The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  Although the Tang dynasty was much weakened and Tang armies withdrew from Central Asia, Chinese military colonies, under the rule of the Anxi Protectorate, continued to exist in Kucha. Between 766 and at least 781, a Chinese official named Guo Xin served as the highest official in the Anxi Protectorate, based in Kucha, but had no contact with the Tang court in Chang’an.69 In 781 Guo Xin reestablished contact with the Tang by sending envoys but continued to govern on his own. The Tibetans conquered the region in 790, although they have left minimal traces in the archeological record, and the Uighurs took over Kucha in the early ninth century and remained in power until the coming of the Mongols in the thirteenth century.70

  The Chinese documents from Duldur Aqur start in the 690s, when the Tang was still powerful, and continue through 792, when the Chinese finally lost control of Kucha.71 Unlike the Kuchean religious texts and monastic accounts, the Chinese materials cover secular matters too. Written by Chinese soldiers stationed in Kucha, they include letters home as well as three funeral notices praising the deceased for their military prowess. One contrite believer lists various violations of Buddhist proscriptions committed while in military service: drinking alcohol, eating meat, breaking a vegetarian fast, damaging monastic property, and harming sentient beings.72 These materials document a range of activities: monks reciting sutras in a monastery, women writing letters, the size of agricultural plots, the number of banners used in Daoist religious ceremonies, and an evaluation of an official’s performance.73 These documents point to a separate Chinese settlement, possibly a garrison staffed by soldiers living with their dependents.74

  These materials, like the Kuchean-language travel passes, document the movement of caravans, which various letter writers used to send their correspondence. One letter writer, apparently en route himself, writes so quickly that he repeats certain phrases, in order to finish his letter in time to give it to a group of colonists returning to Kucha.75

  The main item of trade mentioned in these documents is horses, which the Chinese bought from the nomadic peoples north of Kucha in exchange for one thousand catties (roughly 1,300 pounds, or 600 kg) of steel or roughly 1,000 Chinese feet of cloth. One account gives the amount and type of grain (crushed grain with soy, bran, or barley) given to government officials for the horses in their care.76 The militia and different expeditionary armies used horses, as did the postal and relay stations.77 One letter is from a horse merchant who reports the illness of a horse that subsequently recovered. Other sources confirm that Sogdians, either immigrants from Samarkand and its environs or their descendants, played an important role in supplying the Tang army with horses, and the Duldur Aqur scraps contain a few faint traces of Sogdian presence.78 Like the documents from the garrison at Loulan, these documents point to the existence of trade, but it is a trade carried out by Chinese officials purchasing what they need: mostly horses. Fragmentary and difficult to interpret, they document the existence of government-sponsored trade above all else.

  Consistent with this picture of government-sponsored trade is the frequent mention of coins in Duldur Aqur documents. They document a monetized economy in which certain individuals spend considerable amounts in individual transactions. One person without an official rank paid a tax of one thousand coins to be exempted from a labor obligation; another paid 1,500 coins. A list of debtors gives the amount of money paid by the people whose names appear: 4,800 coins, 4,000 (possibly more) coins, 2,500 coins.79 Archeologists have found eleven Chinese-language contracts at other sites in Kucha. Three of the best-preserved Chinese contracts are for loans of one thousand coins each; the borrower agrees to pay back the loan in installments of two hundred coins.80

  Who minted all these coins, and why? Where some historians of Rome have identified the state as the most likely producer of coins, since it paid soldiers, others point out that if local markets had not existed, soldiers would not have needed coins.81 The Tang state collected taxes and made payments in three types of currency: coins, measures of grain, and cloth (usually bolts of a fixed length of silk). Their extensive payments to their armies resulted in ample supplies of coins circulating throughout Kucha.

  In 755, with the An Lushan rebellion, the Tang dynasty withdrew its forces from Kucha and the flow of coins into the region came to a sudden halt. The authorities at Kucha responded by minting their own inferior copies of Tang coins. Using a coin from the Kaiyuan (713–41) era to make a mold, they replaced the two characters for Kaiyuan with the name of the new eras proclaimed by the Tang emperor (Dali, 766–69; Jianzhong, 780–83). Cruder than the original characters, the new characters include some mistakes. These Kucha-issued coins have other signs that they were not minted by the central government: their central holes are sometimes octagonal instead of rectangular (because the molds were not aligned properly). The metal in these coins was also a redder copper than used in central China, another sign of local manufacture. One thousand coins of this type have been found in Xinjiang, of which eight hundred came from the Kucha region. Only two were found in central China.82 Clearly these coins circulated primarily in Xinjiang. Even though Kucha was cut off from the Tang, the different local rulers still had to pay their troops, and they needed coins to do so.

  Undeniably, the Chinese-language materials from Duldur Aqur are limited. Totaling only 208 documents, many of them consisting of a few characters, they touch on a surprising range of activities. The historian who has translated these documents into French, Éric Trombert, summarizes their content: “One other characteristic of the Chinese materials from Duldur Aqur—collected by Pelliot and Ōtani—is the absence of identifiable commercial documents. No lists of goods destined to be commercialized. No travel documents like the many travel passes for caravans found near the postal station at Yanshuigou. Few contracts, which seem to be mostly transactions among peasants.”83 Yet for all their variety, they do not mention anything that looks like the conventional portrait of the Silk Road trade—no private merchants carrying vast quantities of goods across long distances. Trombert believes that Kucha was a center of commerce, but that the merchants traveling there stayed within the city or outside the oasis—not at Duldur Aqur, which is why no commercial documents survive.

  Yet, like Duldur Aqur, the much-better-documented sites along the Silk Road also lack documents about long-distance trade. The body of materials from Kucha in Agnean, Kuchean, and Chinese, the focus of this chapter, is certainly the most piecemeal and damaged of any site discussed in this book. All the Chinese and Kuchean materials from the Kucha region combined total under ten thousand scraps; of these, only several hundred documents are preserved well enough to be read and understood. There was trade in Kucha, but, as the travel passes show, government officials supervised it closely, and, as the materials from the Chinese garrison at Duldur Aqur reveal, the Chinese army’s demand for horses constituted a major component of that trade. Even in the late 700s, when military conflict was endemic, local rulers continued to mint coins—an indication of how closely tied the trade was to the presence of armies.

  The surviving evidence from Kucha, as partial as it is, suggests an alternative to the standard picture of the fabled Silk Road trade: rather than a long-distance trade initiated and staffed by private merchants, these materials indicate that the Chinese military contributed significantly to the Silk Road economy. When Chinese armies were stationed in Central Asia, money—in the form of coins, grain, and cloth—flowed into the region. When the Chinese troops withdrew, small-scale trade resumed, largely maintained by local travelers and peddlers.

  CHAPTER 3

  Midway Between China and Iran

  Turfan

  Located on the northern route around the Taklamakan Desert, Turfan bridged the Chinese and Iranian worlds. Even today, Turfan retains some of its cosmopolitan feel. Vendors on every corner sell naan, the leavened flatbread like that eaten in Central Asia and north India. At a conference I attended there in the mid-1990s, one Norwegian professor of Iranian languages cheerfully
greeted everyone at breakfast, explaining that it was the first time he had woken up to the sound of braying donkeys since being in Iran before the 1979 revolution. In town, one sees many Uighur and Chinese faces, and the proprietors at the bazaar—even Chinese speakers say “baza’er” and not the Chinese word for “market”—proffer rugs, glistening jeweled knives, and always a glass of tea to potential customers.

  Historically, Turfan had a mixed population. Migrants from China and Sogdiana, the region around Samarkand, formed the largest communities. After the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE the Chinese migrated in large numbers to the northwest. Turfan and Kucha were the two largest settlements on the northern route around the Taklamakan. The Chinese residents of Turfan listened to Iranian music as they, man and woman alike, performed the Sogdian swirl, a wild twirling dance that was all the rage, shown in color plate 14. To the Sogdians, Turfan felt so Chinese that they called it Chinatown.1

  The Sogdians and the Chinese overshadowed the indigenous residents, some of whom originally spoke Kuchean. Turfan’s residents had already started using Chinese characters in 273, the date of the earliest excavated document found so far at the oasis. The sources from Turfan are particularly significant because the inhabitants recycled paper with writing on it to make shoes, belts, hats, and clothing for the dead. The records preserved in this way form a random, unedited sample that offers an unparalleled glimpse of life on the Silk Road during its peak.

  When the southern route fell into disuse after 500, many travelers opted for the northern route that went through Turfan. One such traveler was a Chinese monk named Xuanzang (ca. 596–664) who decided in 629 to go to India to study the original Sanskrit versions of several Buddhist texts whose Chinese versions did not make sense.2 His timing could not have been worse, since an imperial ban on travel beyond the borders of the new empire was then in effect.

  RECYCLED PAPER GOODS FROM THE ASTANA GRAVEYARD

  To save space in his archeological reports, Aurel Stein labeled similar items from a single site and photographed them together on the same page. This photo shows some of the paper goods he found at the Astana graveyard in Turfan: a hat decorated with flowers, a rolled-up flag, a string of coins, and, most typically, shoes. Craftsmen cut paper documents into shoe soles and covers, sewed them with thread, and then blackened the exterior. The arrow marks the writing still visible inside one of the shoes. By disassembling such items and reconstructing the original documents, archeologists have learned much about life along the Silk Road.

  We know about his trip because Xuanzang dictated a detailed account of his harrowing journey to his disciple Huili (615–ca. 675) in 649 after he returned to China.3 As Huili relates, Xuanzang was born near Luoyang, Henan, entered a monastery while a teenager, and left the city in 618 when the Sui dynasty collapsed. For eleven years he read Buddhist texts, first in the Tang capital of Chang’an (modern Xi’an, Shaanxi) and then in Sichuan Province. In preparation for his trip, he studied Sanskrit, the Buddhist liturgical language that was also spoken in monasteries.4

  To travel the 350 miles (550 km) between Dunhuang and Turfan, visitors today can choose between an overnight train ride and a one-day car trip. The ease of travel nowadays, however, obscures the genuine perils the journey posed in the past. The first leg of the trip took Xuanzang to Liangzhou, modern Wuwei in Gansu Province, an important city where “merchants and monks from the different countries east of the Pamirs came and went without pause.”5 Wuwei was the last city inside Tang-dynasty China of any importance; from there one could join caravans going west.

  The city’s top-ranking official, the prefect, urged Xuanzang to abandon his plan to leave China. But a local Buddhist teacher helped him to proceed to Guazhou, where the local prefect tore up an imperial order for Xuanzang’s arrest and urged him to depart as soon as possible. (Xuanzang did not pass through Dunhuang, only nearby Guazhou.) At Guazhou, Xuanzang learned of the obstacles on the way to Hami, the first major stopping point beyond the Chinese border: the rapids of the Hulu River, five successive watchtowers to the north that kept a lookout for unauthorized travelers, and, finally, the Mohoyan (Gashun Gobi) Desert. Retracing Xuanzang’s footsteps in 1907, Aurel Stein estimated the distance Xuanzang covered at 218 miles (351 km).6 He found Huili’s account remarkably accurate, with one exception; Huili omitted two days of walking between the first and fourth watch-towers, probably to speed up the narrative.

  Since there was no clearly marked road, Xuanzang hired a guide, Shi Pantuo, to take him to Hami. The guide’s last name, Shi, indicated that his family had originally come from the region of Kesh, or Shahrisabz, outside Samarkand, Uzbekistan, while his given name, Pantuo, was the Chinese transcription of Vandak, a common Sogdian name meaning “servant” of a given deity.7 Vandak introduced the young monk to an elderly Sogdian who had already made the trip to Hami fifteen times and urged Xuanzang to trade his horses for the monk’s aged horse. Recalling the prediction of a fortune-teller in Chang’an that he would ride on a thin, red, old horse, Xuanzang agreed to the trade.

  Sometime after midnight Vandak and Xuanzang set off. They followed the Hulu River north until they reached a shallow ford where the river could be crossed. Vandak cut down some Chinese parasol trees to make a simple bridge so that the two men and their horses could get to the other bank, where they lay down to sleep. In the middle of the night Xuanzang thought he saw Vandak advance toward him carrying a knife—could this have been a nightmare?—but he prayed to the bodhisattva Guanyin for help, and the crisis passed.

  The next morning Vandak explained that he had decided to turn back: “I think the road ahead is dangerous and far, with neither water nor grass, and the only water is by the five towers. One must reach these at night so that one can steal water and keep going, but discovery means certain death.” He and Xuanzang agreed to part ways. Xuanzang gave him a horse as a gift and then set off alone through the desert.

  Huili describes the terrors of his master’s solo journey vividly. Following a track through the gravel marked only by the horse dung and dried bones of earlier travelers, Xuanzang hallucinated and saw mirages in which hundreds of soldiers in the distance constantly changed their appearance. When he arrived at the first tower, he hid in a ditch until nightfall. Then, as he was drinking his fill and replenishing his water bag at a water tank, several arrows whizzed past, just missing his knee. He stood up and cried, “I am a monk who has come from the capital. Don’t shoot me.” A watchman opened the door to the tower, and the captain invited him inside to spend the night. The captain promised that a relative of his would help Xuanzang at the fourth gate. There, too, arrows showered Xuanzang until he again explained who he was, and the guards allowed him to pass. The guard-tower captain urged him to proceed directly to the Wild Horse Spring (Yemaquan), about 30 miles (50 km) away, the nearest source of water.

  Continuing alone and on foot, Xuanzang traveled a long way without finding the spring. At one point, when he stopped to take a drink, his water bag slipped through his fingers, and all his water drained out. Discouraged, he started back but then decided: “It would be better to go west and die than to return to the east and live!” Wandering in the desert for a full five days and four nights, Xuanzang prayed again to the bodhisattva Guanyin before his horse finally led him to a spring in the desert. He recovered from dehydration and proceeded to Hami, where three Chinese monks received him in a local monastery. He had made it out of China.

  Occupying less than a chapter, the account of Xuanzang’s trip from Chang’an to Turfan is only one episode in Huili’s hagiography, whose primary purpose was to record the different miracles Xuanzang had performed. Like all hagiographers, Huili exaggerated the perils of the trip in order to document his master’s piety. Still, the modern reader cannot help wondering about some of the details. Would any Chinese official have torn up a writ of arrest in the presence of the person he was supposed to detain? Why would Xuanzang give a horse to a guide who had menaced him at knifepoint and then left him t
o travel the most difficult leg of the journey alone? How could the unaccompanied Xuanzang have survived his desert journey? Would two separate watchtower captains have allowed a fugitive, even a Buddhist monk, to pass? Could he have lived five days and four nights in the desert with no water? (Admittedly, Hedin survived six days and five nights without water in 1896.)8

  Huili’s account makes it sound as though the one act that violated imperial orders—leaving China in spite of the travel ban—Xuanzang did entirely on his own. Even though Xuanzang must have originally intended to go directly to see the kaghan of the Western Turks, the main rival of the Tang for control of Central Asia, Huili altered his account so that Xuanzang became a loyal Tang subject who left China on his own and decided only after leaving China to visit the kaghan.9

  Whatever the circumstances of his departure were, Xuanzang’s experience differed significantly from that of ordinary travelers on the northern route. On the Guazhou to Turfan leg of the trip he traveled alone, but almost everyone traveled in caravans. When no travel bans were in effect, caravans applied at the border for a travel pass. Guides would have led travelers on difficult-to-find routes through the desert, and, barring the disasters that befell those whose skeletons lay along the path, they would have survived the trip. Xuanzang’s itinerary underscores the important place of Turfan on the Silk Road. Along with Kucha, it was one of the largest cities in the Western Regions.

  As Huili tells it, once Xuanzang left the Tang Empire, his fortunes shifted. Qu Wentai, the king of the Gaochang state, which was based in Turfan, the next oasis after Hami on the northern route, sent an envoy to greet him. Proceeding in the dark, the monk and his guide arrived at the palace at midnight, and the king and his retinue, carrying torches, came out to greet him. The king kept Xuanzang up all night talking, and the next morning, while the monk was still asleep, the royal couple waited outside his door so that they could show their devotion by being the first to greet him in the morning. Xuanzang then moved to a monastery for ten days before deciding to resume his journey.