{"book":"adl0957","page":246,"text":"195\n\nChangez Khan early in the thirteenth century A.D. It is said that one of Changez Khan's grandsons, Mutugen, son of Jaghtai, was killed in the action when the Mughuls were besieging Jalaluddin, son of Alauddin Mohammad Khwarazmshah in the citadel of Bamian. When the town surrendered, Changez, in revenge, ordered that every living being, man or animal, should be killed. The ruined town was then named Mao-Baligh, that is, \"the bad town\".\n\nBamian was an important commercial centre in the Middle Ages, but now the new route, which connects Kabul with the northern provinces, passes some 15 miles to the north.\n\nThe present Afghan Government, which shows great interest in the relics of the past, is diligently looking after ancient monuments, and for the sake of travellers, who every year visit this place in large numbers from all over the world, has built here a comfortable rest-house.\n\nFrom here a difficult road leads to Herat through the heart of the Hazara country. In winter it is rather impassable. Some 50 miles west of Bamian on this route lies Band-i-Amir, a fine chain of lakes encompassed by hills of various colours. The whole locality is of extreme beauty. The water of the lakes is of bluish green in colour and quite transparent. The old Hejdah Nahr (or 18 canals) of Balkh, famous in local history, probably received water from these lakes.\n\nBand-i-Amir: One of the most interesting places for tourists to visit is Bandi-i-Amir, which, with its numerous and beautiful lakes is deemed one of the wonders of the world. The waters of Band-i-Amir issue forth from a spring named Kaprak, 10 miles from the sanctuary of Band-i-Amir. The water contains","chars":1670,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00246.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/246","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/246","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}