Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎506r] (136/238)

China, the Avars, and the Franks. 349
apparently for the first time in Chinese history, occurs the
word Khaghan, or “ Emperor.” The Khan of the Geougen
Tartars, as we shall call him, usually held his Court in what
is in our times called the Alashan region, somewhere about
mediaeval Etzina. He had conquered and annexed most of
the High Carts, and also those remains of the earlier
Hiung-nu called the Bayirku, lying further to his west.
This last word again appears in Turkish on the Orkhon
inscriptions of the seventh century, and some of their
fighting with Shelun is plainly stated to have been on the
Orkhon River. Owing to a misprint in some of the
Chinese national histories, De Guignes, and after him
Gibbon, erroneously gives this first Khan’s name as Toulun,
a mistake all the more important in that a century later the
Geougen Khan really was named Toulun.
From first to last the Geougen never possessed anything
in the shape of a town. They were what the Chinese call a
“ horse-back State,” pure and simple; that is, they were
nomads, moving about with their tents, and pitching for a
few weeks or months in ever-changing valleys or oases,
according to the needs of their flocks and herds, to the
supplies of pasturage and water, and to the temperature of
the seasons. Whilst we have tolerably full accounts of
social usages amongst the ancient Hiung-nu, and their later
descendants the Turks, we have very little to show us what
were the particular points in Geougen character which differ
entiated the ruling caste among them from these two—that
is, from their predecessors and successors in desert empire ;
but the bulk of them are clearly stated to have been
Hiung-nu tribes too. The evidence of language is, of
course, not to be despised. We are given the native
trisyllable for “bald-head,” and also the native words (as
they sounded to Chinese ears) for all the Khans’ descriptions
or titles. Thus, beginning with Shelun the “ Conqueror,”
we have, in succession, the “Extender,” the “Fair,” the
“ Victorious,” the “ Spiritual,” the “ Pensive,” the “ Good,”
the “Perpetual,” the “Merry,” the “Successor,” the