Definition of "Chuguchak"

My four months on the desert road to Turkestan were the first part of a journey overland from Peking to India. The Mongolian journey I made alone in 1926, but early in the following year my wife joined me at Chuguchak, on the Siberian border, and together we traveled on through Chinese Central Asia and over the Karakoram route to Leh, Kashmir, and India.

1929, Owen Lattimore, “Preface”, in The Desert Road To Turkestan‎, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, page vii

THE decision having been reached to send me to Sinkiang, the question arose as to how I was to get there. Urumchi can be reached from three directions ; from Kashmir in India across the Himalaya, Karakoram and Pamir to Kashgar, and thence a further journey of near a thousand miles through Eastern Turkistan to Urumchi ; from China across the Gobi desert to Hami and thence on across the T'ien Shan range to Urumchi ; and via the Trans-Siberian and Turkistan-Siberian railways through Russian Central Asia to the Chinese frontier town of Chuguchak (Ta-ch'eng) and thence by cart or motor truck across the Dzungarian steppe to Urumchi.

1937, Sir Eric Teichman, Journey to Turkistan‎, Hodder and Stoughton, page 27

Tatar commercial penetration into new regions of Central and Eastern Asia very often preceded Russian political expansion. Tatars appeared in Manchuria, the Far East, and Tuva (called the Urjankhai region before the revolution of 1917) even before the appearance of Russian administration there. Tatar merchants were involved in trade with China, especially Sinkiang, and gained a foothold in the border market of Chuguchak as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century.

1960, Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia‎, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, page 21

By chance—ill chance, as it had turned out—Georg Vasel, the young German airfield engineer, found himself at the remote town of Chuguchak on the Sinkiang-Soviet border at the time. It was an unhealthy place for a European just then, and it was from a prison yard that Vasel watched ‘regiment after regiment’ marching through the snow towards Urumchi, followed by ‘greyish-green monsters - armoured cars with machine-guns mounted on their steel turrets’.

1985, Peter Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia‎, W. W. Norton and Co., page 226

Eleanor chronicled both her solo journey from Beijing via the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Novosibirsk and Semipalatinsk and then via sled in the dead of winter to Chuguchak and the couple's subsequent travels in Turkestan Reunion. Their odyssey together across Xinjiang provided the framework for Lattimore's much broader cultural and historical observations in High Tartary.

1995 April 16, Orville Schell, “THE STRANGE ORDEAL OF OWEN LATTIMORE”, in The Washington Post‎, archived from the original on 08 December 2017‎