{"book":"adl0957","page":256,"text":"205\n\n(4) Puli-Khumri to Khanabad: (Distance about 70 miles).\nAt Puli-Khumri the Kabul-Mazar road branches off. One turns right and via Baghlan leads to Khanabad. Baghlan is now the centre of the Kataghan province. It is newly built and well-laid out and has a big sugar factory, the annual output of which is about 4,000 tons. The road from Puli-Khumri to Baghlan is level, but between Baghlan and Khanabad there are some low hills. From Khanabad roads lead in various directions. One goes to Taluqan, while a second runs straight north to Kunduz, and from there to Hazrat-i-Imam on the Oxus, beyond which lies the district of Badakhshan, a country of numerous lofty mountains in whose bosom some very fine valleys are located. To some people, this small and enchanting mountain district has an attraction of an almost unique kind.\n\nWinters are severe, the passes are blocked with snow, and the streams are frozen over, but summers are genial. Rainfall, owing to the presence of forests, is sufficient.\n\nBadakhsan has considerable mineral wealth. Salt deposits and rubies, lapis-lazuli and sulphur mines are known to exist in several places. Badakhshan was famous for its lapis-lazuli some three thousand years before the Christian era and had a brisk trade with China, Bokhara, and other countries of western Asia, even as far as Egypt. Another article of export was rubies, which have furnished the poets with many a simile. Marco Polo, the Venetian traveller of the 13th century, fully appreciated these beautiful rubies. He also speaks of \"the finest azure in the world.\" The mines of Lapis-lazuli (Lajaward) are still worked. Grain mills, driven by water, are very frequently met with in this area. The mountaineers have taken full advantage of this natural source of power. Gushing streams are to be seen in all directions.","chars":1829,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00256.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/256","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/256","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."}}