"Tash Rabat was my way station in Kyrgyzstan, and one of the loneliest and most beautiful places I had ever seen. I spent the night in a yurt belonging to one Jergalbek, a Kyrgyz herdsman, pictured here with his wife and daughter. On Hsuan Tsang's crossing of the Tianshan Mountains, twelve to fourteen members of his party froze to death. One night, the monk's party slept alongside a stream where they had met some foreign merchants who, as Hui Li tells it, 'privately went forward in the middle of the night. Scarcely had they gone ten li when they met a band of robbers who murdered every one of them. And so, when the Master of the Law and the others came to the place, they found their dead bodies there, but all their riches gone.' They passed on, 'deeply affected with the sight.'"

Jergalbek, a Kyrgyz herdsman, with his wife, daughter, and family dog in front of their yurt.

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