CQ2 | Ed Murphy

Transliterating Sanskrit, and its derivatives such as Pali, remains an annoying problem.  The problem isn’t with the language itself; Sanskrit’s wonderfully precise and clear about sounds and letters.  Likewise, there’s no issue with scripts or alphabets.  You might think that there is some mystical connection between the script that a language is written in and the language itself but that’s really not the case.  Sanskrit in India is written in Devanagari but there’s no special reason to use Devanagari for Sanskrit instead of the Latin alphabet or another one.  Plus, Sanskrit’s only been written in Devanagari for a comparatively short period of time.

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The Pakistan Taliban war is being fought in areas that 1500 years ago were Buddhist. The districts of Dir, Buner, and especially Swat are rich with Buddhist ruins, a record of a time when they were part of the Gandharan Buddhist heartland centered on the ancient capital of Taxila, now on the outskirts of Islamabad/Rawalapindi. Padmasambhava, for instance, was from Swat, ancient Uddiyana, before he went on to convert Tibet to Buddhism. These were rich, sophisticated centers of learning and art, famous for their monasteries, now sadly the locus of much suffering.

[updated 13 May 2009 with the maps above; for more detail you're wanting John Huntington's gorgeous map.]

[22 June 2009: It turns out that the identification of Uddiyana with Swat is contested; it might instead refer to modern-day Orissa, in eastern India.]

In form, if not in fact, the structure of Chinese sub-provincial units goes as follows:

• Region (province)
  • Prefecture
    • County (and/or district)

There may be one or many counties/districts in a prefecture and one or many prefectures in a region.  China also has the idea, if not in fact, of autonomous regions, prefectures, and counties.  The general naming structure is: <placename> <ethnicity> <”autonomous”> <unit>, where unit could be region, prefecture, or county/district.  So, for example, you have, officially, the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”  But the autonomous designation is, as it were, autonomous, so you end up with situations like:

• Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
  • Bayin’gholin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture
    • Yanqui Hui Autonomous County

So that’s a nominally autonomous region of Hui (Han Chinese Muslims) within a Mongol autonomous prefecture within a Uyghur autonomous region, none of which are, of course, in the slightest bit autonomous.

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]

Of contested provenance, the term sart refers to oasis-dwellers of Chinese and former Soviet Central Asia.  It’s the antonym of ‘nomad.’  At one time it might have had a connotation of “Persian-speaker” but that’s not the current sense of it.  Possibly also pejorative.  V.V. Barthold, the Gibbon of Turkestan, I think had much to say on this matter.  (Gibbon is the Barthold of Rome.)  Wikipedia notes that “the Muslim, Mongol-speaking Dongxiang people of Northwestern China call themselves Sarta or Santa. It is not clear if there is any connection between this term and the Sarts of Central Asia.”