"Gulshan аl-Muluk"

Before you is one of the major historical chronicles of the nineteenth-century Emirate of Bukhara – Gulshan al-Muluk, or The Rose Garden of Kings, written by Muhammad Yaqub Bukhari.
On the manuscript opening, an important visual system can be seen: significant names, religious formulas, and dates are highlighted in red ink. For readers of that era, this served as a form of textual navigation. The nastaliq script remains elegant and disciplined, even though the manuscript is devoted not to poetry, but to political history.
What makes this work especially valuable is that it was written almost simultaneously with the events it describes, between 1825 and 1831. The author recorded the history of Bukhara virtually in real time.
For the Manghit dynasty, such chronicles were politically essential. Since the emirs were not descendants of Genghis Khan, they legitimized their authority through devotion to Islam, protection of Muslim lands, and support for religious scholarship.
Thus, this manuscript functioned not only as a chronicle, but also as a political and moral justification of power in Islamic Central Asia.