the caravans would have turned so far to the south-east, besides which Gordon regards this cairn as in any case of recent origin.
Two hundred years before the Greeks had crossed the Pamir the Chinese had made the acquaintance of the peoples dwelling on the Sir and Oxus, with whom they had established relations through the passes of the Tsung-ling, or Pamir of the Russian geographers. After Chang-Kien's expedition (probably about 128 a.d.) trade was rapidly developed, and large Chinese caravans soon found their way directly from the Tarim to the Sir basin in the "Tavan" country. To these caravans has been attributed the introduction into China of the vine, walnut, pomegranate, bean, cucumber, parsley, lucern, saffron, and sesame. Coming from the Tarim valley, the Chinese traders naturally sought to cross the heights at their narrowest point. They skirted on the north-east the Pamir and Alaï by the Terek-davan, but we also know from contemporary records that they crossed the Pamir by the southern passes directly in order to reach the Oxus and Ki-pin, or Kabulistan.
This direct commercial movement between east and west was interrupted by civil wars and migrations. But the routes over the Pamir were reopened by Buddhist missionaries and pilgrims. Hwen-T'sang, the most famous of these pilgrims, describes the journey of sixteen years' duration which he made across Central Asia in the first half of the seventh century, and a sufficient number of names in his itinerary have been identified to enable us to follow him over the Southern Pamir through Sirikol, Wakhan, and Badakshan. This is nearly the same route as that taken by Marco Polo in company with his father and uncle in 1272–5. But this traveller seems to have passed more to the north, instead of ascending the Upper Oxus crossing the Pamir in a north-easterly direction, travelling "twelve days on horseback" in a region "without dwellings or pasture." In 1603 the Catholic missionary, Benedict Goës, also crossed the Southern Pamir, probably by the same route as Hwen-T'sang. But two hundred years elapsed before it was again approached by a European traveller. In 1838 Wood ascended a headstream of the Oxus to the Sari-kul, or Kul-kalian, and with this journey begins the era of modern scientific exploration. In 1868 Hayward visited the south-east corner of the plateau; the Hindu emissaries of the Indian Topographic Bureau also traversed the "Great" and "Little" Pamir; the Greek Potagos penetrated, in 1871, from Badakshan to Kashgar; and in 1873 Forsyth, Gordon, and Trotter crossed the plateau to Badakshan, and sent a Hindu geometrician to visit Shignan and Roshan.
But the Northern Pamir has ceased to be visited ever since the epoch of Chinese supremacy. The Arabs, masters of the Sir valley, sent their trading expeditions by relatively easier routes round the northern base of the Tian-shan, and the same route was followed by the European envoys to the Mongol court. The rediscovery of the Northern Pamir is due to the Hindu Abdul Mejid, who was the first to cross the Pamir from south to north in 1861, and to the Russian explorers, Fedchenko, Kostenko, Mushketov, Sieverzov, Oshanin, and others. Over four-fifths of the whole area have already been surveyed, and Sieverzov's expedition of 1878 came within some 30 miles of the English exploration of 1873. About
