The Silk Road: A New History
Page 19
The Eastern Market tended to specialize in domestic goods, while the Western Market offered more foreign goods, many delivered by camel trains. Shops selling the same goods clustered together on narrow roads called hang. (Even today the Chinese word for expert is neihang, “inside the row,” and for a layman waihang, “outside the row.”) The Eastern Market had 220 different groups of shops selling different wares including Chinese brushes, iron goods, cloth, meat, wine, and printed materials. The Western Market offered foodstuffs as well as leather goods, like bridles and saddles, and jewelry and precious stones from all over Eurasia. The markets were packed with goods; a fire in 843 destroyed four thousand dwellings in twelve different rows of the Eastern Market.24
Visitors to the markets enjoyed restaurants, wine shops, food stands, and brothels, and traveling merchants could store their goods in warehouses, deposit their money in bank-like institutions, and stay at inns, some with as many as twenty rooms. The dispute between the Sogdian merchant Cao Rokhshan and the Chinese merchant Li Shaojin, discussed in chapter 3, illustrates how the Chinese courts handled a dispute between Chinese and non-Chinese; they applied Chinese law. Tang-dynasty law stipulated that if foreigners from the same country committed a crime against each other, the law of their homeland would apply, but if foreigners of different nationalities were involved, then Chinese law would apply.25 Recall that both men lived in the capital and traveled to the northwest on business.
Many travelers came to visit the Tang capital of Chang’an, home to some 960,000 people living in 300,000 households, according to the official history of the Tang.26 In a population of one million people, the majority of the residents were Chinese, but a sizable foreign community lived in the city as well, concentrated around the Western Market.27 Some foreigners settled in China as the result of treaties. In 631, after the Eastern Turks surrendered to the Tang, nearly ten thousand households were ordered to move to Chang’an, and many of these households were Sogdians in the service of the Turks.28 When the Tang forces conquered different Central Asian kingdoms, they required their former rulers to send their sons to Chang’an as hostages, further swelling the numbers of foreigners in the city. Perhaps the most famous refugees were the descendants of the Sasanian emperors who fled Iran after the fall of their capital at Ctesiphon to Muslim forces in 651. The last Sasanian emperor, Yazdegerd III, died while in flight, but his son Peroz and grandson Narseh both moved permanently to the city.29
These immigrants brought their religious practices with them. At least five, maybe six, Zoroastrian temples stood in the city, four around the Western Market.30 A single Christian church, affiliated with the Church of the East, was located just north of the Western Market. In modern Xi’an, the Forest of Steles (Beilin) Museum houses hundreds of stone tablets found all over China, the most famous of which, often referred to as the Nestorian stele, provides a history of Christianity under the Tang dynasty.31
According to this tablet, the first Christian to arrive in Chang’an was a man named Aluohan; dispatched by the patriarchate in Seleucia-Ctesiphon (in modern-day Iraq) in 635, he established the earliest outpost of the Church of the East in China.32 The founding of this church coincided with a mass migration of Persians from their homeland in Iran, then under siege by Muslim armies, to China and other points east. Seventy names, in Syriac script with Chinese transcriptions, along with these individuals’ positions in the church hierarchy, follow the main inscription. Some of the names, like Hope of Jesus, are unmistakably Christian, while others, such as Given by the Moon God Mah, are originally derived from Zoroastrianism but had become common names used throughout Mesopotamia. Each of the names has a Chinese transcription. It seems likely that most of the seventy signatories were foreign, not Chinese.
VESTIGES OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE TANG CAPITAL
Headed by a cross with four even sections, which was commonly used by the Church of the East, this text was carved onto a stone stele in 781. Discovered in 1625, the rubbing was shown by a Chinese official to Jesuit missionaries, who were overjoyed to learn that they were not the first Christian missionaries in China. They sent the rubbing to Europe, and by the 1670s both the Chinese and Syriac-language portions of the text had been translated. Cultural Relics Publishing House.
The Church of the East established churches in a few major Chinese cities: Chang’an, Luoyang, Guangzhou (Canton), and possibly in a few other places. Members of the Church of the East, largely Iranians and Sogdians, received the support of the Tang dynasty throughout the seventh and eighth centuries, but in 845 the Tang emperor issued a ban whose primary target was Buddhism but included Christianity as well. Buddhism survived, but the Church of the East did not.
No traces of this or any other religious institutions survive in today’s Xi’an. In fact, the aboveground city of Xi’an contains remarkably few structures from Chang’an at its peak during the Tang. The visitor will look in vain for remnants of the glorious wide avenues. The wall one sees today is very large—so large that one can ride a bicycle or drive a golf cart on top of it—but it dates to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), not the Tang. The only Tang-dynasty structures still standing are two brick towers: the Big Goose Pagoda and the Small Goose Pagoda. Emperor Taizong built the Big Goose Pagoda to house the books Xuanzang brought back from India; Xuanzang supervised a team of translators there.
Only below ground, in tombs, can one hope to find a taste of the city’s past glory. Unlike other sites on the Silk Road, Xi’an’s climate is moister than that of the Taklamakan, so that buried paper eventually disintegrates. Still, thanks to the reuse of waste paper, a fascinating set of receipts from a pawnshop in Chang’an has survived in the arms of a figurine excavated in the Astana graveyard at Turfan. The documents mention several place-names unique to the Tang capital and so are almost certainly from Chang’an.
Craftsmen based in the Tang capital used discarded pawn slips to make the figurines that were subsequently placed in the joint grave of a man and his wife buried at Astana.33 The husband died in 633, before the Chinese conquest of 640, and the wife more than fifty years later in 689. The figurine’s fine brocade clothing and carefully worked head, pictured in color plate 8, also look as though they were produced in a workshop in the capital. The place-names mentioned in the documents have dated the pawnshop tickets to between 662, when the Guanyin Monastery changed its name, and 689, when the wife was buried in the joint tomb.
The discarded pawn tickets show how the ordinary inhabitants of Chang’an made ends meet during the seventh century. Each ticket follows the same format: item pawned, name of borrower, date (month and day, not year), the amount of money loaned, the amount of money paid back, the address and (sometimes) the age of the borrower. The slips list twenty-nine people by name yet give the occupations of only two individuals: one was a dyer and another made hairpins. When the pawned item was returned, the pawnshop employees cancelled the transaction by drawing a line (in the shape of a 7) across the ticket. Fifteen sheets of paper record fifty-four transactions (the last sixteen are incomplete), which are the earliest surviving pawnshop records found in China to date. In almost all of the transactions the borrower deposited an item of clothing (sometimes silk, sometimes simply cloth) or a piece of cloth (also used as a form of currency during the Tang) and received a certain number of coins, usually around a hundred, in exchange. Only two transactions involved goods besides clothing or cloth; one borrower put up a bronze mirror against a loan of seventy coins, while another presented four strings of pearls for 150 coins. The borrowers paid interest at a rate of 5 percent each month, which was within the limits set by Tang law (and far lower than the rates paid by borrowers in Turfan during the same period).
A second set of records, also preserved as part of a figurine, suggests that those frequenting the pawnshop near the Guanyin Monastery were relatively well off. These list a total of 608 transactions, even small loans, made by Chang’an shops to city dwellers who paid with “medicine, cloth, beans, and wheat bran.” O
ne-fourth of these transactions were made by women, evidence that the female residents of the capital did leave their homes, even if Confucian ideals portrayed virtuous women as always staying inside.34
Another surprise find, this time from the capital itself, offers insight into those at the opposite end of the social spectrum, the wealthiest of the city’s dwellers.35 In 1970, during the Cultural Revolution, Xi’an archeologists uncovered two clay pots (25 inches, or 64 cm high) and one silver pot (10 inches, or 25 cm high) in Hejiacun, or Hejia Village, then in the southern suburbs. They were buried about 1 yard (.9 m) under the ground and 1 yard (.9 m) apart from each other. At the time, the authorities were building a detention center; a hostel for government officials now occupies the unmarked site. The three pots held over one thousand different items including gold and silver artifacts, precious gems and minerals, medicines, and an extraordinary coin collection. If the collection originally included more fragile items, like textiles or books, they have not survived. One of the largest hoards of buried treasure ever found in China, the Hejia Village collection certainly contains the most valuable and the most beautifully worked Silk Road artifacts.
No definitive evidence of the owner’s identity survives. Almost everyone assumes that the hoard’s owner intended to come back after some kind of disturbance—a rebellion? bandit attacks? a natural disaster?—but never did. The hoard was buried in a quarter approximately 0.6 miles (1 km) east of the Western Market and 2 miles (3 km) west of the Eastern Market. The best clue to the hoard’s date is several silver biscuits with labels identifying them as tax payments. Before 780 the Tang dynasty required that its subjects pay three different types of taxes: zu (rent in grain), yong (corvée labor), and diao (cloth), but districts were allowed to substitute other goods. Four round silver biscuits, about 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter and weighing over 14 ounces (400 grams), are incised with crude characters that identify them as tax payments from two subprefectures in Guangdong Province. One is dated 722; three are dated 731. Inscriptions on these biscuits give their exact weights as well as the names of the officials who weighed them.
After the authorities received such biscuits, they melted them down into larger lumps, the largest weighing over 17 pounds (8 kg), which were labeled in black ink with the name of the storehouse where they were held—the Eastern Market Storehouse—and their weight and the official who weighed them.36 Because central government officials melted down the biscuits they received from localities to make these larger lumps, it seems most likely that the hoard was buried not long after 731, the latest date on the biscuits. Many of the intricately worked gold and silver bowls in the collection bear similar labels, always in black ink, giving their weight, an indication that they, too, were held in a government storehouse. Government officials apparently stored tax silver at three different stages in its life cycle: when it was first mined and submitted by various localities, after it had been melted into large lumps, and finally after it had been worked into gold and silver vessels.
TABLE 5.1 HEJIACUN VILLAGE FIND CHART
Forty-six different silver vessels served as medicine containers that were labeled with both the weight and the grade of their contents: “stalactite of upper-upper grade” or “stalactite of medium-upper grade.” Over 4.4 lbs (2 kg) of stalactite powder of different grades was buried in the hoard; Tang medical guides suggest daily doses of around 1.4 ounces, or 40 grams, for one or two hundred days to either calm the nerves or increase one’s energy. The 4.4 ounces (126 grams) of gold dust probably had medicinal uses, as did a block of litharge, a lead oxide added to skin ointments to cure cuts and blemishes.37
Museum exhibits about the Silk Road or Tang-dynasty Chang’an often feature the Hejiacun gold and silver vessels, because they combine different elements of Iranian and Chinese art in extraordinarily pleasing ways.38 In surviving paintings from the Sogdian city of Panjikent and Sogdian tomb panels found in China, Sogdian artists frequently mixed scenes showing Sogdian life, such as hunting or banquets with pictures of activities pursued by peoples, often Chinese, from other societies.
No one can tell by looking at a metal cup or container where it was made or who made it. Historians of technology tend to assume, though, that classic Sogdian shapes without Chinese motifs were made in Sogdiana and imported to China (if they were found in China), while any vessel whose shape departs from Sogdian prototypes was probably made in Chang’an, by Sogdian or Chinese craftsmen. By this measure, few of the Hejia Village vessels appear to be distinctly Sogdian: many more vessels have Chinese-style shapes.
A CUP FROM THE HEJIACUN VILLAGE HOARD
This gilt silver cup, measuring 2 inches (5.1 cm) tall, with a mouth 3.6 inches (9.1 cm) across, has several identifiable Sogdian characteristics: eight lobes, a thumb ring attached to a triangular medallion holding a deer, and a pearl border trim at its base. The exterior of the cup, like the murals on the northern wall of the Afrasiab house at Samarkand, alternates active scenes of men hunting, squarely in the tradition of Iranian royal art, with portraits of delicate women in Chinese gowns engaged in daily activities, like getting dressed or playing an instrument. Cultural Relics Publishing House.
The owner of the treasure separated the imported items from the other treasures and buried them in the silver jar with the handle; on the lid of the jar, he listed these goods.39 A miniature rock-crystal bowl, only 1 inch (2.5 cm) tall and 3.8 inches (9.6 cm) across, has eight lobes, an identifying characteristic of Sogdian manufacture. Rock crystal occurs naturally but looks like glass when it is free of imperfections. The main constituent of both glass and rock crystal is silica, and one can make glass by melting rock crystal, but only at high temperatures—above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 degrees Centigrade), temperatures far too hot for any premodern workshop to achieve. In addition to the rock-crystal bowl, the hoard contained a glass vessel that must have been imported from the west, since Chinese craftsmen learned how to make opaque glass in ancient times but translucent glass only much later.40 Historically, most glass was made from sand, limestone, and sodium carbonate.
Other imported items in the silver vase included gems not mined anywhere within the Tang empire: seven sapphires, two rubies, one topaz, and six agates. The largest, the topaz, weighed 119 grams (596 carats); the smallest (one of the rubies) was just 2.5 grams (12.5 carats). Rubies and sapphires originated in Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Kashmir, India; topazes came as well from Burma and Sri Lanka as well as Japan and the Russian Urals. The unusual moss green color of the agates found at Hejia Village suggests an Indian source.41 A beautiful rhyton drinking vessel crafted from carnelian, a brownish-red agate, was probably made in Gandhara or the Tocharistan region of Afghanistan.42
This composition of the hoard, with a few imported items and many more locally made vessels, fits the overall pattern of Silk Road trade. Relatively few goods traveled long distances overland; those that did were often precious gem-stones that were small, light, and easy to carry. As Muslim armies conquered more territory, increasing numbers of migrants, including many skilled metal craftsmen, came to China and chose to settle in Chang’an, where many non-Chinese lived already. After Sogdian metalsmiths had migrated to China, they settled down and began to make vessels similar—but not identical—to those they had made in their homeland. As they learned more Chinese motifs and adjusted to a new clientele, they produced more hybrid items like the cup with its mixture of Chinese and Iranian elements.
A list of gifts that the emperor exchanged with An Lushan, before the Turco-Sogdian general rebelled, includes many items corresponding to objects in the Hejiacun hoard: Iranian-style silver ewers, parcel-gilt silver bowls, agate dishes, jade belts, coral, pearls, incense, and medicine in gold and silver boxes. In return the general gave Iranian-style bottles and plates made from silver and gold.43 This list of gifts confirms that the vessels in the Hejiacun hoard came from the highest level of Chang’an society, the emperor and his top-ranking courtiers.
Of all the items buri
ed at Hejia Village, the most difficult to explain is the collection of 478 coins. Six were definitely made outside of China: one silver coin minted during the reign of the Sasanian emperor Khusrau II (reigned 590–628) and five silver coins from Japan, dating to 708–15. There was a seventh coin, apparently a gold coin minted by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (reigned 610–40), but, like so many of the Byzantine coins found in China, it is an imitation made in China, not a genuine Byzantine coin. Equally unusual was a selection of twenty historic Chinese coins. The earliest, dating to about 500 BCE, were examples of China’s first currency, shaped like a shovel and a knife. Also included were coins from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and the centuries of disunity before the Tang unification. The final group of coins was the largest: 451 stamped with the Kaiyuan reign period (713–41). The Kaiyuan coins included bronze examples, which circulated widely at the time, as well as silver and gold coins, apparently specially made for the emperor to give out at parties (one such party occurred in 713, according to the official histories).44 The composition of the coin collection, including foreign-made, historic, and contemporary examples, has prompted some to wonder if it belonged to a private collector.45