern China in the first half of the 20th century, a bloody and complex period in the region.  The two most famous members of the clan were Ma Bufang and Ma Zhongying, who fought with Chiang Kai-shek against the Communist forces.  Ma Bufang ruled Qinghai from 1937 until the Communist victory in 1949.  Ma Zhongying, was warlord of neighboring Gansu and fought unsuccesfully to control Xinjiang.

According to Wikipedia, Ma Zhongying fled to the Soviet Union and was probably executed by Stalin in a purge in 1937.  After the Communist takeover, his cousin, Ma Bufang became the Taiwanese ambassador to Saudi Arabia although he was removed from his post in 1961 by the Taiwanese government after he forced his niece to become his concubine.   He never returned to China and died in Saudi Arabia in 1975.   There’s a book in here somewhere.

Ma Bufong’s palace in Linxia

[source]

Have you ever had the experience of reading something for the first time and then realizing that you had actually read it before and just forgotten?  There should be a name for that; there probably is, in German at least.

Last night I was reading George van Driem’s absolutely amazing two volume Languages of the Himalayas, a book I love for its eccentric encyclopedic breadth of knowledge.  (Eccentric because, for example, chapters are entitled “Kings of the Forest,” “Men of the Jungle”, and “Flotsam and Jetsam along the Southern Slopes.”  And because he has an idiosyncratic ‘symbolic theory of language.’  But encyclopedic because he somehow knows about all — and I mean all — Himalayan languages.)

Anyway, it’s not a book that you read from cover-to-cover but I was looking at the Burushaski section last night and wandered over to the Turkic section, getting more and more lost the whole time.  Eventually I got to this:

Also in [China’s] Gansu province live the ‘Yellow Uighur’, quite distinct from the Uighur proper, who speak a language closely related to Uzbek.  Yellow Uighur is now usually called Yugur, which actually does little to alleviate potential confusion, because the Yugur are a linguistically heterogeneous group.  The Western Yugur speak an Eastern Turkic language, and the Eastern Yugur speak a Mongolian language.  Some ‘Yellow Uighur’ even speak an Amdo dialect of Tibetan.  (pp. 1210-1211)

If you had asked me yesterday about it, I would have said that this — especially the fact that there are Tibetan-speaking Yellow Uighurs — was mindbendingly complicated and utterly new to me, but at some point in the past I had apparently had the exact same epiphany and scrawled “This finally and conclusively puts it over the top for me” in the margins.

There’s a common misperception that Greek settlement in Afghanistan was simply the remnants of Alexander’s garrisons in the east. For example, writing in a recent New York Review of Books, the estimable William Dalrymple says, “After [Alexander] died, the Greek garrisons he had established in what is present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan found themselves cut off from their Mediterranean homeland and had no choice but to stay on, intermingling with the local peoples, and leavening Sanskrit learning with classical Greek philosophy.”

If this were true, it would have to be a pretty impressive garrison of troops to have such an impact. But the reality is that there was an active program of settlement even in the easternmost satrapies, with Greek colonists moving to Bactria, and other regions, over the course of many — hundreds? — years. At least at first these were not isolated communities, and they were designed to anchor the successor kingdoms. John Grainger writes in his Alexander the Great Failure:

[Alexander’s successor] Seleukos found groups of Greeks and Macedonians scattered throughout his lands, usually former soldiers settled in old Persian centers or new Macedonian garrisons. He organized several of these places as new cities, each with a defined territory, a set of public buildings, including city walls. Each city also had a garrison established in an adjoining citadel; he established cities, but also ensured that he retained control. Some of these places were organized while he was in the east campaigning in Baktria and India, and he inherited Alexander’s foundations as well: at Alexandria at Kandahar, Alexandria-Eschate and Merv, in Margiane.

And their impact was huge; in art (veristic portraiture, for one arrived in South Asia with the Greeks), medicine, language and scripts, warfare, governance, and philosophy. But despite this acknowledged influence, until fairly recently, there was a paradox about the Greeks in Afghanistan: there was the textual record and the evidence of their impact — Buddha statues in togas, lots of numismatic evidence, the edicts of Asoka in Bactrian written in Greek letters, and so on — but we didn’t know where their fabled cities were. Balkh today, outside of Mazar-e-Sharif, Ali’s tomb, in northern Afghanistan, is a dusty little village: Colin Thubrow reports in Shadow of the Silk Road that “almost nothing in Balkh remained.” This paradox — lots of evidence, no cities — was often referred to as ‘the Bactrian mirage,’ and it was resolved only with the modern discovery, by French archeologists before the Soviet invasion, of the classical Greek city of Ai Khanoum in northern Afghanistan.