Kucha or Kuche (also: Kuçar, Kuchar) Uyghur (كۇچار), Chinese Simplified: 库车; Traditional: 庫車; pinyin Kùchē; also romanized as Qiuzi, Qiuci, Chiu-tzu, Kiu-che, Kuei-tzu from the traditional Chinese forms 屈支 屈茨; 龜玆; 龟兹, 丘玆, also Po (bai in pinyin?); Sanskrit: Kueina, Standard Tibetan: Kutsahiyui[1] was an ancient Buddhist kingdom located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin and south of the Muzat River. (The area lies in present day Aksu Prefecture, Xinjiang, China; Kuqa City itself is the county seat of that prefecture's Kuqa County). Its population was given as 74,632 in 1990.
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According to the Book of Han, Kucha was the largest of the 'Thirty-six kingdoms of the Western Regions,' with a population of 81,317, including 21,076 persons able to bear arms.[2] During the periods of Tang domination during the Early Middle Ages, the city of Kucha was usually one of the 'Four Garrisons' of An-hsi (Anxi) the 'Pacified West'.,[3] typically the capital of it. During periods of Tibetan domination it was usually at least semi-independent. It fell under Uighur domination and became an important center of the later Uighur Kingdom after the Kirghiz destruction of the Uighur steppe empire in 840.[4]
Chinese transcriptions of the Han or the Tang also infer an original form Küchï, but the form Guzan, representing [Küsan], is attested in seventh century Old Tibetan (in the Old Tibetan Annals, s.v. year 687).[5] Mongol Empire-period Uighur and Chinese transcriptions support the form Küsän/Güsän/Kuxian/Quxian rather than Küshän or Kushan (Yuanshi, chap. 12, fol 5a, 7a). (The form Kūsān is still attested in the early-modern work, Tarikh-i-Rashidi, Cf. ELIAS and ROSS, Tarikh-i-Rashidi, in the index, s. v. Kuchar and Kusan: “One MS. [of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi] reads Kus/Kusan. Both names were used for the same place, as also Kos, Kucha, Kujar, etc., and all appear to stand for the modern Kuchar of the Turki-speaking inhabitants, and Kuché of the Chinese. An earlier Chinese name, however, was Ku-sien.” Elias (1895), p. 124, n. 1.) However, transcriptions of the name 'Kushan' in Indic scripts from late Antiquity include the spelling Guṣân, and are apparently reflected in at least one Khotanese-Tibetan transcription.[6] The history of the toponyms corresponding to modern 'Kushan' and 'Kucha' remain somewhat problematic.[7]
Kucha is well known as the home of the great fifth century translator monk Kumārajīva (344-413). It was an important Buddhist center from Antiquity until the late Middle Ages, with the Sarvāstivāda school (a Sthavira school) predominating into the Uighur period, when Mahayana eventually became important. For a long time Kucha was the most populous oasis in the Tarim Basin. The language, as evidenced by surviving manuscripts and inscriptions, was Tokharian (Tocharian), an Indo-European language. Under the Uighur domination the Kingdom of Kucha gradually became Turkic speaking.
As a Central Asian metropolitan center, Kucha was part of the Silk Road economy, and was in contact with the rest of Central Asia, including Sogdiana and Bactria, and thus eventually with the peripheral cultures of India, Persia, and China.[8]
Kuchean music was very popular in China during the Tang Dynasty, particularly the lute which became known in Chinese as pipa.[9] The 'music of Kucha' was transmitted from China to Japan, along with other early medieval music, during the same period, and is preserved there, somewhat transformed, as gagaku, or Japanese court music.[10] See: Picken, Music from the T'ang Court.
The extensive ruins of the ancient capital city, in Chinese Guici [the 'City of Subashi'], lie 20 kilometres (12 mi) north of modern Kucha. Francis Younghusband, who passed through the oasis in 1887 on his epic journey from Beijing to India, described the district as "probably" having some 60,000 inhabitants. The modern Chinese town was about 700 yards (640 m) square with a 25 ft (7.6 m) high wall, with no bastions or protection to the gateways, but a ditch about 20 ft (6 m) deep around it. It was filled with houses and "a few bad shops". The "Turk houses" ran right up to the edge of the ditch and there were remains of an old Turk city to the south-east of the Chinese one, but most of the shops and houses were outside of it. About 800 yards (732 m) north of the Chinese city were barracks for 500 soldiers out of a garrison he estimated to total about 1500 men, who were armed with old Enfield rifles "with the Tower mark."[11]
Buddhism was introduced to Kucha before the end of the 1st century, however it was not until the 3rd century that the kingdom became a major center of Buddhism, primarily the Sarvāstivāda school of the Sthavira or Śrāvakayāna branch, but eventually also Mahāyāna. (In this respect it differed from Khotan, a Mahāyāna-dominated kingdom on the southern side of the desert.)
According to the Chinese Book of Jin, during the third century there were nearly one thousand Buddhist stupas and temples in Kucha. At this time, Kuchanese monks began to travel to China. The fourth century saw yet further growth for Buddhism within the kingdom. The palace was said to resemble a Buddhist monastery, displaying carved stone Buddhas, and monasteries around the city were numerous.
There were two nunneries at A-li (Avanyaka):
Another nunnery, Tsio-li, was 40 li north of Kucha and is famous as the place where Kumārajīva's mother Jīva retired.
A monk from the royal family known as Po-Yen travelled to the Chinese capital, Luoyang, from AD 256-260. He translated six Buddhist texts to Chinese in 258 at China's famous White Horse Temple, including the Infinite Life Sutra, an important sutra in the Pure Land Buddhism.
Po-Śrīmitra was another Kuchean monk who traveled to China from 307-312 and translated three Buddhist texts.
A second Kuchean Buddhist monk known as Po-Yen also went to Liangzhou (the Wuwei region of modern Gansu), China and is said to have been well respected, although he is not known to have translated any texts.
In the early 20th century inscriptions and documents in two new related (but mutually unintelligible) languages were discovered at various sites in the Tarim Basin written in Central Asian Brahmi script. It was soon found that they belonged to the Indo-European family of languages and had not undergone the Satem sound change. The only records of East Tokharian, or "Tokharian A" (from the region of Turfan [Turpan] and Karashahr), and West Tokharian, or "Tokharian B" (mainly from the region of Kucha, but also found in Turfan and elsewhere), are of relatively late date – approximately 6th to 8th century CE (though the dates are contested); but the people arrived in the region much earlier. Their languages became extinct before circa 1000 CE. Scholars are still trying to piece together a fuller picture of these languages, their origins, history and connections, etc.[12]
The kingdom bordered Aksu then Kashgar to the west, and Karasahr then Turpan to the east. Across the Taklamakan desert to the south was Khotan.