The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  In the early twentieth century Sher Ali Khan’s caravan carried mostly local merchandise—with the exception of the English woven goods that were newly available in Kashmir and Yarkand. His particular caravan covered a lot of ground, but most of the traders whom Stein and Hedin encountered moved along shorter routes. The documents in cave 17 suggest that the caravans traveling one thousand years earlier were basically the same.

  In the Dunhuang economy of the ninth and tenth centuries, locally produced goods circulated in small quantities. Traffic to distant places was limited, commodities of foreign origin rare. The trade had little impact on local residents, who continued to live in a subsistence economy. State-sponsored delegations played a key role in the movement of goods; envoys, including monks, are the one group that was certainly moving from one place to another. This picture of the Silk Road trade matches that given by the excavated materials from the other sites. Rather than trying to explain why the Dunhuang documents do not mention long-distance trade with Rome and other distant points, we should appreciate just how accurate their detailed picture of the Silk Road trade is.

  A ROYAL ORDER IN KHOTANESE

  In 970 the king of Khotan sent this royal edict to the ruler of Dunhuang, who was his uncle. The use of the Chinese character chi, or “edict,” shows how great the influence of Chinese culture was on the royal family. Preserved in the Dunhuang library cave, this is one of the few surviving tenth-century Khotanese documents that was written in the town of Khotan itself and not outside it. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

  CHAPTER 7

  Entryway into Xinjiang for Buddhism and Islam

  Khotan

  Khotan, like nearby Kashgar, is famous for its Sunday market, where tourists can buy locally made crafts, naan bread, and grilled mutton on skewers. As visitors watch farmers fiercely bargaining over the price of a donkey, it’s easy to imagine that Khotan has always been this way—but this is an illusion. The predominantly non-Chinese crowd prompts a similar reaction: surely these are the direct descendants of the earliest Silk Road settlers. In fact, though, a major historic break divides today’s Khotan from its Silk Road past. The Islamic conquest of the Buddhist kingdom in 1006 brought a dramatic realignment to the region. Eventually Khotan’s inhabitants converted to Islam, as did those of the surrounding oasis towns, making Islam the principal religion in the region today.1 They also gradually gave up speaking Khotanese, the language shown on the facing page, for Uighur, the language one hears most often in the city today.

  Almost all the materials about pre-Islamic Khotan come from outside the city. Because the oasis sits at the confluence of two major rivers, the environment is relatively well-watered. Extensive irrigation and occasional floods have created a damp environment in which paper and wood cannot survive. Documents about and artifacts from Khotan were preserved in neighboring—and far dryer—desert regions. There are nine major sites: Shanpula, Niya, Rawak, Endere, Melikawat, Yotkan, Dandan Uiliq, Domoko, and, finally, Dunhuang. The earliest finds, dating to the third century BCE, are from Shanpula, while the latest, from just before the Islamic conquest, come from the library cave at Dunhuang. Some of these sites are located within the city itself; Dunhuang, in contrast, lies 800 miles (1,325 km) to the east. The materials excavated from these multiple sites make it possible to reconstruct Khotan’s remarkable history.

  Khotan was the largest settlement in southwestern Xinjiang and thus the ideal portal for religions entering the Western Regions from neighboring lands. The first Buddhists came from India sometime around 200 CE, and for eight hundred years, as Buddhism moved east and became the most important religion in central China, Khotan served as a major center for the study and translation of Buddhist texts.

  In 644, when the Chinese monk-pilgrim Xuanzang passed through Khotan, the inhabitants related this legend of the kingdom’s founding: after a son of the great Buddhist ruler Ashoka (reigned 268–32 BCE) was banished from the Mau-ryan Kingdom in India, he crossed the Pamirs into Khotan and became a shepherd, leading his flocks through the barren desert in search of grass. Childless, he stopped to pray at a temple to the Buddhist guardian of the north. A male child then appeared at the deity’s forehead, while the earth in front of the temple produced a liquid “with a strange taste, sweet and fragrant as breast milk” for the infant.2 Later versions of this myth have different protagonists—sometimes the prince’s ministers—who come to Khotan, and some describe a dirt breast emerging from the earth, but they agree that migrants from India founded the settlement.

  These early versions of the kingdom’s founding do not mesh with the archeological record, which indicates that the site’s earliest residents were nomads from the Eurasian steppe, not migrants from India. The Shanpula (Sampul in Uighur) cemetery, lying 20 miles (30 km) east of Khotan, contains materials dating from the third century BCE, the time of the kingdom’s purported founding, to the fourth century CE.3 This ancient burial site is worth a visit. Abandoned skulls, wooden tools, and bright red scraps of wool, some two thousand years old, poke out above the ground’s surface. Ancient graves lie next to a modern Muslim burial ground, whose caretakers have joined forces with archeological authorities to protect the much-disturbed site from further plundering.

  In the early twentieth century, scavengers sold Aurel Stein some scraps of paper and small wooden items from Shanpula, but Stein never visited the site himself.4 No one excavated the site systematically until the early 1980s, when heavy rains exposed many burials. Between 1983 and 1995, local archeologists excavated sixty-nine human graves and two pits for horses in an area of 2 square miles (6 sq km). Like many steppe peoples, the inhabitants of Shanpula gave their horses elaborate burials, interring one with a beautifully woven saddle blanket.

  The Shanpula graveyard also contained mass graves with up to two hundred people placed in a single pit. The women were buried wearing voluminous woolen skirts, whose many stains and multiple signs of mending indicate previous use by the living. The funerary skirts bear decorative bands of woven tapestry 6.3 inches (16 cm) tall, which were made separately on a small loom; for every color change, the weaver cut off the warp threads and replaced them with a new color.5

  The Shanpula site produced vivid evidence of exchanges with peoples living to the west, none more telling than the leg of a man’s trousers cut from a piece of tapestry, shown in color plate 13 and on the jacket of this book. (All the other trousers found at the site were undecorated.) A centaur occupies the top panel, while a soldier with Western-looking facial features stands below. Although Rome, where images of centaurs were common, is a possible source, certain motifs—particularly the animal heads on the soldier’s dagger—indicate that the kingdom of Parthia in northern Iran, nearer to Khotan, was the more likely place of origin.6

  Goods from other societies were buried in the Shanpula graves as well. Four mirrors were of Chinese manufacture and date to when the Chinese first stationed garrisons in Khotan at the end of the first century CE. The dynastic history of the Han records the oasis’s population as 19,300 people living in 3,300 households.7 The mirrors, like those found at Niya, were most likely gifts presented by Chinese envoys to local rulers.

  By the year 300 CE, the mass burials die out, an important indicator of cultural change. The later graves at Shanpula, which contain single individuals buried in rectangular pits, closely resemble those at Niya and Yingpan, suggesting that a related population had moved to Khotan by the third and fourth centuries CE and displaced the earlier residents.

  This was the time of the Kharoshthi documents from Niya, which frequently mention Khotan, some 150 miles (250 km) to the west of Niya. The Niya officials welcomed refugees from Khotan even as they bemoaned the cavalry attacks and raids by the Khotanese.

  Distinctive Sino-Kharoshthi coins, with Chinese characters on one face and Kharoshthi script on the other, testify to the extensive contacts the people of Khotan had with their neighbors. The Khotanese kings created their own hybrid coinage that co
mbined elements of Kushan and Chinese coinage. Numismatic scholars have been unable to match the names of the kings on these coins with the kings mentioned in Chinese sources, making it difficult to date the coins absolutely, but they were probably minted sometime around the third century CE.8

  With the weakening of the Kushan Empire in the second or third centuries CE, Indian migrants who crossed the Pamirs introduced Buddhist teachings to Khotan as they did at Niya. A prominent Chinese translator traveled from Luoyang to Khotan in 260 in search of the original version of an important Sanskrit text. After working for twenty-two years, he sent the written Sanskrit sutra to Luoyang but chose to remain in Khotan, where he died.9 This account, preserved in an early sixth-century Chinese catalog of Buddhist texts, is the first written mention of Buddhism in Khotan.

  DECORATIVE SKIRT BAND FROM SHANPULA

  This skirt band shows a stag, its head weighed down by exaggerated antlers that fill the entire vertical frame. Colored pink, red, and blue, his four legs and tail stand out from the navy background. A creature—perhaps a bird with its head facing upward—rides on its back. Deer with giant antlers often occur in the art of neighboring Central Asian nomadic peoples. © Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2001. Photo: Christoph von Viràg.

  Khotan’s most imposing Buddhist ruin, Rawak, dates to this period as well. The site lies 39 miles (63 km) north of Khotan in the desert, east of the Yurungkash River. Visitors today take a car or bus to a location a few miles from the site, and then either walk (if it is not too warm) or ride a camel. The desert is blistering hot, and extraordinarily fine sand gets into everything, yet it teems with life: small plants, lizards, and rabbits thrive under foot, while hawks and larks fly overhead. Eventually visitors reach a guardhouse, where an incongruous chain stretches across the road and a sign identifies the archeological site. A central monument surrounded by sections of a wall is visible. Sand covers much of the ruin, and one can easily imagine the shifting dunes obscuring the whole edifice in a few years’ time.

  Rawak profoundly impressed Aurel Stein on his arrival in April 1901. Realizing that he needed to remove massive amounts of sand before he could map the site, he sent for additional laborers to help the dozen workers in his crew. Spring windstorms blew sand into everyone’s eyes and mouths, making all physical labor trying. Working section by section, the crew eventually uncovered the central stupa, the monument designed to hold relics of the Buddha. It stood an imposing 22.5 feet (6.86 m) tall and formed the shape of a cross, with stairways on each of the four sides.10 As the workmen shoveled away the sand, they uncovered a huge, rectangular interior wall. In addition, they unearthed the southwestern corner of an exterior wall, which originally extended all the way around the interior wall.

  As worshippers walked around the monument, they proceeded through an impressive walkway, viewing the statues on both sides. Stein supposed that a wooden roof must have covered the walkway between the interior and exterior walls simply because the statues were so breakable. Some oversize statues, standing 12 or 13 feet (around 4 m) tall, depict buddhas; the smaller figures, their attendants.

  The absence of wood makes carbon 14 testing impossible; one can only date the statues by rigorous stylistic comparison to other Buddhist statuary. Since the Rawak figures closely resemble the earliest Buddhist statues from Gandhara and Mathura, India, the first phase of construction at the site probably occurred in the third and fourth centuries CE, and a second phase followed in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, roughly the same time as the Miran site.11

  SKIRT FOR THE DEAD, SHANPULA

  This, one of the largest skirts from Shanpula, measured 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) at the top edge, which was gathered around the deceased’s waist. The lower edge of the skirt extended a full 16 feet 6 inches (5.03 m) in length. Too unwieldy to be worn in daily life, this skirt was made specifically for the use of the dead. © Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2001. Photo: Christoph von Viràg.

  THE WALLS OF RAWAK MONASTERY OUTSIDE KHOTAN

  This photograph by Stein’s crew shows the square central stupa at Rawak and the interior wall, over 3 feet (1 meter) tall. This wall, measuring 163 feet by 141 feet (50 m by 43 m), encircled the stupa, enclosing an area just under half an American football field. This wall formed a corridor that devotees used to circumambulate the stupa.

  Rawak is much larger and more magnificent than any of the other stupas along the southern route (including the square stupa at Niya found by the Sino-Japanese expedition). Its size testifies to the wealth of the oasis. The Chinese monk Faxian who passed through Khotan on his way to India in 401 also remarked on the oasis’s prosperity and the extent of support for Buddhists among the populace, who, he reported, each built a small stupa in front of their doors.

  Khotan had fourteen large monasteries as well as many smaller ones, and Faxian and his companions stayed in one of the large monasteries. Each year, this monastery sponsored a four-wheeled cart in a lavish Buddhist procession. Standing over 24 feet (7 m) tall, and decorated with jewels and banners, the float housed images of the Buddha and two attendants made of gold and silver. Faxian also described a new monastery built to the west of the oasis, which had just been completed after eighty years. The complex had a great hall, living quarters for monks, and a stupa standing some 66 yards (60 m) high.12

  THE FRAGILE STUCCO STATUES AT RAWAK

  After cleaning the sand off, Stein examined the stucco statues and concluded that they must have originally had wooden frames inside. Since the interior frames had disintegrated, the statues were too fragile to transport. Stein opted to photograph the statues and ordered his men to use ropes to prop up their heads, but the delicate heads snapped off anyway.

  Faxian sometimes exaggerates the number of Buddhists or the depth of their devotion, but he does not distort the basic facts. The monasteries of Khotan were indeed wealthy. The monks of Khotan lived very differently from the Buddhists of Niya, who resided with their families and participated only occasionally in Buddhist rituals. Amply supported by donations from the king and other wealthy patrons, the Khotanese Buddhists could devote themselves full-time to study and the performance of rituals.

  In subsequent centuries, with the enthusiastic support of local kings, Khotan continued to thrive as a center of Buddhist learning. Visiting in 630, the Buddhist monk Xuanzang listed the main local products: rugs, fine felt, textiles, and jade. Khotan was famous for its jade (technically nephrite), large chunks of which the inhabitants found in the riverbeds around the oasis. Khotan’s two largest rivers are named the Yurungkash (“White Jade” in Uighur) and the Karakash (“Black Jade”), and they merge north of the city to form the Khotan River. The jade found in the two rivers differs in color, and implements made from the lighter-colored Khotanese jade have been found in a royal tomb, dating to 1200 BCE, in the central Chinese city of Anyang.

  In 1900, when Aurel Stein first came to Khotan, the inhabitants were still prospecting for jade in the riverbeds. In addition, they had expanded their search to include gold and also antiquities. As he noted wryly, “‘Treasure-seeking,’ i.e., the search for chance finds of precious metal within the areas of abandoned settlements, has indeed been a time-honored occupation in the whole of the Khotan oasis, offering like gold-washing and jade-digging the fascinations of a kind of lottery to those low down in luck and averse to any constant exertion.”13 These were the very men on whom Stein depended so heavily in his own excavations and explorations.

  In Khotan itself, Stein purchased surface finds at Yotkan, the site of the ancient capital, but, to his frustration, no ruins survived. He did not excavate, which is puzzling, because today the visitor sees tantalizing evidence of fallen walls and buildings spread over a large area. Stein did find small clay figurines of monkeys everywhere.14

  Modern visitors can go to Yotkan, but it is more interesting to go to Melikawat, a ruin on the Yurungkash River, 22 miles (35 km) south of the city. There, multiple sand dunes sit on a barren, but evocative, moons
cape occupying several square miles (10 sq km) of an ancient city lost in the dunes. One can hire a donkey cart and wander in the hills of sand—or proceed on foot. Local children offer various scavenged items for sale; tourists scan their trays of obviously manufactured fakes, hoping to spot a genuine item.

  In 1901, after leaving Niya and going west for eight days, Aurel Stein found a wooden slip with the earliest evidence of the indigenous language of Khotan in Endere (modern Ruoqiang), an oasis 220 miles (350 km) to the east of Khotan. The wooden slip surfaced in the ruins of a house near a Buddhist stupa. Like the Niya documents, this slip, too, is written in Kharoshthi script, but the handwriting and the spelling are not exactly the same as those at Niya. Because of the many similarities, most scholars assume that the slip dates to the third or fourth centuries CE.15

  CLAY MONKEYS FROM YOTKAN

  As was his usual practice, Stein carefully numbered and arrayed the different clay monkeys he found at Yotkan on a tray so that they could be photographed. Their sexually explicit positions suggest their use as talismans to enhance fertility.

  Since the document is so important for the study of Khotan, let us consider the full text:

  On the 18th day of the 10th month of the 3rd year, at this time in the reign of the king of Khotan, the king of kings, Hinaza Deva Vijitasimha, at that time there is a man of the city called Khvarnarse. He speaks thus: There is a camel belonging to me. That camel carries a distinguishing mark, a mark branded on it, like this—VA SO. Now I am selling this camel for a price of 8,000 masha [most likely Chinese coins] to the suliga Vagiti Vadhaga. On behalf of that camel Vagiti Vadhaga paid the whole price in masha, and Khvarnarse received it. The matter has been settled. From now on this camel has become the property of Vagiti Vadhaga, to do as he likes with it, to do everything he likes. Whoever at a future time complains, informs, or raises a dispute about this camel, for that he shall so pay the penalty as the law of the kingdom demands. By me Bahudhiva this document (?) was written at the request of Khvarnarse.