Chien-li hsien was also a fertile area for chen since it was located by the Yangtze river in an area crossed by numerous rivers and contained a population of 883,000.]

On the south side of the Taklimakan Desert stands a Central Asian oasis, the edge of a dusty city that was once the centre of a great Buddhist kingdom. As early as the second century A.D., Yarkant (Suoju, Shache, or So-ch'e in Chinese) was responsible for ideas and texts that changed the Chinese empire. These days Yarkant is a market town for low-income Uighurs, Islamic farmers and herders who have lived here for more than a millennium, and a strategic base for China's domestic security forces. With some of the lowest annual incomes in China, these ethnic-minority farmers and herders scratch out a living based on the trickle of moisture that flows from the Kunlun mountain range to the near south. Yarkant is literally wedged in between the outer edge of the Himalayas and a vast desert filled with hidden energy treasure.

In a slaughter wide they fell, woeful days of Bale came on; Famine-death fortook fortitude from men!

St Cyprian's was an expensive and snobbish school which was in process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive.