Watters Tells Me That The Tartars Are First Mentioned By
The Chinese In The Period Extending From A.D. 860 To 874; The Earliest
Mention I Have Discovered, However, Is Under Date Of A.D. 880.
(Wu tai
shih, Bk.
4.) We also read in the same work (Bk. 74, 2) that 'The Ta-ta
were a branch of the Mo-ho (the name the Nu-chen Tartars bore during the
Sui and T'ang periods: Ma Tuan-lin, Bk. 327, 5). They first lived to the
north of the Kitan. Later on they were conquered by this people, when they
scattered, a part becoming tributaries of the Kitan, another to the
P'o-hai (a branch of the Mo-ho), while some bands took up their abode in
the Yin Shan in Southern Mongolia, north of the provinces of Chih-li and
Shan-si, and took the name of Ta-ta.' In 981 the Chinese ambassador to
the Prince of Kao-chang (Karakhodjo, some 20 miles south-east of Turfan)
traversed the Ta-ta country. They then seem to have occupied the northern
bend of the Yellow River. He gives the names of some nine tribes of Ta-ta
living on either side of the river. He notes that their neighbours to the
east were Kitan, and that for a long time they had been fighting them after
the occupation of Kan-chou by the Uigurs. (Ma Tuan-lin, Bk. 336, 12-14.)
We may gather from this that these Tartars were already settled along the
Yellow River and the Yin Shan (the valley in which is now the important
frontier mart of Kwei-hua Ch'eng) at the beginning of the ninth century,
for the Uigurs, driven southward by the Kirghiz, first occupied Kan-chou in
north-western Kan-suh, somewhere about A.D. 842."]
NOTE 3.
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