The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  Like other refugees, the Sogdians brought their religious beliefs with them to China. Some Sogdians gave up their original practices—like exposing the dead and then burying the bones in clay containers called ossuaries—and adopted certain Chinese funerary customs, like burying the dead in tombs with a slanting stairway leading down to an underground chamber. In Xi’an and other Chinese cities, archaeologists have unearthed tombs decorated with scenes of the Zoroastrian afterlife. One held a bilingual epitaph for the deceased composed in both the Chinese and Sogdian languages.

  Each community in the Western Regions hosted multiple migrant communities, many of whom continued the religious practices of their homes. Whereas refugees left their homelands because they had no choice, students of religion traveled to learn more and teachers settled in towns where they could attract students. Some of the most detailed travel accounts come from Chinese monks who traveled to India, both by land and by sea, to study Buddhist teachings. They vividly documented the risks of travel. In the early 400s, Faxian’s Indian shipmates almost threw him overboard until they realized that only he could speak Chinese and determine where their ship had landed (hundreds of miles off course, as it turned out).

  More than two centuries later, the monk Xuanzang crossed mountain passes where many of his companions perished from the cold, and he survived being robbed of all his possessions, even his clothing. He also encountered brigands so busy dividing up loot that they could not be bothered to steal anything from him. He is the rare traveler to say much about thieves. Police reports from Niya document the losses of a handful of refugees who carried pearls, mirrors, fine clothes of silk or wool, and silver ornaments, but do not identify the culprits. One wall painting at Dunhuang captures the palpable apprehension of merchants held up by an armed bandit—until the bodhisattva Guanyin intercedes to save them.

  Buddhist missionaries like Xuanzang were among the most important translators. They worked out a system for transcribing unfamiliar terms in foreign languages, like Sanskrit, into Chinese that still remains in use today. Chinese absorbed some 35,000 new words, some technical Buddhist terms, some common everyday words. People who spoke different languages often encountered each other on the Silk Road. Some, like Kumarajiva, had learned multiple languages since childhood. Others had to learn foreign languages as adults, an even more painful process than it is today given how few language learning aids were available.

  Surviving phrase books shed light on the identities of students and their reasons for learning languages. Used in monasteries throughout the first millennium, Sanskrit always attracted students, but so too did Khotanese, Chinese, and Tibetan. After 755, more Buddhist pilgrims traveled from Khotan and Tibet to Dunhuang and then onto Mount Wutai in Shanxi; some went in the opposite direction, going all the way to Nalanda, always an important center of Buddhist learning in India.

  Some of these pilgrims traveled on their own, while others served as emissaries sent by one ruler to visit another. Envoys have left a clearer documentary footprint than any other itinerant group. These diplomats carried unusual gifts and letters from one ruler to another; at the same time they brought information about their home societies to their hosts and relayed what they learned on their travels to the rulers who dispatched them. Some were certainly spies.

  The Xuanquan wooden slips from Dunhuang document the regular exchange of envoys between the Chinese and rulers to the west at the turn of the Common Era, and diplomats continued to travel in subsequent centuries. At the peak of the Silk Road, all the major powers exchanged emissaries. Chinese envoys traveled to Samarkand, and their Sogdian counterparts went in the opposite direction. The Afrasiab murals at Samarkand give pride of place to envoys, each laden with products from their native lands.

  The envoy traffic continued even after the massive contraction of the Silk Road economy after 755. One delegation of seven Khotanese princes was unable to complete their trip because the ruler of Dunhuang would not allow them to leave, as travel had become so dangerous. The delegation’s members resorted to impromptu exchanges of locally produced goods to cover their travel expenses, paying with bolts of silk or a sheep or even an antelope skin. Even the Khotanese princes resorted to selling jade to cover their travel expenses.

  The documents about the princes’ difficulties are among the forty thousand documents in multiple languages preserved in the library cave at Dunhuang, which was sealed sometime after 1002 and serves as a time capsule of Silk Road diversity. The Buddhist librarian-monks who saved the texts collected the teachings of their own religion, of course, but kept all scraps of paper in case they might prove useful in the future. They saved texts written in Sanskrit, Khotanese, Tibetan, Uighur, and Sogdian, and from the religions of Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. The Diamond Sutra is the most famous of all the writings from the library cave, because it is the world’s earliest dated printed book, but other texts are arguably more unusual: think of the talisman made from a sheet of folded paper with excerpts in Hebrew from Psalms or the Manichaean hymns sung in Sogdian but written phonetically in Chinese characters. The entire cave embodies the tolerance of different religions that characterized Silk Road communities for nearly one thousand years.

  The monks who sealed off the library cave did not record their reasons for doing so, but they knew of the war between the Buddhist allies of the Dunhuang ruler in Khotan and the Muslim Karakhanids. Even if the fall of Khotan in 1006 did not trigger the closing of the cave, it ushered in a new era for the region, which gradually converted to Islam. Over the following centuries each oasis became a self-contained Islamic state, and the very few men who went to Mecca on the hajj exercised great influence on their return. The European travelers who still managed to travel through the region—possibly Marco Polo, certainly Bento de Goes—described homogenous, isolated communities very different from the cosmopolitan towns of earlier times.

  When Sven Hedin made his first foray into the Taklamakan in 1895, he entered a remote world utterly unknown to Europeans. Thanks to the region’s dry climate, Hedin, Aurel Stein, and others were able to recover multiple documents and artifacts from before the coming of Islam. Those same conditions of preservation draw visitors today who hope to catch a glimpse of the latest discoveries from this now lost, once tolerant world.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Jonathan M. Bloom, “Silk Road or Paper Road?” Silk Road 3, no. 2 (December 2005): 21–26, available online at http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol3num2/5_bloom.php.

  2. Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 1.

  3. Wang Binghua, Xiyu kaogu lishi lunji [Collected essays on the archeology and history of the Western Regions] (Beijing: Renmin Daxue Chubanshe, 2008), 1–54.

  4. Ferdinand von Richthofen used a red line to draw the main route (based on Ptolemy and Marinus) and blue lines for the information from Chinese geographers. The map appears facing p. 500 in vol. 1 of Richthofen, China: Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1877).

  5. Tamara Chin gave a presentation entitled “The Invention of the Silk Road, 1877” at Yale on February 21, 2008, and plans to publish her findings in the future. See also Daniel C. Waugh, “Richthofen’s ‘Silk Roads’: Toward the Archaeology of a Concept,” Silk Road 5, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 1–10, available online at http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol5num1/srjournal_v5n1.pdf.

  6. Times of London, December 24, 30, 1948; Tamara Chin, personal communication, September 6, 2011.

  7. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

  8. Charles Blackmore, Crossing the Desert of Death: Through the Fearsome Taklamakan (London: John Murray, 2000), 59, 61, 64, 104, caption to fig. 14.

  9. Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for Lost Cities and Treasures of
Chinese Central Asia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 45–46; Rudolf Hoernle, “Remarks on Birch Bark MS,” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (April 1891): 54–65.

  10. Sven Hedin, My Life as an Explorer, trans. Alfhild Huebsch (New York: Kodansha, 1996), 177.

  11. Hedin, My Life, 188.

  12. Jeannette Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 70 (Ernst’s letter with the clipping), 79–83 (Stein’s application for funding).

  13. Wang Binghua, “‘Sichou zhi lu’ de kaituo ji fazhan” [The opening and development of the “Silk Road”], in Sichou zhi lu kaogu yanjiu [Studies on the archeology of the Silk Road] (Urumqi, China: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe, 1993), 2–5; E. E. Kuzmina emphasizes the contacts between Xinjiang and the Semirech’e region of modern-day Kazakhstan in her book The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. Victor H. Mair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 119.

  14. J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 179–81.

  15. J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 460–63.

  16. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Mummies of Ürümchi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

  17. I have written about the Xiaohe site in an earlier publication that contains some errors. Most regrettably, I give the wrong date for the occupation of the site: the correct date is between 2000 and 1800 BCE. “Religious Life in a Silk Road Community: Niya during the Third and Fourth Centuries,” in Religion and Chinese Society, ed. John Lagerwey (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004), 1:279–315. Xinjiang Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo, “2000 nian Xiaohe mudi kaogu diaocha yu fajue baogao” [Report on the archeological investigation and excavation at Xiaohe cemetery for the year 2002], Xinjiang Wenwu 2003, no. 2: 8–46; Victor H. Mair, “The Rediscovery and Complete Excavation of Ördek’s Necropolis,” Journal of Indo-European Studies 34, nos. 3–4 (2006): 273–318.

  18. Sergei I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 115, fig. 55 (bronze mirror); plate 178 (embroidered phoenix on silk).

  19. Wang Binghua, “‘Sichou zhi lu’ de kaituo ji fazhan,” 4; site report for Alagou, Wenwu 1981, no. 1: 17–22; the silk is shown in Xinjiang Wenwu Ju, ed., Xinjiang wenwu guji daguan [A survey of artifacts and ruins in Xinjiang] (Urumqi, China: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe, 1999), 165, fig. 0427.

  20. The earliest account of Zhang Qian’s trip occurs in Sima Qian, Shiji [The records of the grand historian] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1972), ch. 123; and in Ban Gu, Han shu [Official history of the Han dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1962), 61:2687–98. This book cites the punctuated edition of all the official histories published by Zhonghua Shuju in Beijing, which are available online at the Scripta Sinica site maintained by the Academia Sinica of Taiwan: http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm. A. F. P. Hulsewé explains that the Shiji account was probably lost and later reconstructed on the basis of the later Han shu account. See his China in Central Asia: The Early Stage, 125 B.C.–A.D. 23; An Annotated Translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 15–25. He translates the Han shu biography of Zhang Qian on pp. 207–38.

  21. Helen Wang, Money on the Silk Road: The Evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800 (London: British Museum Press, 2004), 47–56.

  22. Discovered in 1987 and excavated in 1990 and 1991, Xuanquan has produced many documents, of which only a small selection have been published to date. See Gansu Sheng Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo, “Gansu Dunhuang Handai Xuanquan zhi yizhi fajue jianbao” [A preliminary excavation report from the ruin of the Han-dynasty office at Xuanquan, Dunhuang, Gansu], Wenwu 2000, no. 5: 4–45, 5 (map of the site’s exact location), 11 (the number of bamboo slips).

  23. He Shuangquan, Shuangyu lantang wenji [Collected papers from the Double Jade Orchid Studio] (Taibei: Lantai Chubanshe, 2001), 30.

  24. Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 1, Paper and Printing, by Tsien Tsuen-hsuin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 40; Han shu 97b: 3991.

  25. Nicola Di Cosmo, “Ancient City-States of the Tarim Basin,” in A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2000), 393–409.

  26. Hu Pingsheng and Zhang Defang, eds., Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui [Selected explanations of the Han-dynasty bamboo slips found at Xuanquan, Dunhuang] (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2001), 110.

  27. Wang Su, “Xuanquan Hanjian suojian Kangju shiliao kaoshi” [An examination of the materials from the Xuanquan Han-dynasty bamboo slips concerning Sogdiana], in Zhongwai guanxi shi: Xin shiliao yu xin wenti [A history of China’s relations with foreign countries: new materials and new sources], ed. Rong Xinjiang and Li Xiaocong (Beijing : Kexue Chubanshe, 2004), 150, transcribing and explicating Xuanquan document # II90DXT0213 ®:6A.

  28. Lothar von Falkenhausen, “The E Jun Qi Metal Tallies: Inscribed Texts and Ritual Contexts,” in Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 79–123 ; Cheng Xilin, Tangdai guosuo yanjiu [A study of travel pass documents in the Tang dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2002), 2.

  29. Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan, 77–80, document # I 0112 ®: 113–31.

  30. Wang Su, “Xuanquan Hanjian suojian Kangju,” 155–58.

  31. The record appears in Fan Ye, Hou Han shu [Official history of the Later Han], (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1965), 118:2920. Manfred G. Raschke, “New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römische Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, vol. 2, part 9.2, ed. Hildegard Temporini (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), 853–855nn848–850, discusses the many doubts scholars have about this record.

  32. Raschke, “New Studies in Roman Commerce,” 604–1361. For his reasons why he believes that Periplus must have been written before 70 CE, see 755n478.

  33. Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 91.

  34. Étienne de la Vaissière, “The Triple System of Orography in Ptolemy’s Xinjiang,” in Exegisti Monumenta: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas Sims-Williams, ed. Werner Sundermann, Almut Hintze, and François de Blois (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2009), 527–35.

  35. I visited the Hangzhou Silk Museum on June 12, 2006, and saw this fragment of silk from Yingyang Qingtai village in Henan province.

  36. The most thorough study of Chinese textiles in English is Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 9, Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling, by Dieter Kuhn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 272.

  37. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: H. G. Bohn, 1855–57), 6.20 (Seres and Roman women wearing silk and opposition to various imported goods); 6.26 (export of coins to India); 11.26–27 (Coan silk). Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0137

  38. I. L. Good, J. M. Kenoyer, and R. H. Meadow, “New Evidence for Early Silk in the Indus Civilization,” Archaeometry 51, no. 3 (2009): 457–66.

  39. Irene Good, “On the Question of Silk in Pre-Han Eurasia,” Antiquity 69 (1995): 959–68.

  40. Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Die Seiden mit Chinesischen Inschriften,” in Die Textilien aus Palmyra: Neue und alte Funde, ed. Andreas Schmidt-Colinet, Annemarie Stauffer, and Khaled Al-As’ad (Mainz, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 2000); reviewed by Victor H. Mair, Bibliotheca Orientalis 58, nos. 3–4 (2001): 467–70. On the basis of parallels with excavated Chinese textiles, von Falkenhausen dates catalog item no. 521 to between 50 and
150 CE. Catalog item no. 521 was found in a tomb dated to 40 CE, making it one of the earliest dated silks found in the West. Both textiles must have been made before 273, when Palmyra fell to the Sasanians. See also von Falkenhausen’s “Inconsequential Incomprehensions: Some Instances of Chinese Writing in Alien Contexts,” Res 35 (1999): 42–69, esp. 44–52.

  41. Anna Maria Muthesius, “The Impact of the Mediterranean Silk Trade on Western Europe Before 1200 A.D.,” in Textiles in Trade: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium, September 14–16, 1990, Washington, D.C. (Los Angeles: Textile Society of America, 1990), 126–35, with the mention of a single Chinese textile from a reliquary in the Basilica of Saint Servatius, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 129; Xinru Liu, Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600–1200 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8.

  42. Pliny, Natural History, 6.20.

  43. Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 96–99 (luxuries), 108–10 (Seres).

  44. Luo Feng, Hu Han zhi jian—“Sichou zhi lu” yu Xibei lishi kaogu [Between non-Chinese and Chinese—“The Silk Road” and the archeology and history of the Northwest] (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 2004), chart of gold coins found in China on pp. 117–20.

  45. Vimala Begley, “Arikamedu Reconsidered,” American Journal of Archaeology 87, no. 4 (1983): 461–81, esp. n82.

  46. Raschke doubts that anyone in Rome collected this type of statistic; he believes Pliny is exaggerating on moralistic grounds (“New Studies in Roman Commerce,” 634–35): “Thus, both Roman bureaucratic practice and the surviving records from Egypt itself indicate that it would have been impossible for the Elder Pliny to obtain any accurate figures for the annual quantity of the balance of payments deficit in Rome’s trade with the East” (p. 636). See also Hsing I-tien’s review of Raschke’s book in Hanxue Yanjiu 3, no. 1 (1985): 331–41, and of its sequel in Hanxue Yanjiu 15, no. 1 (1997): 1–31, where Hsing expresses deep skepticism about the extent of Roman-Chinese trade.