The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  47. Qi Dongfang, personal communication, June 2006. One important exception has been studied by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, “Roman Themes in a Group of Eastern Han Lacquer Vessels,” Orientations 32, no. 5 (2001): 52–58.

  48. Wu Zhen, “‘Hu’ Non-Chinese as They Appear in the Materials from the Astana Graveyard at Turfan,” Sino-Platonic Papers 119 (Summer 2002): 1–21.

  CHAPTER 1

  I have previously published two papers on Niya: “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; “The Place of Coins and Their Alternatives in the Silk Road Trade,” in Sichou zhilu guguo qianbi ji silu wenhua guoji xueshu taolunhui wenji [Collected papers from the international conference on the Silk Road: Ancient Chinese money and the culture of the Silk Road], ed. Shanghai Bowuguan (Shanghai: Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 2011), 83–113.

  1. My discussion of the Stein excavation at Niya throughout this chapter draws on M. Aurel Stein, Ancient Khotan: Detailed Report of Archaeological Explorations in Chinese Turkestan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 1:310–15; 2:316–85.

  2. Aurel Stein, On Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative of Three Expeditions in Innermost Asia and North-Western China (London: Macmillan, 1933), 1–2; Valéria Escauriaza-Lopez, “Aurel Stein’s Methods and Aims in Archaeology on the Silk Road,” in Sir Aurel Stein, Colleagues and Collections, ed. Helen Wang, British Museum Research Publication 184 (London: British Museum, forthcoming).

  3. This river is also known as the Konche-daria or Qum-darya.

  4. The Sino-Japanese expedition has published two reports: the first, Zhong Ri Ri Zhong gongtong Niya yiji xueshu diaocha baogao shu [The report of the Sino-Japanese Japanese-Chinese joint scholarly investigation into the Niya site] (Urumqi, China: Weiwuer Zhizhiqu Wenwuju, 1996), covers the excavations of 1988–1993, while the years 1994–1997 are covered by the three volumes of second report, with the same title, published in 1999. I am grateful to Lin Meicun for carrying a set of these books to New Haven.

  Earlier expeditions to the Lop Nor region include those led by the Russian Prejavalsky in 1876–77, the American geography professor from Yale Ellsworth Huntington in 1906, the Japanese Count Ōtani in 1908–11, Aurel Stein in 1914, Huang Wenbi in 1930 and 1934, the Xinjiang Archaeological Institute in 1959 and again in 1980–81, and the joint Sino-Japanese team who excavated from 1988 to 1997. For a historical survey, see Wang Binghua, “Niya kaogu bainian” [One hundred years of Niya archeology], in Xiyu kaocha yu yanjiu xubian [Continuation of investigations and researches about the western regions] (Urumqi, China: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe, 1998), 161–86.

  5. Jean Bowie Shor, After You, Marco Polo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 172; John R. Shroder, Jr., Rebecca A. Scheppy, and Michael P. Bishop, “Denudation of Small Alpine Basins, Nanga Parbat Himalaya, Pakistan,” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 31, no. 2 (1999): 121–27.

  6. Jason Neelis, “La Vieille Route Reconsidered: Alternative Paths for Early Transmission of Buddhism Beyond the Borderlands of South Asia,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 16 (2002): 143–64.

  7. Antiquities of Northern Pakistan: Reports and Studies, vol. 1, Rock Inscriptions in the Indus Valley, ed. Karl Jettmar (Mainz, Germany: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1989).

  8. Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42–56.

  9. Richard Salomon, “New Manuscript Sources for the Study of Gandhāran Buddhism,” in Gandhāran Buddhism: Archaeology, Art, and Texts. ed. Pia Brancaccio and Kurt Behrendt (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 135–47. For more about the early history of Buddhist schools in this region, see Charles Willemen, Bart Dessein, and Collett Cox, eds., Sarvāstivāda Buddhist Scholasticism (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1998).

  10. See charts of formulae in Neelis, “Long-Distance Trade,” 323–26.

  11. Jettmar, Antiquities of Northern Pakistan, 1:407.

  12. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, part 2, Inscriptions of the Seleucid and Parthian Periods and of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, vol. 3, Sogdian, section 2, Sogdian and Other Iranian Inscriptions of the Upper Indus. by Nicholas Sims-Williams (London: Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum and School of Oriental and African Studies, 1989), 23, Shatial I inscription 254, with parentheses dropped to improve clarity of reading. The original translation of Nicholas Sims-Williams has been changed to reflect Yoshida Yutaka’s emendation of the text to mention Tashkurgan. See Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward (Boston: Brill, 2005), 81n42.

  13. Karl Jettmar, “Hebrew Inscriptions in the Western Himalayas,” in Orientalia: Iosephi Tucci Memoriae Dicata, ed. G. Gnoli and L. Lanciotti, vol. 2 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1987), 667–70, Plate 1.

  14. C. P. Skrine gives a vivid description of his own journey over the pass in 1922. See his Chinese Central Asia (London: Methuen, 1926), 4–6.

  15. On the basis of the Rabatak inscription in Afghanistan, Joe Cribb and Nicholas Sims-Williams proposed a new chronology for the Kushans in which Kanishka’s reign started either in 100 or 120 CE. “A New Bactrian Inscription of Kanishka the Great,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 4 (1995–96): 75–142. Analyzing an astronomical manual, Harry Falk proposed the specific date of 127 as the start date for Kanishka’s reign: “The Yuga of Sphujiddhvaja and the Era of the Kuṣāṇas,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 7 (2001): 121–36. While Falk’s dating has not received universal acceptance, many in the field concur that Kanishka’s reign probably started between 120 and 125. Osmund Bopearachchi proposes a start date for Kushan rule circa 40 CE in “New Numismatic Evidence on the Chronology of Late Indo-Greeks and Early Kushans,” in Shanghai Bowuguan, Sichou zhilu guguo qianbi, 259–83.

  16. See the chart of the standard histories, their compilers, and dates of compilation or publication in Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 503–5.

  17. Lin Meicun, “Kharoṣṭhī Bibliography: The Collections from China (1897–1993),” Central Asiatic Journal 40 (1996): 189. Prof. Lin translates the biography of Zhi Qian from the Chu sanzang jiji, in Taishōshinshū Daizōkyō (Tokyo: Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō Kankōkai, 1962–90), text 2145, 55:97b.

  18. Erik Zürcher, “The Yüeh-chih and Kaniṣka in Chinese Sources,” in Papers on the Date of Kaniska, ed. A .L. Basham (Leiden: E .J. Brill, 1968), 370; Fan, Hou Han shu, 47:1580; Yu Taishan, Liang Han Wei Jin Nanbei chao zhengshi Xiyu zhuan yaozhu [Annotated selections from the treatise on the Western Regions in the official histories of the Han, Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern dynasties] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2005), 281n221. Because Yu’s book provides a valuable supplement to the Zhonghua Shuju edition of the dynastic histories, the notes will often cite it as well.

  19. One group, the so-called Greater Yuezhi, moved to northwest India, the official histories in Chinese maintain, while a smaller group, the Lesser Yuezhi, settled in southern Xinjiang, near Niya. Scholars in the field are sharply divided about the reliability and accuracy of this report. As the late John Brough noted,

  The story may well be based on real happenings; but there is no independent evidence to enable us to judge how much of it is factual. As in later times, there must have been numerous ethnic groups in Central Asia, many of them nomadic; and it would obviously have been difficult, even a single generation later, to obtain trustworthy information. We should at least be ready to admit that the traditional story may, to a greater or lesser extent, be a theoretical construct, designed to explain the continuing presence of Yuezhi (distinguished as ‘Lesser Yuezhi’) in regions to the east of the Pamir.

  “Comments on Third-Century Shan-shan and the History of Buddhism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 28 (1965): 585.

  Earlier the Japanese historian Shiratori Kurakichi ha
d noted in his history of the Sogdians: “It has been noticed how the old Chinese authors seem to have been addicted to the practice of tracing the origin of a foreign country to something native to their own country or some name found in their own literature.” Shiratori gives several telling examples: the Chinese ascribed Chinese homelands for the Xiongnu, the Japanese, and even the people of the Great Qin, the realm on the western edge of the world, possibly corresponding to Rome. “A Study on Su-t’ê, or Sogdiana,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 2 (1928): 103.

  Others, though, think the authors of the dynastic histories must have had some basis (now lost) for reaching these conclusions. François Thierry, “Yuezhi et Kouchans: Pièges et dangers des sources chinoises,” in Afghanistan: Ancien carrefour entre l’est et l’ouest, ed. Osmund Bopearachchi and Marie-Françoise Boussac (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 421–539.

  Craig G .R. Benjamin surveys the evidence (the author does not read Chinese but is familiar with the extensive Russian-language literature about archeology) and notes that no archeological evidence indicates a migration out of Xinjiang and then back again. The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007). Anyone interested in this problem should start with Thierry’s article and Benjamin’s book, both of which survey the extensive secondary literature on this question.

  20. For a brief description of Stein’s Fourth Expedition, see Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein, 466–69. Professor Wang Jiqing of Lanzhou University has thoroughly studied the photographs Stein took, his correspondence about the confiscated artifacts, and the significance of the artifacts. He has one article in English: “Photographs in the British Library of Documents and Manuscripts from Sir Aurel Stein’s Fourth Central Asian Expedition,” British Library Journal 24, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 23–74. It is a shorter version of his book Sitanyin di sici Zhongguo kaogu riji kaoshi: Yingguo Niujin daxue cang Sitanyin di sici Zhongya kaocha lüxing riji shougao zhengli yanjiu baogao [An examination of Stein’s archeological diary in China on the Fourth Expedition: A study and reorganization of Stein’s handwritten diary on the Fourth Expedition held by Oxford University] (Lanzhou, China: Gansu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2004).

  21. Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein, 469, citing Stein’s letter of February 3, 1931, to Percy Stafford Allen in the Bodleian Library.

  22. Enoki Kazuo, “Location of the Capital of Lou-lan and the Date of the Kharoṣṭhī Inscriptions,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 22 (1963): 129n12; Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 10–11.

  23. Ban, Han shu, 96A:3875–81; Yu Taishan, Xiyu zhuan, 79–93; translated in Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 7–94.

  24. The length of the li varied over time and space; during the Han dynasty, it was approximately 400 meters. Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xxxviii, gives the length of the li as .415 km and notes, “In certain contexts, the term li is used rhetorically rather than as a precise indication of distance.”

  25. Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 29. The characters cannot be read from the photograph in Stein’s account. Chinese scholars read the seal as “zhao Shanshan wang”—the edict of the king of Shanshan. Meng Fanren, Loulan Shanshan jiandu niandaixue yanjiu [Studies and researches into the dates of bamboo slips and documents from Shanshan and Loulan] (Urumqi, China: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe, 1995), 261, no. 625, N.xv.345. Stein also found a seal that read “Shanshan junyin” (the seal of the Shanshan prefecture): Ancient Khotan, N.xxiv.iii.74.

  26. Aurel Stein, Serindia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), 1:219; 1:415 (Rapson’s identification of Loulan as Kroraina); 1:217–81, 3: plate 9 (House 14); 1:227 (discovery by Rustam); 1:226 (size of house 24); 1:530 (painting at M5).

  27. Brough, “Comments on Third-Century Shan-shan,” 591–92.

  28. Ban, Han shu, 96A:3878–79; Yu Taishan, Xiyu zhuan, 84–86; Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 89–91; Brough, “Comments on Third-Century Shan-shan,” 601.

  29. Helen Wang, Money on the Silk Road, 25–26, alerted me to this find; Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia, Kan-su and Eastern Irān (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 287–92, describes it in detail.

  30. Of the original 211 coins, fifty are now in London; they are dated between 86 to 1 BCE, putting the date of the earliest wuzhu coins in modern Xinjiang before the beginning of the Common Era. Helen Wang, Money on the Silk Road, 295–96.

  31. Stein, Innermost Asia, 290.

  32. Documents excavated from Juyan (Ejina Banner, Inner Mongolia, 90 km northeast of Jinta County, Gansu) and Shule (near Dunhuang and Jiuquan, Gansu) confirm the significant presence of the Chinese military during the Han dynasty. Documents recording large expenditures of over 100,000 coins date to between 140 BCE and 32 CE. Individual soldiers were paid in coin, and they made purchases, often of clothing, using coins advanced to them by the garrison. Helen Wang, Money on the Silk Road, 47–56, provides extensive, detailed analysis of these materials.

  33. Mariner Ezra Padwa has analyzed each house at Niya: “An Archaic Fabric: Culture and Landscape in an Early Inner Asian Oasis (3rd–4th century C.E. Niya)” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2007).

  34. The jade is called langgan and meigui. Unfortunately, the tags were not dated, but the characters were written so skillfully in clerical script that the great Sinologist Wang Guowei (1877–1927) believed that they had to date to sometime after 75 CE but before the end of the Han dynasty in 220 CE. Guantang jilin [Collected writings from the Guan studio] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1959), 833–34.

  Édouard Chavannes thought that they were contemporary with other materials from the site and dated them to the third and fourth centuries: Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein dans les sables de Turkestan oriental (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), 199–200. The most up-to-date transcription is in Meng Fanren, Loulan Shanshan jiandu, 269–71.

  35. N.xiv.iii; Meng Fanren, Loulan Shanshan jiandu, 269, no. 668.

  36. N.xiv.ii.6, N.xiv.ii.19, N.xiv.ii.12.8; discussed in Wang Jiqing, “Sitanyin di sici Zhongya kaocha suohuo Hanwen wenshu” [The Chinese-language documents Stein obtained on the Fourth Central Asia Expedition], Dunhuang Tulufan Yanjiu 3 (1998): 286.

  37. N.xiv.ii.1; discussed in Wang Jiqing, “Hanwen wenshu,” 264.

  38. Meng Fanren, Loulan Shanshan jiandu, 262, no. 627 (N.xv.109), no. 628 (N.xv.353), no. 629 (N.xv.314); 264, no. 639 (N.xv.152); discussed in Cheng Xilin, Tang-dai guosuo yanjiu [Research on the guosuo travel pass system of the Tang dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2000), 39–44; Wang Binghua, Jingjue chunqiu: Niya kaogu da faxian [History of the Jingjue Kingdom: The great archeological discovery at Niya] (Shanghai: Zhejiang Wenyi Chubanshe, 2003), 101.

  39. Stein, Innermost Asia, 288, 743. J .P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair’s Tarim Mummies provides the best survey of these finds in English.

  40. Xinjiang Weiwuer Zizhiqu Bowuguan Kaogudui, “Xinjiang Minfeng da shamo zhong de gudai yizhi” [Ancient remains in the Taklamakan Desert near Minfeng County [Niya Site], Xinjiang], Kaogu 1961, no. 3: 119–22, 126, plates 1–3. At the time, the Xinjiang Museum and Archaeological Institute—now two separate institutions—formed a single unit called the Xinjiang Museum Archaeological Team (Xinjiang Bowuguan Kaogudui).

  41. Shown in Ma Chengyuan and Yue Feng, Xinjiang Weiwuer zizhiqu Silu kaogu zhenpin/Archaeological Treasures of the Silk Road in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (Shanghai: Shanghai Yiwen Chubanshe, 1998), 273, figure 62.

  42. Éric Trombert, “Une trajectoire d’ouest en est sur la route de la soie: La diffusion du cotton dans l’Asie centrale sinisée,” in La Persia e l’Asia Centrale: Da Alessandro al X secolo (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1996), 212nn25 and n27; Li Fang, ed., Taiping yulan [Imperially reviewed encyclopedia of the Taiping Tianguo reign] (Beijing: Zhongghua
Shuju, 1960), 820:3652–53, entry for “baidie” (cotton).

  43. The textile inscription in Chinese reads: “yannian yishou yi zisun.” The mirror reads: “jun yi gaoguan.” “1960 Xinjiang Minfeng xian bei da shamo zhong gu yizhi muzang qu Dong Han hezang mu qingli jianbao” [A brief report on the investigation of a joint Eastern Han burial in the burial ground of the ancient site in the middle of the great desert to the north of Minfeng county, Xinjiang], Wenwu 1960, no. 6: 9–12, plates 5–6.

  44. The Chinese text reads “wanghou hehun qianqiu wansui yi zisun.” Xinjiang wenwu guji daguan [A survey of artifacts and ruins in Xinjiang] (Urumqi, China: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe, 1999), figure 0118. For further analysis of the textiles in tombs M3 and M8, see Wang Binghua, Jingjue chunqiu, 111–20.

  45. Fan, Hou Han shu, 88:2909; Yu Taishan, Xiyu zhuan, 233.

  46. When Stein excavated the Yingpan site on his Third Expedition, he found some Kharoshthi documents, indicating that the site was occupied in the third and fourth centuries (Innermost Asia, 749–61). For a more recent find of additional Kharoshthi materials, see Lin Meicun, “Xinjiang Yinpan gumu chutu de yifeng Quluwen shuxin” [A letter in Kharoṣṭhī unearthed in an ancient tomb at Yingpan in Xinjiang], Xiyu Yanjiu 2001, no. 3: 44–45.

  47. Zhou Xuejun and Song Weimin, eds., Silu kaogu zhenpin: Archaeological Treasures of the Silk Road in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (Shanghai: Shanghai Yiwen Chubanshe, 1998), 63–74, figure 132 (photo of deceased), figure 133 (detail of face mask), figure 134 (detail of red textile).

  48. Wang Binghua, personal communication, fall 2005; Ban, Han shu, 96B:3912; Yu Taishan, Xiyu zhuan, 201.