The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  One conclusion is certain, though: the peoples living in Central Asia were always moving, and the languages spoken in a given region often changed as a result. Chinese-language records document the successive displacement of peoples resulting from the Xiongnu expansion in the second century BCE, with the rise of the Turks (a people the Chinese called Tujue, who were distant ancestors of the modern Turks of Turkey) in the sixth century, and the migration of the Uighurs (who also spoke a language in the Turkic language family) into Xinjiang in the ninth century.40 Similar displacements could easily have occurred with the migration of different tribal peoples in the distant past, before any records survive. The norm in Central Asia was linguistic change, not linguistic continuity.

  Since the time of Sieg and Siegling, linguists have clarified the relationship between the two languages they called Tocharian A (more accurately called Agnean) and Tocharian B (now recognized to be Kuchean). In 2007, a scholar at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Melanie Malzahn, did a census of all extant manuscripts in Agnean. She put the total number of extant leafs and fragments at 1150.41 The complete leafs total no more than fifty.42

  Of the Agnean manuscripts, 383 came from a single scriptorum at Shorchuk, southwest of Yanqi on the road to Korla.43 None of the surviving documents gives the name of the language itself, but since almost all were found near Yanqi—the town called Agni in Sanskrit—scholars prefer to call this language Agnean, the term we will use henceforth.44 The surviving manuscripts hint that the residents of Yanqi (Agni) and Turfan may have spoken Agnean in the early centuries of the Common Era, when Iranians living to the west first introduced the teachings of Buddhism.

  The longest manuscript in Agnean has twenty-five consecutive leafs with no significant gaps—unlike the individual leafs that survive in most cases. It is a jataka story with many of the same plot elements as the classic Coppélia tale. It tells of a prince named Punyavan, a Sanskrit name meaning “Possessing Merit,” who competes for the throne of his country against his four brothers (Possessing Virile Force, Possessing Technical Skill, Possessing Good Looks, and Possessing Sagacity). In the Agnean version of this text, which differs both from the Sanskrit original and later Chinese and Tibetan versions, the contest among the princes occupies only two of the seventeen leafs. The rest of the text is devoted to long speeches in which each prince describes his own attribute.

  In the story Possessing Sagacity tells, a young painter falls in love with a mechanical doll created by an artisan, who left the doll in the painter’s room overnight. When the painter reaches for her, she breaks into pieces, and the painter responds by hanging himself from a cord connected to the wall. After the artisan discovers the artist’s suicide, he summons the neighbors and the authorities. As they arrive, he prepares to cut the cord from which the corpse hangs. At that moment, the painter emerges from behind the wall and says to the artisan: “A painting is one thing, a painter another.” The artist’s trompe l’oeil painting of himself hanging was his response to the animated doll, which utterly lacked sagacity.45 This memorable story taught the advantages of sagacity to its audience, most likely students in a monastery.

  A manuscript found by the Germans at Sängim (Shengjinkou in Chinese), just outside of Turfan, illustrates the different uses of the two Tocharian languages most clearly. The text is in Agnean, with nineteen explanatory notes in Kuchean and two in Uighur. As Lane explains, “It should be abundantly clear that we are dealing with the glossing of a Tocharian A [Agnean] text by a newcomer whose monastery language, at least, was dialect B [Kuchean], and to whom the ‘old’ monastery language of the area was not familiar. His own native speech may have been Turkish [Uighur].”46 By the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, then, Agnean had become almost entirely a written language used exclusively by Buddhists inside monasteries. Surviving Agnean texts display no regional differences, another sign that the language had largely ossified. Outside the monasteries, most of the people living in the region of Yanqi and Turfan were speaking either Chinese or Uighur.

  Kuchean and Agnean differ in important ways. The Kuchean language displays regional variants, the product of evolving use over time in different places, as well as clear stages of development: archaic, classical, late, and colloquial.47 In 1989 the leading scholar of Tocharian, the French scholar Georges-Jean Pinault, calculated the total number of documents in Kuchean to be 3,120.48 He has since revised his count upward to 6,060 to include newly available fragments from Berlin. Still, the total number of intact leaves remains no more than two hundred.49

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pelliot collected some two thousand of these fragments, most in the immediate vicinity of a monastery in Duldur Aqur, 12 miles (20 km) south of Kucha.50 Unlike the texts in Agnean, these texts give the name of the language in which they are written as Kuchean.51 Kuchean was used in a broader geographic region, all along the northern edge of the Taklamakan, with the core area in Kucha, but extending as far east as Turfan, and overlapping with the Agnean core area of Yanqi.

  Many of the Chinese and Kuchean materials came from a single library, Pelliot’s notes suggest, where a wall had collapsed, preserving the contents, and where a subsequent fire heavily damaged the documents. Pelliot unearthed the surviving records from more than one place. The religious documents were from the sanctuaries and stupas inside the monastery, while the administrative documents must have come from the edge of the monastery.52

  At the end of the fifth century, when the inhabitants of Kucha were speaking Kuchean, Central Asia entered a particularly unsettled period as various tribal confederations, including the Rouran (also known as the Ruirui and Ruanruan in China and as the Avars in Europe) and the Hephthalites, vied for control of the major trade routes. After conquering both Kucha and Yanqi, the Avar confederacy eventually broke apart, only to be succeeded in 552 by the Turks (Tujue in Chinese), who formed another powerful confederacy that conquered Kucha and Yanqi, leaving the local rulers in place. After 552, the brother of the founder of the Turkish confederacy led a series of successful military campaigns to the west, conquering parts of Xinjiang and lands extending all the way to the Black Sea. The two brothers eventually formed a dual Turkic kaghanate in which the founder retained control of eastern territories, while his brother, the leader of the Western kaghanate, accepted a subordinate role. Over time, this relationship grew more formal, and by 580 distinct Eastern and Western kaghanates had taken shape.53 Recognizing the Western kaghan as their overlord, the rulers of Kucha paid tribute to them and provided troops when asked.

  The Bai-family kings continued to rule Kucha in the sixth through the eighth centuries, the official Chinese histories confirm. Frequently repeating the contents of earlier histories, the compilers of the histories concur that the kingdom was wealthy and sent valuable tribute to the Chinese. The official history of the Wei dynasty, composed 551–54, is the first to report that the people of the kingdom paid their taxes using silver coins: “The customs of the local people are licentious. They have established a market where women are sold and officials collect the coins that men pay.” The same official history also reports the existence of an unusual natural resource: “In the middle of the mountains to the northwest is a river formed from an ointment-like substance that travels some distance before it enters the soil. It is like clarified butter and has a foul odor. When applied to hair or teeth that have fallen out, it makes them grow back, and the sick who take it are all cured.” This mysterious substance has been identified as petroleum.54 Today Korla is one of China’s most important oil fields.

  The official history of the Northern dynasties, written about a century later, reports that those cultivating the land paid their tax in grain while everyone else paid in silver. It lists different products from Kucha: fine carpets, copper, iron, lead, deer skins (used to make boots), ammonium chloride (an important flux used in metallurgy and textile dying), felt wall coverings, white and yellow powder used for makeup, incense, fine horses, and cattle.55 When a Chines
e monk visited the kingdom in 629, he reported that the people used gold, silver coins, and small copper coins.56

  Although these sources all say that silver coins were used in Kucha, to date only bronze coins have been excavated, most likely because anyone who uncovered silver coins in later generations would have melted them down. Pelliot found a clay vessel holding 1,300 coins, of which 1,105 are now held in the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris. These include coins from the Han and the successor dynasties of the third century but none from the Tang. The curator of the collection, François Thierry, dates the horde to somewhere between the third and seventh centuries, preferring a date in the sixth or seventh century.57 Finds of molds for coins and even two copper foundries confirm that the Bai-family kings of Kucha had everything they needed to mint bronze coins locally.

  Surviving accounts written in Kuchean that give the expenditures, receipts, and balances of Buddhist monasteries show that the monasteries spent bronze coins.58 These accounts list cash expenditures for sugar and for alcohol for musicians who performed at a ceremony. Monasteries also bought supplies, like oil, for ceremonies and paid millers to grind grain.

  The monasteries also received some goods in kind. Certain donors gave foodstuffs for the support of monks as well as the dependents who lived on and worked the monastic lands. Villagers paid sheep and goats to the monastery, on some occasions to clear debts. Kuchean had a rich vocabulary for describing sheep and goats, whether male or female, that were young, middle-aged, or old (literally “with a large tooth,” since the mature animals had permanent central incisors).59 In one transaction, the elders exchanged two goats for 250 pounds of barley and a sheep for 200 pounds of grain; the measures of barley and grain functioned as money, and there is no mention of coins of any kind. These monastic accounts mention only goods that were produced within the oasis itself, giving the impression that the monasteries were largely self-sufficient and did not participate in any long-distance trade.

  The Kuchean language in the sixth through eighth centuries was clearly still a living language used by monastic officials for accounts, kings for royal orders, historians for their chronicles, travelers for graffiti, and devotees to label their offerings to monasteries. In addition, storytellers used Kuchean to tell Buddhist narratives. Like later transformation texts in Chinese, these tales alternate prose passages with poetry. The poetry sections are preceded by the name of a musical tune, which indicated to the storyteller how they should be sung.60 Three phrases—“here,” “after that,” and “anew”—occur in manuscripts recounting the well-known story of the Buddha’s birth, luxurious childhood, departure from the palace, discovery of human suffering, and eventual enlightenment. These same phrases appear in boxes underneath narrative scenes in the caves of Kizil (cave 110) and Kumtura (cave 34), serving there as captions to the illustrations. When the storytellers told the narratives shown in the paintings, they would point to a certain scene and say, “This the place where…”61 Kuchean was still spoken at a time when Agnean had largely died out, but, after 800, Kuchean also fell from active use.62

  Some Kuchean documents dwell not on Buddhism but on the far more prosaic subject of trade. A fascinating series of Kuchean texts found by Pelliot and also published by Pinault describe the caravan traffic in and out of Kucha. In January 1907 a local person brought Pelliot a half-dozen wooden tablets with Brahmi script on them from the Buddhist ruins some distance from the pass of Yanshuigou.63 Pelliot then went to a still-functioning tax station near Shaldïrang, a small place in the mountains north of Kucha, on the pass through the mountains to Baicheng. On top of a cliff among the ruins of a guard tower, Pelliot found a total of 130 travel passes 8 inches (20 cm) beneath the snow.

  The Kucha king’s officials issued these travel passes to caravans after recording a headcount of the individual members of each caravan—first human, then animal. They did not write down the goods that each caravan carried. At each station, the caravans handed in their current passes and received new ones, which is why Pelliot found over one hundred discarded passes at Yanshuigou.

  Even though paper was widely available in Kucha and was used for monastic accounts and letters, officials made the passes from wood slips cut from poplar trees, which were cheaper than paper. Averaging about 4 inches (10 cm) long and 2 inches (5 cm) high, the passes show considerable variation in size (shown in the photo at the beginning of the chapter). Like the Kharoshthi documents on wood found at Niya, these Kuchean documents consisted of two parts that fitted together. An outer wooden envelope partially covered an interior wooden slip (sometimes slips) so that the contents could not be seen from the outside: only the name of the official at the postal station was visible.64

  Although the size of the passes varied, the contents followed a fixed format: they recorded the name of the sending official, the receiving official’s name and address, an introductory greeting, and the name of the traveler carrying the pass. A list of the members of the party followed: first men, then women, then donkeys, horses, and cattle. The use of the unabbreviated forms of numerals indicates that these were formal administrative documents. The documents close with an exhortation: “Let them pass. If their party is more than what is listed here, do not allow them to pass.” Finally, the documents give the year of the king’s reign, the month, and the day, as well as a statement of verification by a witness. These documents all date to 641–44, the closing years of the reign of the Kuchean king Suvarnadeva (reigned 624–46), and they document the close government scrutiny under which caravans proceeded from one permitted destination to the next.

  Pinault has provided a helpful chart of all those passes listing the people and animals in each caravan. Of the thirteen instances in which the number of men with each caravan is given, nine caravans had fewer than ten men, while the largest four consisted of ten, twenty, thirty-two, and forty men. The highest number of animals is seventeen horses, who traveled with eight men. Because pass no. 80 is damaged, we do not know how many animals accompanied the party of forty men. As is still true of modern Xinjiang, donkeys were an important means of travel; some caravans consisted of only men and donkeys. Two travel passes listed accompanying children, and two others listed “monastic attendants,” who were permitted to do tasks forbidden by the Buddhist vinaya regulations for monks.65 One caravan (pass no. 64) consisted entirely of women except for a male caravan leader; the number of women (and donkeys) is illegible. Conceivably these women were on their way to be sold at the market for women at Kucha mentioned in the official histories. While the travel passes do not reveal what goods the caravans carried, they do show that the Kucha kings closely monitored the caravans going in and out of Kucha and ensured that they stayed on their prearranged routes.

  TABLE 2.1 COMPOSITION OF CARAVANS IN KUCHA, 641–644

  These documents are important because few sources detail the size of caravans. The dynastic history of the Zhou dynasty (557–81), which was composed around 629, tells of a caravan going to Wuwei, Gansu, that consisted of 240 non-Chinese merchants, with six hundred camels who carried 10,000 bolts of multi-colored silk.66 This was before the Sui reunified the empire, when travel was difficult; merchants formed large groups, often hiring guards, to ensure their own safety. The Kuchean travel passes indicate a routinization of caravan travel in the seventh century: because the roads were safe, travelers could move in smaller groups.

  These different sources—the official Chinese histories, coin finds, and the Kuchean-language documents—portray a thriving local economy in which a money economy in coins coexisted side-by-side with a subsistence economy. In 648 the Tang-dynasty armies conquered Kucha. The Bai-family rulers went from being vassals of the Western Turkish kaghanate to subjects of the Tang dynasty. Kucha was the site of the headquarters that administered the “Four Garrisons of Anxi” (Kucha itself being one of the four). The Tang maintained only intermittent control for most of the following century; the other three garrisons were Khotan, Kashgar, and Yanqi (between 679 and 719 Tokmak
replaced Yanqi).67 Like the Han dynasty before them, the Tang established garrisons in the Western Region, but with one crucial difference: they used the same administrative system for the Western Regions as for the traditional core areas of China. The prefecture of Kucha was structured exactly like a prefecture within central China. Prefectures were divided into counties, which were divided into villages in rural areas and quarters in urban areas.

  Our best information about the Chinese occupation comes from a severely damaged group of documents that Pelliot found at the Duldur Aqur monastic site just south of Kucha: 214 scraps of paper, many of them damaged by fire and highly fragmentary, with Chinese on them. The earliest ones date to fifty years after the Tang conquest, the 690s, a time of much political turmoil. At the end of the seventh century, the peoples living in Tibet formed a powerful expansionist empire that challenged Tang control of Central Asia in 670, and the Tang managed to reassert control in Kucha only in 692.68 Then, after fifty years of stable Chinese rule, a rebellion led by a part-Sogdian, part-Turkish general named An Lushan almost brought down the Tang dynasty, which defeated the rebels only in 763 after hiring mercenary troops.