San-Tash and the legend of Timur's counted stones

Chokan Valikhanov, a member of Colonel Khomentovsky’s expedition to Lake Issyk-Kul, camped on the Tüp river at the Santash pass on the night of 25 May 1856.⁷⁸ His diary entry for that date gives the pass’s legend: Timur, stones, a count of the dead.¹ The next lines of the same entry say that the historical accounts flatly contradict it.²

Written down, then doubted

Valikhanov’s diary of the 1856 trip stayed in manuscript for a century.¹⁰ The editors of the 1984 collected works say the autograph is in the Academy of Sciences archive and that the diary first appeared in print in 1959.¹⁰ Valikhanov wrote of the expedition that it spent two months among the wild-stone Kyrgyz, collecting information mainly by studying their traditions and language.⁷

His entry for 25 May glosses the name as “counting stone” and says the pass takes it from a heap of stones piled into one mound, about three sazhen high and thirty-five around.³¹¹ A sazhen is the Russian fathom. His version of the story has Timur, whom he calls the emir Temir-Kurkan, setting out for China to take the Chinese emperor’s daughter into his harem.¹ Each soldier put a stone in one place on the way out.¹ On the way back each took one and put it in another place, and Timur judged his losses from the stones left unlifted.¹ The diary then turns on the story it has just told.

Timur did march on China, Valikhanov goes on, but he died at Otrar at the very start of the journey from Samarkand.¹² Le Strange, who annotated the English translation of Clavijo’s embassy, dates that death to the middle of February 1405, after Timur had crossed the Jaxartes.¹² Valikhanov adds that in all the Central Asian legends Timur plays the lead, as Charlemagne does in the medieval poems and Vladimir the Red Sun in Russian fairy tales.²

He did not dismiss the mound itself. Building it, he wrote, took many people and a great deal of labour, and it must commemorate some notable event in the life of some earlier people.²

One pass, two tellings

A year later Semenov-Tian-Shansky crossed the same pass.¹³ His memoir puts the crossing on 9 June 1857, and the legend above is his.¹³⁴ It differs from Valikhanov’s at several points.

Semenov’s account puts Timur’s march in the last quarter of the fifteenth century,¹³ and Timur died in 1405.¹² Valikhanov names no teller; Semenov says only that the Kara-Kyrgyz keep the tradition.¹⁴ Neither entry says where the story came from before them. In his report on the 1858-59 journey to Kashgar, Valikhanov describes the pass as a level plateau “famous for a tradition about Tamerlane” and does not tell the tradition.¹⁴

Both men do agree on the pass. It lies on the divide between the Ili and Issyk-Kul basins, and caravans use it; Valikhanov calls it the most important and most convenient of the crossings of the Kungei Alatau.⁹

A khan in the postscript

Under the legend and its rebuttal, Valikhanov added a postscript. The wild-stone Kyrgyz, he says, ascribe the mound to a Kyrgyz khan called Ishim, as a monument to a victory over the Kalmyk Dzungars.⁵ He finds that more likely than Timur.⁵

A Kazakh book of 2010 also gives the mound a khan, after a defeat rather than a victory. Bektursyn’s list of the Kazakh people’s major battles says that after the battle of San-Tash the Kazakh khan Esim held a memorial feast there for the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz who had died, and built a stone burial mound.⁶

The battle itself has a date. Atygaev, in a 2023 history of the Kazakh khanate that draws on Zayn ad-Din Vasifi, says Uzbek and Moghul armies fought a Kazakh-Kyrgyz army at a place called San-Tash on 27 July 1537 and won.¹⁵ Bektursyn says the Kazakh-Kyrgyz army was destroyed there.¹⁵ They disagree on where: Atygaev puts it west of Issyk-Kul, Bektursyn on the east shore.¹⁵ Neither says the battlefield is the pass on the Tüp. Bektursyn puts the feast “afterwards” without a year, and the sources we read show Esim active around 1600, some sixty years after the battle.⁶¹⁶

That leaves two khans’ monuments for two different events: Valikhanov’s Ishim celebrating a victory over the Dzungars, and Bektursyn’s Esim mourning a defeat by Uzbek and Moghul armies.⁵⁶¹⁵ Ishim and Esim look like one name spelled two ways, but that is our guess; no source we read says so.

What the mound is

Whether the cairn covers a grave, older than Timur or younger, is something we could not settle: we found no excavation report. The 1856 diary describes a heap and calls it a kurgan, a mound.³¹¹ Valikhanov’s own reasoning from the labour involved is the closest thing to a verdict in the record we read, and he left it open.²