During the
Former Han period, this place was referred to as
Xiye (). It was described as having 350 households, 4,000 people and 1,000 men able to bear arms. It was ruled by a king of a neighboring kingdom called
Zihe (). In the
Later Han period it was apparently known as
Piaosha "drifting sands", The Chinese pilgrim monk,
Song Yun, passed through the Kingdom of Zhujuban () on his way from Khotan in 519 CE. He described it as being five days' journey around and that it produced much cereal, which was made into cakes. The inhabitants did not allow the slaughter of animals and only ate those which had died a natural death. Many of them lived in the mountains. They resembled the people of Khotan in their language and customs while their writing was like that of the
Brahmans from India. of Kargalik, 1915 During the 1800s, Kargalik contained many foreign slaves who had integrated into the Chinese state. After being freed, many slaves such as Gilgitis in Xinjiang cities like Tashkurgan, Yarkand and Karghallik, stayed rather than return
Hunza in
Gilgit. Most of these slaves were women who married local slaves and free men and had children with them. Sometimes the women were married to their masters, other slaves or free men who were not their masters. There were ten slave men to slave women married couples and 15 master-female slave couples, with several other non-master free men married to slave women. Both slaves and free Turki and Chinese men fathered children with Hunza slave women. A free man, Khas Muhammad, was married with two children to a female slave named Daulat, aged 24. A
Gilgiti slave woman aged 26, Makhmal, was married to a Chinese slave man, Allah Vardi and had three children with him. In 1979, a number of religious schools were founded by militant group
East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM/TIP) founder Abdul Hakeem Makhdoom in Karghalik. These were used to disseminate the movement's ideology among the local population, and were the place where
Hasan Mahsum, who would later go on to revive and lead the militant group, studied from 1984 to 1989. In 1994, the Chinese character name for the town was set as Kageleke (喀格勒克镇). ==Geography==