by John Keay
Into the same wishful category fall Sui relations with the island world of the Yellow and East China Seas. Sui Yangdi is said to have launched two naval expeditions against somewhere called ‘Liuqiu’; it could have been Taiwan/Formosa or possibly Luzon in the Philippines, but was probably the Ryukyu Islands. The first expedition was repelled and the second, though more successful, withdrew. Both ventures, being Yangdi’s, are represented as ill conceived and ruinously expensive. Of ‘Liuqiu’ all that can be said for certain is that it was hot and sticky and that it was not Japan.
For from Japan, or from its self-styled ‘Sunrise Son of Heaven’, there had come to Chang’an in 607 a large embassy, plus monks, conveying congratulations on the efforts made by the ‘Sunset Son of Heaven’ to promote Buddhist precepts. Sui Yangdi heartily deplored all this fraternal terminology; at best it implied equality of status between Heaven’s twin sons, at worst a dawn precedence for the Japanese emperor. But with a view to setting the record straight, the religio-diplomatic intercourse continued with more missions in both directions. Uniquely they are chronicled not only in Chinese sources but also in the Nihon Shoki, an eighth-century text that is Japan’s first comprehensive history. The slant put on diplomatic protocol for the benefit of the ‘Sunset Son’ may thus be compared with that put on it for the the ‘Sunrise Son’ (actually a daughter, the Yamato ruler of the time being a lady emperor). Yangdi was reassured that the Yamato acknowledged Sui suzerainty, revered its Buddhist scholarship and emulated its culture. The Japanese, on the other hand, while conceding their need for further religious, literary and bureaucratic novelties, seem never to have accepted that their diplomatic presentations amounted to tribute or that their ruler was other than a counterpart of the Sui and Tang.
Official contacts between Japan and China would continue sporadically throughout the next two centuries. But they were conducted in the face of great difficulty. Nearly half of the traffic was lost at sea, and this despite the route usually involving a landward crossing of the Korean peninsula, so halving the sailing distance, and despite such Chinese maritime inventions as the magnetic compass, the sternpost rudder and watertight bulkheads. In 838, a Japanese mission would fare better on the high seas and would yield the first account of life and travel in China to be penned by a foreigner. But the mission would also prove to be ‘the last to be dispatched abroad by the Imperial court of Japan until the nineteenth century’.19 Though cultural, commercial and piratical contacts flourished, authority in Japan fell a prey to feudalism and its diplomacy slipped into a milliennium-long hibernation.
Korea served as both a conduit and an obstacle in this Sino-Japanese intercourse. The Sui and then the Tang generally kept on good terms with the southernmost Korean kingdom of Silla, whose mariners’ intimate knowledge of the treacherous Tsushima strait was invaluable. But from the north Korean kingdom of Koguryo (whence derives the name ‘Korea’), Chang’an failed dismally to win other than token acknowledgements of suzerainty. Sui Yangdi’s three disastrous invasions had been preceded by an equally unrewarding intervention under Sui Wendi and they were followed by worse under the Tang.
Relations had briefly improved when the advent of the Tang coincided with a change of ruler in the Koguryo capital of Pyongyang. Tang Gaozu at the time was too busy pacifying the empire, and then Tang Taizong too busy with the Turks, to launch assaults in the north-east. But the temptation to upstage Sui Yangdi eventually proved too great. Buoyed by success elsewhere and ignoring the almost unanimous advice of his ministers, in 645 Taizong launched a massive assault across the Liao River supported by a naval attack from Shandong. Unusually the emperor led his forces in person, such was the importance he attached to the campaign. Not unusually, ‘the whole expedition ended in disaster’.20 The imperial forces got bogged down trying to reduce the fortified cities of Liaodong and were then overtaken by the Manchurian winter. They scarcely entered the Korean peninsula.
Taizong tried again in 647, but with little success; and he planned yet a third invasion that was cancelled on his deathbed in 649. Not until twenty years later would Tang troops finally enter Pyongyang and complete the reassembly of the Former Han’s territorial behemoth by appending its Korean tail. But the triumph would be short-lived; and in the eyes of the annalists, it would be vitiated by its being less that of Taizong’s successor than of the latter’s formidable consort, the Empress Wu.
BEYOND THE JADE GATE
Born in 599, the great Tang Taizong, constructor if not architect of the Tang empire, belonged to a generation of Asian empire-builders. From the Tsangpo basin of southern Tibet, Srong-brtsan-sgam-po, his exact contemporary, was masterminding the first unification of the scattered peoples of Asia’s high plateau to lay the foundations of a formidable Tibetan empire. Across the Himalayas in the Gangetic plain, Harsha-vardhana of Kanauj was performing a similar feat in establishing his imperial sway over the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of north India. Simultaneously the Sassanid ruler Chosroes (Khosrau) II was overrunning the Levant and Asia Minor to recreate a Persian empire that stretched from Xinjiang to Egypt. And in the far south-west, along the caravan routes of Arabia, another contemporary took rejection in Mecca as cause for flight (hegira or hijra) to Medina, where, acknowledged as the Prophet, he found a following and launched a crescentade that in less than a century would obliterate the Sassanids and buffet the frontiers of both India and China.
Asia was being reconfigured. For anyone keen on amateur exploration or individual travel it was a difficult time. The fast-changing scene could frustrate departure, impede progress and provide a homecoming full of surprises. So it was for Xuanzang, an exact contemporary of Tang Taizong, who in 622 – the year of the Prophet’s flight from Mecca – set off for Chang’an as a just-ordained Buddhist monk. There, like Muhammad in Medina, Xuanzang felt the call to action. He must go, as he put it, ‘in search of the truth’, ‘to seek the Law’. Though he was the product of a Confucian upbringing, Xuanzang’s conspicuous Buddhist devotion was rivalled only by his passion for Buddhist scholarship. Both could best be served by undertaking a journey of pilgrimage-cum-research to the Buddhist ‘Holy Land’ of India.
There was nothing new in this. Religious traffic along the Silk Road had been two-way since at least the fourth century. In the early fifth another Chinese monk, Faxian, had gone west overland and returned home by sea. He had then written a brief account of his travels. Monk Xuanzang had read it and noted the horrors of the sea voyage: the ship had been blown off course, there had been weeks without drinking-water, and Faxian had narrowly escaped being sacrificed by his superstitious shipmates. Xuanzang opted for the overland route. But this too posed problems. With the Turks pressing from the north and the Sassanids from the south-west, anyone attempting to squeeze between them by one of the silk-and-sutra routes through Xinjiang could no longer count on the residual loyalty to Chang’an of the oasis-states. All were now under some form of duress or obligation, mostly to the Turks.
To complicate matters further, Tang Taizong’s web of intrigues and incentives designed to exploit divisions within the leadership of the Turks was at a delicate stage. Neither the Sui nor the Tang had enjoyed much success in their efforts to control the Eastern Turks on their northern frontier. Sui Yangdi had been surrounded and nearly captured by them during a northern excursion in 614, a disgrace that would be overshadowed only by his defeats in Koguryo. Li Yuan (before becoming Tang Gaozu), in return for their neutrality and some support in his march on Chang’an in 617, had been obliged to employ language that effectively declared him a vassal of the eastern qaghan. And Tang Taizong, in the early days of his own reign, had been similarly humiliated when, having deposed his father and killed two of his brothers, he had had to buy off a Turk army of retribution within a day’s march of Chang’an.
In the 620s, while Taizong schemed, monk Xuanzang waited and prayed, all the while adding to his reputation as the foremost exegetist of his age. Then in 628 the eastern Turk qaghanate, assailed from without by o
ther Turkic peoples and from within by famine, was reported on the verge of collapse. Throwing caution to the winds, Taizong abandoned appeasement for active intervention; new candidates for the qaghanate were encouraged to declare themselves, and a Tang army of 100,000 was readied to march. It was now or, very possibly, never for Xuanzang’s great design. Defying an imperial embargo on non-essential foreign travel, the monk slipped out of Gaozhou in Gansu and, with an old horse and a crazed guide, headed west for the frontier and Xinjiang.
His horse died, the guide tried to murder him, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and, becoming lost in the desert, he spilled his water-sack and would have perished but for a Bodhisattva’s intervention. This all happened before Xuanzang had reached Dunhuang and the Jade Gate frontier. Thereafter, when things should have got worse, they improved. His unshakeable faith in supernatural protection was not misplaced; word of his distinction invariably preceded him, and his credentials as the devoutest of Buddhist scholars proved more valuable than any official documentation. Thus the ruler of Turfan (Turpan), a vassal of the Western Turks who was particularly anxious to add such a luminary to his court, undertook to provide the transport and funds necessary to secure the monk’s safe return.
Rewarding detours and miraculous interventions, no less than mishaps and encounters with monsters, would ever be the pilgrim’s lot. Xuanzang’s peregrinations across northern Xinjiang, through the Tian Shan to Tashkent and Samarkand, and then south to the Oxus (Amu Darya), Afghanistan and India, were only the beginning. He was gone for sixteen years, some of them passed in study at the great centres of Buddhism, most of them on the road. In all he covered a distance of perhaps 15,000 kilometres (9,320 miles), half of it during extensive wanderings in the Indian sub-continent that took him as far south as Tamil Nadu. He learnt new languages, explored new doctrines, won countless debates, went everywhere, met everyone, and kept a detailed record of it all. The qaghan of the Western Turks took a liking to him, the king of Samarkand let him conduct an ordination, and Emperor Harsha-vardhana became one of his keenest supporters. Indeed, most of what is known of Harsha and his empire, and of India in the seventh century, derives from Xuanzang’s Record of the Western Regions.
Well before any foreign traveller had explored Chinese culture, a Chinese scholar had explored a foreign culture. The repercussions would be surprising. In the mid-nineteenth century, armed with a French translation of Xuanzang’s itinerary (the first to appear in any European language), Alexander Cunningham, a Scots general in British India, devoted his retirement to rediscovering the long-forgotten sites associated with the Buddha’s life and early Buddhism; from this exercise there grew the Archaeological Survey of India, whose responsibilities now probably exceed those of any other heritage body and of which Cunningham was both founder and director. Half a century later it was the memory of Xuanzang as invoked by Aurel Stein, another archaeological traveller, which would be the key to gaining access to the treasures of Dunhuang. Stein’s claim to be retracing the monk’s footsteps would so impress Dunhuang’s local curator that he was persuaded to reveal the greatest trove of Buddhist texts and paintings ever discovered. Arguably no book played a greater part than Xuanzang’s in relaying to an international posterity the achievements of early Buddhism.
In China the impact of Xuanzang’s travels would take a different turn. This was partly due to his own success but more substantially to Tang Taizong’s. Having left a fugitive in 629, Xuanzang returned a hero in 645. At the head of a caravan laden with over five hundred trunks of statuary and texts, bearing letters of congratulation from numerous Asian potentates, with a hundred monks in tow and minus only the elephant provided by Harsha (it had fallen off a precipice), Xuanzang led home something more like a tribute mission. Not even Stein and his rivals for the wealth of Dunhuang would secure a greater archival haul. Choosing a southern variant of the Silk Road through the Pamirs, the pilgrim formally announced his approach to the emperor and, receiving a favourable reply, continued east along the skirts of the Kun Lun.
No less encouraging was the warm reception received at the oasis-states of western Xinjiang. It was as if the empire were stretching out to greet him – and in a sense it was. During the monk’s sixteen-year absence, Tang Taizong had not only triumphed over the Eastern Turks, but with his northern border secure had then directed the same mix of intrigue and force at the Western Turks. Shule (Kashgar), Yutian (Khotan) and Suche (Yarkand), all cities on Xuanzang’s return route through Xinjiang, had submitted to Tang suzerainty during the 630s; and the northern states, including Kuqa and Turfan, were even now (645) being either annexed or bullied into submission – which was doubtless why Xuanzang preferred the southern route. Victorious at last over the Turks, the Son of Heaven Tang Taizong now bore the added title of ‘Heavenly Qaghan’. In effect, he had restored the elephantine proportions of the Han empire in respect of its long western proboscis. Only with the Korean tail would he fail.
Though Xuanzang’s Record stops short of his re-entry into Chang’an, it was evidently a triumphant affair. Painted silk scrolls and wall frescoes from Dunhuang depict the event. Though the emperor was absent, commanding his first assault on Koguryo, on his return he forgave the traveller his original disobedience and insisted on his writing an account of his wanderings. He also tried to persuade him to accept office as an expert on foreign relations. Xuanzang declined. But his journey was not without diplomatic repercussions.
Harsha-vardhana of India had earlier sent emissaries to Chang’an and in 643, around the time of Xuanzang’s departure from India, a Tang mission under a military official called Wang Xuance had repaid the compliment. Five years later, in 648, Wang Xuance was back in India at the head of a more impressive embassy that was doubtless influenced by Xuanzang’s reports on Harsha. But this time ambassador Wang Xuance received a very different reception. Harsha had died the previous year, his empire was already crumbling, and a Brahminical reaction had set in against the Buddhist community. Evidently Xuanzang’s long sojourn and his influence on Harsha had encouraged the idea that Chinese support was enabling Indian Buddhists to subvert the political primacy claimed by India’s priestly caste. Wang Xuance’s 648 mission was therefore waylaid. Its valuables were stolen, its personnel detained and Wang Xuance himself barely escaped with his life. He withdrew to Tibet.
There he took advantage of a rare moment of amity in Sino-Tibetan relations. In the 630s the great Srong-brtsan-sgam-po had been engaged in sporadic warfare with Tang forces in both Sichuan and Qinghai. Unusually the Tibetans fought not to keep the Chinese out of Tibet but to secure closer relations with them, or rather to secure parity of treatment with that extended by Chang’an to their local rivals. These were the Tuyuhun, a Xianbei clan established in Qinghai between Gansu and Srongbrtsan-sgam-po’s swelling territories. The Tuyuhun eventually forfeited their favoured status; they were first incorporated into the Tang empire and then, in 667, into the Tibetan. Meanwhile the Tibetans had renewed their solicitations to Chang’an, and in 641, with a view to ending their raids, Tang Taizong had granted the Tibetans what was in effect a ‘peace-through-kinship’ treaty. It was sealed as usual with the dispatch of an imperial princess. Further exchanges followed, the Tibetans regarding them as evidence of Tang vassalage and the Tang as evidence of Tibetan vassalage.21
Into this happy state of mutual misunderstanding straggled Wang Xuance on his way back from his rebuff in India. The rout of an embassy from the Son of Heaven, not to mention the Heavenly Qaghan, could not go unavenged. Wang Xuance demanded troops for a retaliatory attack on India and the Tibetans obliged. It was thus a joint Sino-Tibetan force that in 649, probably by way of the Chumbi pass between Sikkim and Nepal, crossed the Great Himalaya and inflicted a heavy defeat on Harsha’s successors. ‘Thereupon’, says the standard Tang history, ‘India was overawed.’ Elsewhere it is recorded that Wang Xuance brought back as a prisoner to Chang’an the man who had supposedly usurped Harsha’s throne. A statue of ‘this contumacious Ind
ian’ was erected among the many in front of Tang Taizong’s tomb and ‘so [the Indian] found lasting fame – but as a trophy and an emblem’.22 Needless to say, Indian tradition is blissfully ignorant of all this. The Sino-Tibetan incursion probably affected only a corner of Bengal and had no known repercussions. Though a Chinese assault on Indian territory had been shown to be feasible, it would not be repeated until the 1960s.
In the same year as this obscure affair (649), both Tang Taizong and Srong-brtsan-sgam-po died. Monk Xuanzang was still alive – he lived till 664 – but took no account of the Indian incursion. He was otherwise engaged. Instead of imperial office, he had asked for a monastic base where he could devote the rest of his life to translating and expounding his textual hoard. He asked that it be built of stone like the monasteries of India, but this proved difficult. Brick was seen as a compromise and, though much restored, the monastery’s brick-built ‘Great Pagoda of the Wild Goose’ still stands in what is now Xi’an. Its proportions, if not its size, are reminiscent of the pyramidal tower of the great temple at Boddh Gaya that marks the spot of the Buddha’s enlightenment.
During his final years, Xuanzang remained in imperial favour. Tang Taizong, whose reign had been marked by indifference to Buddhism, is supposed to have adopted Xuanzang as his spiritual adviser; he may even have undergone some form of deathbed conversion. His successor, Tang Gaozong (r. 649–83), declared Xuanzang ‘the jewel of the empire’ and continued to support his work with generous endowments. The results were almost as important as his journey. ‘In his influence on later Buddhist thought, Xuanzang is second only to Kumarajiva; he translated more Buddhist scriptures than anyone else . . . [and] produced over seventy-three works, totalling more than a thousand scrolls,’ writes a latter-day admirer. The emperor himself penned a foreword to Xuanzang’s treatise on yogic practices. His works on Buddhist logic and epistemology added a new dimension to the intellectual life of China.23