Aysima Mirsultan, Abduşükür Məhəmməd Qumtur, Esmanur Tok XIX yüzyıla ait Kuça haritası ve haritada geçen bazı yer adları

Kucha is an ancient homeland situated north of the Taklamakan Desert and south of the Tianshan Mountains. It is one of the longest-inhabited settlements of the Uyghurs. Geographically, Kucha lies at the heart of the vast lands where our ancestors lived and has historically served as a crucial transportation hub between East and West, as well as North and South. In the past, Kucha was the capital of the state known as Küsen. The Küsen Uyghur State was one of the most powerful and culturally and economically advanced states in Central Asia. Despite numerous historical sources on Küsen, there are few local materials documenting the social and economic conditions of premodern Kucha. The available information is limited to a few Uyghur legal documents, foreign travelers’ memoirs, and some details from Chinese sources. After the 17th century, this land, isolated from the outside world and unaware of global developments, became a point of interest for some foreign adventurers, explorers, and travelers in the 19th century who sought to witness the remnants of the medieval past. Although their purposes for coming to this land varied, their primary objective was to discover, excavate, collect, and document an ancient civilization buried underground for thousands of years. Their main expeditions focused on the ancient cities buried beneath the sands of the Taklamakan Desert, Kashgar—once the center of Islamic civilization in Central Asia—and Turpan, Kucha, and Hotan, which were strongholds of Buddhist culture. At that time, adventurers, explorers, and travelers from Russia, Japan, England, Germany, Sweden, France, Finland, and other countries and regions frequently ventured into this land, which had long been in a deep medieval slumber. They took valuable artifacts and manuscripts back to their countries and wrote scholarly articles and books about the region. In 1903, German researcher Albert Grünwedel received a rare map of Kucha from the director of the Saint Petersburg Asian Museum for delivery to the Berlin Ethnological Museum. In the 1890s, Russian Consul General Nikolay F. Petrovsky