The legend of “princess castle” of Tajik Ethnic Group

If you are lucky to go to the Tashikurgan on the Pamirs, the warm-hearted and hospitable Tajik people will introduce many local scenic spots ad historical sites as if they are enumerating the treasures of their own family, such as the Stone Town, Princess Castle, Alaimuger Castle, Xiangbaobao Ancient Graves, Gaizi River Ancient Courier Station, Bamafeili wailimazha, and so on. Among them, the Princess Castle, which locates on a mountain that is 10 kilometers to the south of the Dabuda countryside in this county, is the ancient relic that the Tajik people take as pride.

According to legend, in the ancient times, Tashikurgan was a vast deserted plain on the Congling (the present Pamirs), the opening of the Silk Road made this place full of vigor. Afterwards, a princess of the Han nationality on the Central Plains accepted the marriage request of the Persian king, and started her journey to Persia. When she arrived in Congling, a war happened in the front, the road was blocked, and she was detained in the deserted mountains of the plateau. For the sake of safety, the ambassador-at-large that went to welcome her arranged the princess on a mountain, and ordered the guards to closely guard and protect her. What was magic was that the princess united in wedlock with the solar god on the lone mountain and became pregnant. The ambassador-at-large did not dare to report back to the Persian king, so he ordered the soldiers to construct a place and town on the mountain, and settled in this place with the princess.

The princess gave birth to a clever and handsome boy, when he grew up, he was supported and designated as the king, and he established the Jiepantuo Kingdom, which meant “mountain road”. People called the capital as “Kezikurgan”, which meant the “princess castle”. Since then, the royal family of the Jiepantuo Kingdom called themselves as “the natural race of the Han nationality and the sun”, and called their first ancestor mother as the “person of Han nationality”.

According to the record of historical documents, Jiepantuo Kingdom was the regime of Fang Kingdom that was established by the ancestors of the Tajik nationality in the Western Regions in the 2nd century, and it withered away in the 8th century, but the town name and relic of the princess castle are still kept at present. Thought the above-mentioned stories are full of myth color, it reacts the close relationship and the distant source and long stream between the Han nationality in the Central Plains and the ancestors of the Tajik nationality.