The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  De Goes left the main caravan and visited Turfan, Hami, and Jiayuguan with two companions. Given permission to enter China, he arrived at Suzhou (modern Jiuquan in Gansu) on Christmas 1605. There he sent a letter to Matteo Ricci, who had been in Beijing since 1601, who dispatched a Christian convert to visit de Goes. On arrival, he confirmed what de Goes suspected: that the Cathay mentioned by earlier travelers was the same place as China. Eleven days after the disciple reached him, de Goes died in 1607.

  De Goes’s travel partners divided his property and apparently shredded his diary, leaving only a few sections which fellow Jesuits managed to salvage and send to Ricci. His account of the tribute trade is the most detailed that survives for the modern period. Few caravans traveled from Central Asia to China; those that did maintained the pretense that they were presenting tribute to the Ming emperor. Caravans at this time sought strength in numbers.

  As few caravans entered Xinjiang during the 1600 and 1700s, hardly any travelers left the region during these centuries. A handful of Muslims based in Xinjiang and Gansu traveled to the Middle East, often to study with Sufi teachers; some of them performed the hajj and went to Mecca as well. In the 1600s a Sufi teacher from west of the Pamirs crossed into southern Xinjiang and Gansu, where he preached with great success. His son Khoja Afaq, born in Hami, continued his teaching and became extremely well known. In the 1700s his successors traveled to Yemen, where they studied with Naqshabandi teachers. On their return, they were unusually influential. They spoke with great authority, because so few Muslims had the chance to study outside of Xinjiang.104 In time, the descendants of these Sufis became the Khoja rulers of Khotan and Yarkand, where they implemented Islamic law and their subjects prayed at mosques and abstained from eating pork. Under their influence, Xinjiang became fully Islamicized.

  In 1759 the Manchu armies of the Qing dynasty defeated their last rival and gained control of the Western Regions.105 The Qing government created the province of Xinjiang, which means “new territory.” Delegating power to local headmen, Manchu officials used the Arabic alphabet to translate imperial edicts into Uighur. People living in Xinjiang were subject to different laws than those living in central China: while the Manchus required their Chinese subjects to shave their foreheads and tie their hair into queues, Muslims in Xinjiang were permitted to keep their own hairstyles. Only high-ranking Muslims could apply to the government for permission to wear the queue, which they associated with success.106

  During the period of Qing control the economy improved. As in the Tang, there was a massive infusion of cash and textiles to support the army, trade links were revitalized, and merchants began to risk travel on longer trade routes. But in 1864 the Qing lost control of Xinjiang, when the province revolted, and in 1865 a strongman named Ya‘qub Beg gained control of the region. Sensing an opportunity to gain a foothold, both Russia and Britain sent trade missions to Ya‘qub Beg’s realm, and their reports are remarkably optimistic. Although most of the goods for sale in markets were locally made, the British and Russian agents described a large potential market for foreign goods, particularly textiles and tea (which no longer came in from China). After Ya‘qub Beg’s death in 1877 the Chinese regained tenuous control.107

  In the early 1900s, when Aurel Stein and other foreigners entered Xinjiang with travel documents issued by the Qing, they met many Chinese officials, some of whom actively helped them to excavate and remove antiquities from the region. With the revolution of 1911 and the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Xinjiang enjoyed de facto independence while remaining under control of Chinese warlords who paid lip service to Republican China. In the 1920s and 1930s Russia exerted influence over the various strongmen in power, and Northern Xinjiang was in effect a Soviet satellite under Turkic local leadership from 1945 to 1949. Except for rebellions in the early 1930s, southern Xinjiang, the region treated in this book, was under Chinese warlord rule until one leader recognized the rule of the Nationalists in 1944. In 1949 the warlord then in control shifted his allegiance from the Nationalists to the Chinese Communist Party, and Xinjiang joined the People’s Republic of China.

  Since 1949, Xinjiang’s history has in many ways followed that of all of China. The early 1950s were relatively relaxed. The Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958 began a long period of collectivism, with limited freedom to practice religion. In 1976 the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Under Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party granted more economic and religious freedoms to Chinese citizens, including those living in Xinjiang. After nearly three decades of economic growth there are still tensions between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese population—and occasional outbreaks of violence like those in the summers of 2009 and 2011. All of the interior regions, including Xinjiang, lag behind the booming coastal regions.

  Khotan certainly feels less Chinese than other cities in Xinjiang. Few Chinese faces appear in a population that is 98 percent Uighur. Almost all of Khotan’s taxi drivers and tour guides are native speakers of Uighur, the Turkic language introduced to the region in the ninth and tenth centuries that completely displaced the Khotanese language.

  The memory of the Karakhanid conquest is still alive in today’s Xinjiang, where modern Muslims gather at mazar shrines. While Islam does not have canonized saints, Muslims early on came to accept that certain individuals have an intimate relationship with God and may intercede with him on behalf of ordinary people.108 At mazars, pilgrims read the Quran, offer sacrifices, and perform rituals. They also pray for healthy children, recovery from illness, or the well-being of their family members. One of the largest, and most visited, mazars is the tomb of Satuq Bughra Khan, the first Karakhanid ruler to convert to Islam. It is located less than an hour’s drive from Kashgar in Atush (see color plate 16A).109 Another important mazar, some two hours from Yengisar, the Ordam Padishah Mazar, is believed to be the tomb of his grandson.110 Most likely it was built in the 1500s by a Sufi teacher.111

  Even today, not everyone who would like to is able to go on the hajj: of the 12,700 pilgrims given permission in 2009 to travel to Mecca from China (out of a population of some twenty million Muslims), six hundred were from Khotan.112 Those who cannot go on the hajj sometimes visit local mazars in a fixed sequence that takes the better part of a calendar year. The two best-known series are in Khotan and Kashgar, where mazars are dedicated to the lexicographer Mahmud of Kashgar, the Khoja rulers of Xinjiang, and their female relatives. Those participating in these observances sometimes refer to Khotan as the “holy land,” a fitting name for the oasis given how early it adopted Islam.

  Conclusion

  The History of the Overland Routes through Central Asia

  The Silk Road was one of the least traveled routes in human history and possibly not worth studying—if tonnage carried, traffic, or the number of travelers at any time were the sole measures of a given route’s significance.

  Yet the Silk Road changed history, largely because the people who managed to traverse part or all of the Silk Road planted their cultures like seeds of exotic species carried to distant lands. Thriving in their new homes, they mixed with the peoples already there and often assimilated with other groups who followed. Sites of sustained economic activity, these oasis towns were beacons enticing still others to cross over mountains and move through oceans of sand. While not much of a commercial route, the Silk Road was important historically—this network of routes became the planet’s most famous cultural artery for the exchange between east and west of religions, art, languages, and new technologies.

  Strictly speaking, the Silk Road refers to all the different overland routes leading west out of China through Central Asia to Syria and beyond. Nothing unusual in the landscape would catch the eye of someone flying overhead. The features delineating where the road went were not man-made but entirely natural—mountain passes, valleys, and springs of water in the desert. Not paved, the Silk Road was systematically mapped only in the twentieth century. No one living on these routes between 200 and 1000 CE, the peak pe
riod for the Chinese presence, ever said “the Silk Road.” Recall that the term “Silk Road” did not exist before 1877, when the Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen first used it on a map (see color plate 2–3).

  These routes date back to the very origins of humankind. Anyone who could walk was capable of going overland through Central Asia. In distant prehistoric times, populations migrated along these paths. The earliest surviving evidence of trade goods moving across regions comes around 1200 BCE, when jade traveled from Khotan to Anyang in Henan Province, where the Shang-dynasty kings were buried north of the Yellow River. Contact among the different societies bordering central Asia—China, India, Iran—continued through the first millennium BCE.

  THE WORLD’S EARLIEST KNOWN PRINTED BOOK

  Possibly the most famous of all Silk Road documents, the Diamond Sutra is the world’s first intact printed book. It is a complete work on seven sheets of paper glued together to form a scroll. Note the gap between the opening illustration of the Buddha preaching and the second sheet of paper, which is all text. The closing dedication gives the date of carving the printing blocks as 868, about 150 years after the first woodblock printed texts appeared in East Asia. The desire to accumulate Buddhist merit was a major motivation for the development of printing. Courtesy of the Board of the British Library.

  In the second century BCE the rulers of the Han dynasty sent their first diplomat, a man named Zhang Qian, to the region. The Chinese hoped to negotiate an alliance against their enemy, the Xiongnu people, who lived in what is now Mongolia. The envoy noticed Chinese goods for sale in northern Afghanistan and reported their presence to the emperor on his return. Many books date the beginning of the Silk Road to Zhang Qian’s trip. Remember that the emperor sent him for security concerns—not because he valued the trade, which he had not previously known about and which was small in scale. The Han dynasty subsequently dispatched armies to the northwest and stationed garrisons there, always to protect themselves from their enemies to the north. The soldiers in these Chinese garrisons had limited contact with the local populations. The first sustained interactions among the locals, migrants from India, and Chinese soldiers occurred at Niya and Loulan, which is where chapter 1 begins.

  In each of the Silk Road communities discussed in this book—Niya, Loulan, Kucha, Turfan, Samarkand, Chang’an, Dunhuang, and Khotan—trade existed, but it was limited. In the third and fourth centuries, of nearly one thousand Kharoshthi documents found at Niya, only one mentions “merchants,” who would be coming to the village from China when they could assess the price of silk. The few merchants who were traveling were closely monitored. Local officials issued them travel passes that listed each person and animal in the party and specified exactly which towns they could go to in which order. Chinese officials were not the only ones to supervise the trade; officials at Kucha did so as well. Governments played a major role as the purchasers of goods and services.

  Markets existed in these different towns, but they offered far more local goods for sale than exotic imports. At one market in Turfan in 743, local officials recorded three prices (high, medium, low) for each of 350 different items, including typical Silk Road goods like ammonium chloride, aromatics, sugar, and brass. Shoppers could buy all kinds of locally grown vegetables and staples as well as animals, some brought over long distances. A wide array of textiles woven in central China and shipped to the northwest were on sale, because the central government used these textiles as money to pay its soldiers, and they in turn used them to obtain goods at the market.

  The massive transfer of wealth from central China to the northwest, where many soldiers were stationed, accounted for the flourishing Silk Road trade when the Tang dynasty was at its strongest, before 755. Two shipments of silk in 745 to a garrison in Dunhuang totaled 15,000 bolts, and later encyclopedias report that, in the 730s and 740s, the Tang government sent 900,000 bolts of silk each year to four different headquarters in the frontier areas of the Western Regions—now modern Gansu and Xinjiang. Much larger in quantity than any documented private transaction, these continuing subsidies underpinned the region’s prosperity. Almost immediately after the Turco-Sogdian general An Lushan (or Rokhshan, to use his Sogdian name) rose up in 755, when the Tang government cut off payments to the region, the Silk Road economy collapsed.

  After 755, the region reverted to a subsistence trade very similar to that in earlier times. One merchant traveled a small circuit roughly 100 square miles (250 km) in area around Dunhuang. This peddler handled only locally produced goods, and his business consisted largely of exchanging one item for another. His report confirms the dearth of coins in the northwest after 800. This kind of low-level trade persisted long after the height of the Silk Road trade. In the early years of the twentieth century both Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin encountered itinerant traders just like this. These exchanges had little impact on the economic life of people living along the Silk Road. Those who worked the land continued to do so, and they did not purchase or produce the luxury goods for which the Silk Road is famous.

  This book draws on many documents to show that the Silk Road trade was often local and small in scale. Even the most ardent believer in a high-volume, frequent trade must concede that there is little empirical basis for the much-vaunted Silk Road trade. One might interpret the scraps of evidence differently than this book does, but there is no denying that the debates concern scraps—not massive bodies—of evidence.

  Because each site is so distinct and preserves materials in different languages, most scholars work primarily on a single Silk Road site. Individually, they notice that their particular site preserves little direct evidence of the Silk Road trade, and they go to great lengths to explain why. This book demonstrates that this same silence about trade holds true for all the Silk Road sites that have produced documents.

  The strongest proponents of trade may believe that more evidence lies still undiscovered under the surface of the ground. This point of view is impossible to refute: which of us can say what discoveries lie in the future? In the meantime, though, this book has taken a close, critical look at the evidence at hand, since that is the only way that understanding of the history and trade of the Silk Road will advance. Excavated evidence has received pride of place in this book because it is genuine and firsthand: generalizations about the trade pale in comparison to actual lists of taxes paid by merchants or travel passes granted to merchants on the road. Yes, the evidence is scant and often missing crucial sections. But it comes from a variety of findspots, making this picture of a local, small-scale trade more plausible.

  Despite the limited trade, extensive cultural exchange between east and west—China and first South Asia, and later west Asia, especially Iran—did take place as various groups of people moved along the different land routes through Central Asia. Refugees, artists, craftsmen, missionaries, robbers, and envoys all made their way along these routes. Sometimes they resorted to trade, but that was not their primary purpose in traveling.

  The most important and the most influential people moving along the Silk Road were refugees. Waves of immigrants brought technologies with them from their homeland and then practiced those skills in their new homes. The frequent migrations of people fleeing either war or political conflicts in their homelands meant that some technologies moved east, others west. The technologies for manufacturing paper and weaving silk were transported west out of China at the same time that the techniques for making glass entered China. Itinerant artists also moved along these routes, bringing sketchbooks and introducing motifs from their homelands.

  The first migrants came from the Gandhara region in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Western Regions and settled in Niya. These Indian refugees introduced the Kharoshthi script and their writing technology, slotted wooden boards, to the indigenous peoples. They also brought their belief system, Buddhism, with them. Early Buddhist regulations prescribe celibacy for monks, but some of the Niya Buddhists married and had children. Living at h
ome, they only visited monasteries to participate in major ceremonies.

  The most prominent migrant community in western China by far was the Sogdians, whose homeland was in Samarkand and the surrounding towns of modern Uzbekistan. They formed settlements in almost every Chinese town, where Sogdian sabao headmen supervised the affairs of the local community. Some Sogdian migrants were merchants; they appear so often in fiction that a stereotype of the rich Sogdian merchant took shape.

  One of the most detailed descriptions of the Silk Road trade comes from the eight Sogdian Ancient Letters preserved in an abandoned mailbag outside Dunhuang. The letters, which date to 313 or 314, mention specific commodities: wool and linen, musk, the lead-based cosmetic ceruse, pepper, silver, and possibly silk. The quantities are not large, ranging from 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg) to 88 pounds (40 kg), all consonant with a small-scale trade managed by caravaneers.

  Caravans frequently moved along the various overland routes. In the third letter, a Sogdian woman named Miwnay reports that she had five different opportunities to leave Dunhuang, where she was stranded by her errant husband. To make ends meet, she ended up tending sheep alongside her daughter, and other Sogdians proved just as flexible in their choice of occupation after settling in China. They farmed the land, worked as craftsmen, practiced veterinary medicine, or served as soldiers.

  The historic capital of Chang’an, now called Xi’an, is famous for its Silk Road art. Perhaps the most concentrated find is the Hejia Village hoard, which contains over a hundred beautiful gold and silver vessels combining Chinese and Western motifs. On close examination, many of these objects turn out to be locally manufactured, either by Sogdians in exile or by Chinese craftsmen who adopted Sogdian motifs. Only the jewels are indisputably imported: light and small, they would have been easy to transport overland.