The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  THE RUINS OF ANCIENT GAOCHANG CITY

  The dirt walls of Gaochang City near Turfan are among the few genuine above-ground ruins in all of China. Visitors can see where the residents dug into the ground to make dwellings that would remain cool in the summer and piled earth into high walls. Here two dirt towers stand above the other buildings of Gaochang; it is quite likely that Xuanzang preached from one of them after he ended his hunger strike in 629. Author photo.

  The king tried to convince him to stay:

  From the time I heard the name of the Master of the Law my body and soul have been filled with joy, my hands and feet have danced.

  I propose that you stay here, where I will provide for your wants to the end of your life. I will order the people of my realm to become your disciples. I hope you will instruct the clerics here, who, although not numerous, number several thousand.

  Xuanzang demurred, the two men argued, and the king threatened to send him back to China. When Xuanzang insisted on leaving, the king locked him in the palace and each day personally delivered his meals. For three days Xuanzang refused all food and drink. On the fourth day the king gave in. The two men negotiated a compromise: Xuanzang would stay an additional month in Turfan, where he would teach a Buddhist text entitled The Scripture of the Benevolent Kings while the king prepared gifts for his journey.

  At the end of the month, the king assigned four newly ordained monks and twenty-five attendants to accompany Xuanzang and provided them all with face masks, gloves, boots, and socks. He also gave the monk enough money and cloth to cover his travel expenses for an estimated twenty years: one hundred ounces of gold, 30,000 silver coins, and five hundred bolts of damask and silk. Gold, silver coins, and silk: all served as currency on the Silk Road of the seventh century. Even more important were twenty-four letters of introduction the king provided to the kaghan of the Western Turks and twenty-three subordinate kings who, like the Gaochang ruler, were the kaghan’s allies.10

  Xuanzang’s route allowed him to stay in the territory controlled by the Western Turks and their allies as long as possible. For the kaghan, whose capital at Tokmak lay on the northwestern edge of Lake Issyk-kul in what is now Kyrgyz-stan, the Gaochang king sent two cartloads laden with five hundred bolts of damask silk and delicious fruit, probably dried. Although the Gaochang kings had ice houses so that they could enjoy fruit in the winter, fresh fruit could not have survived the long trip to the kaghan’s camp. Xuanzang left Turfan in the winter, most likely in the twelfth month of 629.11

  The king’s family had been in power since 502.12 Although probably not ethnically Chinese, the Qu-family rulers adopted many Chinese ways. The original inhabitants of Turfan, the Jushi people, “lived in felt-tents, kept moving in pursuit of water and grass for grazing, and had a fair knowledge of farming,” the official history of the Later Han dynasty reports.13 The graves of the Jushi kings, with rectangular pits for their human retainers and circular pits for their horses, confirm their nomadic ways.14 In 60 BCE, when the Xiongnu confederation weakened, the local Jushi rulers submitted to the Han dynasty. The Chinese then established a garrison in the town of Jiaohe, and various Chinese dynasties retained control for most of the time until 450 CE. Jiaohe has a dramatic setting at the meeting of two rivers. Guided by labels on different buildings, tourists walk through the ruins on paved paths provided by UNESCO.15

  During the centuries of Chinese control, numerous Chinese migrants settled in Turfan, and many local people learned Chinese. In the third and fourth centuries, as in Niya and Kucha, few coins circulated. The earliest Chinese contract from Turfan, dated 273, records the exchange of a coffin for twenty bolts of silk, which the residents used as currency.16 The contract specifies that the silk was degummed, meaning that the external coating of the silk thread had been removed by boiling so that the silk absorbed dye more easily. The residents of Turfan retained their preference for degummed silk for centuries, and also used rugs and measured amounts of grain as media of exchange.

  The Qu-family rulers, who came to power in 502, embraced Chinese cultural norms, and, like many Chinese rulers, patronized Buddhism. Structuring their bureaucracy on the Chinese model, they used Chinese as the language of administration, and their walled capital had gates with the standard Chinese names. Students studied Chinese-language classics in school, the dynastic histories record, but they translated them into a local language, possibly Kuchean or Sogdian.17

  After 640, when a Tang army defeated the Gaochang army and conquered the oasis, Turfan became even more Chinese. The tenth and last Gaochang king, Qu Wentai (reigned 620–40), who had hosted Xuanzang, collapsed from fright, his son surrendered, and the Chinese established direct administration over the oasis. Jiaohe became the headquarters for the Chinese, who created the Protectorate General of Anxi, which oversaw affairs in the Western Regions.18

  Since Turfan was a prefecture exactly like the three hundred other prefectures in the Tang Empire, officials implemented redistribution of land as stipulated by the regulations of the equal-field system, which was in effect throughout the empire. They were required to update household registers every three years. The household registers listed the head of each household, all family members and anyone else living in the same house, and their tax obligations. Each able-bodied male was obliged to pay three types of taxes—corvée labor, grain, and cloth. The registers also listed the young, the elderly, the handicapped, and women, who had lower obligations or were exempt.

  In exchange, each household headed by an able-bodied male was entitled to 20 mu (three acres, or 1.2 hectares of permanent holding land) and 80 mu (12 acres, or 4.8 hectares) of personal share land.19 The authorities hoped to encourage long-term investment (like the planting of mulberry trees, whose leaves silk worms ate) on permanent holding land; personal share land, redistributed every three years, was for ordinary farming.

  Drawing up registers for each household in 640, officials counted 37,700 people living in 8,000 households in Turfan.20 (One hundred years later the number of households had increased to 11,647.)21 Since land was scarce in the oasis of Turfan, the land registers list both how much land each household received (usually around five mu, .75 acres, or .3 hectares) and how much was still owed. Although the authorities realized that they would never have enough land to allocate the still-owed allotment, this accounting fiction demonstrated their compliance with the Tang Code. This flexibility at the local level made Tang law successful; officials could adjust all regulations to suit local conditions.

  We know that the Tang officials in Turfan recorded the amount of land still owed because the people of Turfan had the burial custom of outfitting the dead in clothing, hats, boots, and belts made from recycled paper. It seems likely that the Chinese living in other regions also buried their dead with similar paper clothes, but the fragile garments have since disintegrated.22 The living may have believed that paper had a quality that would allow it to ascend to the afterworld, since Buddhists conceived of heavenly realms somewhere above the earthly realm. One shoe sole dating to the early fifth century from Turfan has a single character meaning “rise” written on the bottom in blue ink.23

  Because paper was expensive, the residents of Turfan used discarded paper, sometimes official documents, to make these clothes for the dead. The Chinese official histories record that the officials of the Gaochang Kingdom disposed of all documents once a given matter was settled; the only documents they did not throw away were household registers. After 640 Turfan came under Tang rule, and all Gaochang Kingdom documents became obsolete. In addition, to minimize the space taken up by documents, Tang regulations prescribed that all documents be thrown away after three years.24 Sometimes those making funeral clothing also recycled private materials including letters, contracts, poems, medical prescriptions, and school exercises. The Turfan documents are fascinating precisely because of the enormous variety of materials recovered from funerary garments.

  Turfan’s arid climate helps to preserve the paper a
nd other fragile matter, like textiles. The oasis lies in an unusually low depression formed millions of years ago when the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia and formed the Himalayas. The lowest point in Turfan is the dried up bed of Lake Aiding at 505 feet (154 m) below sea level; this is the second lowest place on earth, after the Dead Sea. Turfan is dry and hot, so hot that the Chinese sometimes called it the prefecture of fire, or Huozhou. Summer temperatures regularly reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), an unbearable temperature for humans without air-conditioning (although indigenous dwellings dug into the ground remain cool) and perfect for Turfan’s famous melons and grapes. In addition to paper documents, Turfan’s dry climate has preserved over one hundred desiccated human corpses, and also artificial silk flowers, shown in color plate 1.

  When Aurel Stein visited the Astana graveyard, just outside the walls of the city of Gaochang, in January 18, 1915, the graves had already been thoroughly ransacked. A local digger named Mashik assured Stein that he and his father had personally examined every grave on the site:

  Mashik, our special cemetery assistant, whom long practice in searching the dead had relieved of all scruples, by breaking the jawbones of the skull recovered from the mouth’s cavity a thin gold coin.… Mashik claimed the distinction of having been the first to learn by experience to look for coins of gold or silver placed in the mouths of the dead, though his search was but rarely rewarded.25

  In the Astana and Karakhoja graveyards, Stein found different artifacts, including some coins Mashik pried out of the mouths of the dead, but he and the other excavators who followed him to the site did not realize how many documents the graveyard contained.

  Today the Astana graveyard is open to tourists, who can walk down stairways into two tombs and view the wall paintings they contain. The site is impressive only if one considers the enormity of the graveyard—it runs 1.5 miles (2.4 km) east to west and is up to three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) wide—and how much information historians have pieced together from the recovered documents.

  Local archeologists realized that the Astana graveyard, though severely disturbed, still contained many artifacts, but no one excavated systematically until 1958. This was the year that the Communist Party launched the Great Leap Forward, an intensive mass campaign intended to raise China’s economy to the level of England’s. Everyone—every farm, every factory, every work unit—was required to increase production by meeting quotas, many of which were artificially high and impossible to achieve. In many regions the forced collectivization and neglect of agriculture resulted in a terrible famine in which forty-five million people died.26

  The Xinjiang archeologists also had quotas, set in thousands of artifacts.27 They tried test pits in a few different places, but the most productive were those at Astana. When the archeologists ran short of money to pay workers to dig, the local authorities agreed to let them excavate alongside work crews digging roads and irrigation channels, saving them the cost of hiring laborers. The archeologists found even more tombs. Local archeologists in Turfan today describe the truckloads of artifacts taken to the Urumqi Museum in the same tone that others describe the removal of artifacts by the camel trains of the early twentieth-century European explorers. The archeologists reached their quotas, and excavations at the site continued until 1975. These years saw many tumultuous political campaigns, particularly during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The emphasis was always on the quantity of artifacts recovered, and, accordingly, the level of reporting is often poor.28 It is not always possible to determine, on the basis of published reports about these hurried excavations, which artifact came from which tomb.

  The documents from the site have fared much better. Under the farsighted leadership of a professor of history from Wuhan University, Tang Zhangru, the government sponsored a group of scholars who met in Beijing to analyze the documents from the site. In some cases they dismantled different items of clothing made from recycled paper and reconstructed the original documents. Each of these reconstituted documents has been published with an expert transcription in modern Chinese characters accompanied by a clear photograph. Since 1959 archeologists have excavated 465 tombs at Astana and Karakhoja, 205 of which contained documents.29 To date, about two thousand documents have been recovered, of which over three hundred are contracts.30

  These documents offer unparalleled insight into the life of ordinary people living in a Silk Road community between 273, the date of the earliest Chinese document, and 769, the date of the last. During the years before the establishment of the Gaochang Kingdom, the different rulers of Turfan participated in the same exchange of envoys as the rulers of Niya and Kucha. In 477 one document lists the expenses of hosting envoys from the Rouran peoples of central Asia (known in Europe as the Avars), the Karghalik Kingdom on the southern edge of the Tarim basin; the Song dynasty (420–479) whose capital was in Nanjing, China; the Uddyana Kingdom in north India, and the “Brahman country,” most likely a reference to south India.31

  This particular list of envoys reveals the neighboring kingdoms with which the rulers of Turfan maintained diplomatic relations, but it does not identify their most important trading partner. Other coins and documents from Turfan indicate a consistent and unmistakable pattern: the Iranian world, especially the eastern Iranian world around Samarkand—not Rome—was the most important trading partner of first the independent Gaochang Kingdom and then, after the 640 conquest, Tang China.

  As early as the year 300 the residents of Turfan used silver coins minted by the Sasanian Empire based in western Iran. Famed for their purity (between 85 percent and 90 percent silver), Sasanian coins are distinctive.32 The face of each coin shows the profile of the reigning ruler, each identifiable by his characteristic crown, and his name in Middle Persian, while the reverse shows two attendants tending a fire altar that represents the state religion of Zoroastrianism, shown in color plate 4B. The earliest Sasanian coins found anywhere in China date to the fourth century and have been found in hoards buried in the dirt ruins of Gaochang City. Many of these early coins show little wear, because they did not circulate widely.33 Confirming this impression of limited use, the fourth-century documents from Turfan record payments in bolts of cloth.

  The first document that specifically mentions silver coins, a list of goods placed in the grave, dates to 543. It lists one hundred silver coins, one hundred gold coins, and 100,009,000 cubits of “climbing-to-heaven silk.”34 (A cubit measured roughly 10 feet, or 3 m.) Although this grave inventory does not specify where the silver coins were minted, Chinese coins at this time were cast from bronze, so the silver coins must have been Sasanian. The elevated amounts of textiles and coins indicate that facsimile textiles and coins were placed in the tomb, not actual goods.

  The earliest certain mention of real silver coins appears in a contract dating to 584 for the rental of a field of one mu for five silver coins. Similar contracts continue until 677; people used silver coins to rent land, trees, oxcarts, or homes and to buy land, hire people to staff beacon towers in their place, make loans, and pay taxes.35 Confirming the information from Chinese-language contracts, the one surviving Sogdian-language contract from Astana records the sale in 639 of a female slave for 120 “very pure” silver coins.36

  The documentary record indicates that the Turfan residents used silver coins from the late 500s to the late 600s, a pattern supported by coin finds. Archeologists have unearthed 130 Sasanian silver coins in the ruins of Gao-chang City and thirty in the Astana cemetery, many wrested from the jaws of the dead by Stein’s assistant Mashik.37 Sasanian silver coins continued to circulate after the Chinese conquest of 640, and even after the Sasanian Empire fell to invading Islamic armies in 651, when the conquerors shifted to Arabo-Sasanian coins minted by Arab governors. The Arabo-Sasanian coins, like their precursors, weighed about four grams; mints replaced the portrait of the Sasanian emperor with that of the Arab governor and added an Arabic inscription to the face of the coin.38


  Some 1,300 Sasanian coins have been excavated in China. Of those, the vast majority have been found in Xinjiang.39 In the modern town of Wuqia (Ulugart in Uighur), far to the west of Turfan on a tiny side road outside of Kashgar, archeologists found the largest cache of silver coins anywhere in China. In 1959 a road crew using dynamite to widen a road uncovered 947 silver coins, many fused together, along with thirteen gold bars that had been hidden in a rock crevice. The hill was near the main route between Turfan and the capital of the Western Turks just northwest of Lake Issyk Kul in today’s Kyrgyzstan. The findspot, on the side of a hill, is so remote that someone—perhaps a merchant? an envoy? a bandit?—must have left the money for safekeeping and never managed to return.40 The 947 coins included both Sasanian and Arabo-Sasanian coins. The presence of Arabo-Sasanian coins dated the hoard to after the fall of the Sasanian Empire to caliphate armies in 651, and the presence of Chinese copies of Sasanian coins, possibly as much as a quarter of the hoard, underlines the continuing appeal of silver coins to the residents of the Western Regions.41

  What was the purchasing power of 947 silver coins in the late seventh century? Documents recovered from the Turfan tomb of a moneylender named Zuo who died in 673 offer some clues. The tomb contained a folded-up letter from a servant to the deceased that denied responsibility for the theft of five hundred silver coins six years earlier in 667. The servant, like many Chinese, believed that courts in the underworld meted out justice both to the dead and to the living. His letter indicates that a prosperous member of the community might have as much as five hundred coins on hand at any given time.