Download PDF |(New Oxford World History) Xinru Liu - The Silk Road in World History-Oxford University Press, USA (2010).
168 Pages
Editors’ Preface
This book is part of the New Oxford World History, an innova-tive series that offers readers an informed, lively, and up-to-date history of the world and its people that represents a significant change from the “old” world history. Only a few years ago, world history generally amounted to a history of the West—Europe and the United States—with small amounts of information from the rest of the world. Some versions of the “old” world history drew attention to every part of the world except Europe and the United States.
Readers of that kind of world history could get the impression that somehow the rest of the world was made up of exotic people who had strange customs and spoke difficult languages. Still another kind of “old” world history presented the story of areas or peoples of the world by focusing primarily on the achievements of great civilizations. One learned of great buildings, influential world religions, and mighty rulers but little of ordinary people or more general economic and social patterns. Interactions among the world’s peoples were often told from only one perspective.
This series tells world history differently. First, it is comprehensive, covering all countries and regions of the world and investigating the total human experience—even those of so-called peoples without histories living far from the great civilizations. “New” world historians thus share in common an interest in all of human history, even going back millions of years before there were written human records. A few “new” world histories even extend their focus to the entire universe, a “big history” perspective that dramatically shifts the beginning of the story back to the big bang. Some see the “new” global framework of world history today as viewing the world from the vantage point of the Moon, as one scholar put it. We agree. But we also want to take a close-up view, analyzing and reconstructing the significant experiences of all of humanity.
This is not to say that everything that has happened everywhere and in all time periods can be recovered or is worth knowing, but that there is much to be gained by considering both the separate and interrelated stories of different societies and cultures. Making these connections is still another crucial ingredient of the “new” world history. It emphasizes connectedness and interactions of all kinds—cultural, economic, political, religious, and social—involving peoples, places, and processes. It makes comparisons and finds similarities. Emphasizing both the comparisons and interactions is critical to developing a global framework that can deepen and broaden historical understanding, whether the focus is on a specific country or region or on the whole world.
The rise of the new world history as a discipline comes at an opportune time. The interest in world history in schools and among the general public is vast. We travel to one another’s nations, converse and work with people around the world, and are changed by global events. War and peace affect populations worldwide as do economic conditions and the state of our environment, communications, and health and medicine.
The New Oxford World History presents local histories in a global context and gives an overview of world events seen through the eyes of ordinary people. This combination of the local and the global further defines the new world history. Understanding the workings of global and local conditions in the past gives us tools for examining our own world and for envisioning the interconnected future that is in the making.
Bonnie G. Smith Anand Yang
China Looks West
From the time Eurasians started using polished stone tools to plant
and harvest crops and to keep domesticated animals, they began to
split into two distinct societies divided by the Tianshan, Altai, and Caucasus mountain ranges. To the fertile south, people became farmers. But on the Eurasian steppe, people continued to herd livestock such as cattle, sheep, and horses. Their herds fed in the cool mountains in summer, where the grass was lush, and were shepherded in winter to warmer valleys and plains. Each group of nomads grazed its animals according to a fixed annual pattern. However, climate changes and political conflicts with other nomads or with agricultural societies to the south often forced nomads out of their normal rounds. The movements of nomadic populations and their livestock continually threatened the settled lives of farmers, whose crops could be quickly destroyed by herds. Sometimes these displaced people and their herds moved westward in search of more fertile grasslands in western Asia and eastern Europe.
Some time around 600 BcE, horseback riding had begun to spread on the Eurasian steppe, and by the 400s BcE, nomads on the north border of the agricultural zone had learned to combine horsemanship with archery to become masters of the horse as a military machine. It is about this time, when these cavalries emerged, that our story of organized trade and communication along the steppe thoroughfares begins, for it was nomads on the Central Asian steppe who brought West and East together.
In the fifth century BCE, seven agricultural states in what is now eastern China were fighting each other for supremacy. In addition to fighting with each other, three northern states, the Qin, Zhao, and Yan, also had to cope with frequent incursions of nomadic cavalry.
Nomads from the steppe raided villages and towns, looting millet and wheat, the major grains of north China, and silks, which were common in China but considered rare and precious among nomads on the western steppe. Sericulture, the process of raising silk worms and extracting silk yarn, had appeared in China in the third millennium BCE; Zhou Dynasty folk songs of the early first millennium BcE frequently refer to silk weaving and textiles.
The mounted archers of the steppe had the advantage of speed and surprise. In an effort to defend themselves, the three northern states built walls along the mountain ranges to divide the agricultural and pastoral zones. Realizing the advantage of the nomads’ tactics and horsemanship, the state of Zhao, under King Wuling, reformed its army in the fourth century BCE. His troops began to master the bow and arrow and began to dress in trousers and tight-sleeved robes as the nomads did. The members of his court heaped criticism on these reforms, since they considered the nomads “barbarians” and unworthy of any emulation. Prince Cheng, the king’s uncle and an important courtier, advised:
wise and intelligent people reside and all material wealth gathers here; sages and saints teach here, good morals dominate here, poetry, prose, rituals, and music are practiced here, and efficient technological inventions are tested here. People of faraway countries admire and learn from here, barbarians emulate the ways things
are done here. Now your majesty is giving up our high standards to follow the clothing style of outsiders, thereby changing the teachings of our ancestors and the ancient ways. This will upset your people and make scholars angry, as it deviates from the values of the Middle Kingdom [China]. Your majesty’s subject wishes you to reconsider your decision.
Nevertheless, the Zhao state’s adoption of its enemies’ military practices continued and improved its defenses.* Once the superiority of nomadic tactics and weaponry to the traditional horse and chariots and infantry was demonstrated, other northern Chinese states followed Zhao’s example.
Such reforms increased the need for horses. The agricultural societies did not have the knowledge or the pasture to produce good horses, especially military mounts. Only the vast grassland could breed large numbers of fast, hardy horses with great endurance. Obtaining such horses was not easy. During the third century BcE, the Yuezhi, who lived in a region relatively near China, northwest of its western borders, between the northern foothills of the eastern end of the Tianshan Mountains and the Turfan Depression, had emerged as a powerful confederacy on the steppe.
They maintained a friendly trading relationship with agricultural China. The minister and economist Guanzi (?-645 BCE) in his treatise on the economics of the Qi state argued that jade supplied by the Yuezhi should be the most highly valued currency of the state. “Our ancestor kings attributed the highest value to jade, as it came from a long distance. Gold is the second, and copper currency is the third.”?
From antiquity, Chinese societies of the Yellow River Valley and the Yangzi River Valley had treasured jade more than gold. Most of the jade items found in their rulers’ tombs were made of materials from Khotan, an oasis on the southern edge of the Takla Makan Desert in modern Xinjiang. The Yuezhi had been middlemen between China and Central Asia in ancient times. During the Warring States period, when the northern Chinese desperately needed good horses to supply their cavalries, they naturally turned to the Yuezhi.
East of the Yuezhi territory, on the Mongolian grassland, lived the Xiongnu, another powerful nomadic confederacy. Unlike the Yuezhi, they were in constant conflict with nearby Chinese states. When the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, indeed the first emperor of China, Shihuangdi—which means simply “first emperor”—united the seven warring states and established the Qin Empire in 221 BcE, the Xiongnu were the foremost threat to his imperial power. The Qin, and later Han, rulers sent large quantities of silk textiles and floss (a silk padding used to make quilted cloth for the cold winter on the steppe) to appease the nomads or to trade for horses.
Some of the silks were government-made products for presentation to the Xiongnu nobles, but many more were plain silk textiles produced by farm women. Silk textiles were used to line fur coats, and silk floss was used to pad quilted cloths. The quilted cloth was not only warm but also extremely light, and it was used not only for bedding but was also made into jackets and trousers. Such exquisite silk garments made the chieftains on the steppe look much more elegant than their followers. In this early international commerce, it was largely the ruling elites, whether nomadic or sedentary, and their demand for exotic goods from foreign lands, not the urge to market their own products, that motivated the trade.
Only rare and luxurious goods from far away could mark the difference between the ruling elite and their subjects. The principal reason the chief of the Xiongnu nomads distributed Han silk robes was to demonstrate the political hierarchy of his confederacy and maintain the loyalty of his most important followers. Silk became the symbol of power and prestige on the steppe.
In addition to silk diplomacy, the Qin emperor fended off the constant Xiongnu raids by linking the walls previously built by different states to form the Great Wall, which ran all along the border between agricultural China and the steppe. To build the wall, he used peasants and convicts. Where there were gates in the wall, markets formed where farmers and herdsmen exchanged their products. Among the nomads who came to trade, one chief of the Yuezhi, whose surname was Luo, made a fortune selling good horses to the Chinese. The horses of the Tianshan foothills were taller and stronger than those of the Xiongnu, and Luo sold many of them to Shihuangdi for silks, which he then sold to other chiefs on the steppe.
The chiefs paid him, according to the historian Sima Qian of the second century BCE, “ten times his original investment with their livestock.” This wealth probably made the nomad Luo not only rich but also powerful among his followers. “The first emperor of the Qin showed his appreciation by granting Luo a position of the same rank as the highest ministers in the court,” according to Sima Qian.* The Yuezhi became the great ally of the Qin Empire by supplying them with crucial military mounts.
The Qin Dynasty (221-207 BceE) ruled with strict and cruel laws and exhausted its people with many large projects, including the Great Wall, which caused unrest in the country. It was soon replaced by the Han Dynasty (206 BcE-220 cE), whose rulers also faced a persistent threat from the Xiongnu on its northern borders. The early Han Empire had just emerged from a devastating civil war, which had ended the Qin Dynasty, and was in a completely defensive position. The Xiongnu once surrounded the Han’s founding emperor, Gaozu, on the northern frontier of the empire and almost took him prisoner. Many lands were laid waste, and horses were in short supply. Even ministers lacked horses and had to ride on bull carts in royal processions, and the emperor could not afford the full majestic chariot of four horses.
Gaozu and the next few emperors resorted to diplomacy to appease the Xiongnu. They sent princesses of the Han court, some genuine, some not, to the shanyu (chief) of the Xiongnu, to become his brides. The Han court hoped that in the future the shanyu might be the son of a Han princess, and friendlier toward the Chinese. The princesses brought with them large dowries, mostly silks and food grains, and the Xiongnu chiefs in turn presented horses as gifts to their new fathersin-law. We do not know whether there ever was a shanyu at this time whose mother was a Han princess. Even if there had been one, it is hard to imagine that he would have improved the nomads’ attitude toward the Chinese. But the exchange of gifts, including Chinese royal brides, ensured periodic peace and trade around the gates of the Great Wall.
After more than sixty years of recovery, the Han Empire gained enough strength to stop sending its princesses to the nomads, ending what the founding emperors had regarded as a humiliating practice. But the concept remained as a diplomatic tool. A century later, when the Xiongnu confederacy had split into northern and southern factions, the shanyu of the Southern Xiongnu, Huhanxie, asked for the hand of a Han princess by way of making a Han alliance against the northerners.
The Han emperor, Yuandi, took this opportunity to make peace with the southern Xiongnu and enjoined his courtiers to select a beauty from his outer harem, the residence of the many beautiful girls sent to the court from various parts of the empire to wait for their chance to be chosen by the emperor as the favorite one. Most women spent their whole lives there without ever seeing the emperor. The “lucky” ones might “accompany the emperor to his tomb.” The beautiful and accomplished Wang Zhaojun, because of her hopeless and bleak existence there, volunteered for the harsh life on the steppe. Yuandi, seeing her for the first time on the day of the ceremony at which she was presented to Huhanxie, was stunned by her great beauty and wanted to keep her in his palace. Nevertheless, the marriage alliance was deemed too strategically important to be called off and proceeded as planned.
It turned out to be quite beneficial for both sides. The presence of Wang Zhaojun at the Xiongnu court ensured frequent exchanges of gifts and greetings between the steppe and the Han Empire. She gave birth to several princes and princesses who were inclined toward friendship with the Han. Despite difficulties caused by domestic problems on both sides, a peaceful relationship between the two regimes lasted for several decades. Zhaojun missed her native Chinese culture, especially because she was a talented musician accustomed to the elegance of the Han court.
In remembrance of her bravery and dedication, the Chinese people named several places after her and built temples in her honor to mark her route into the steppe. Many folk stories, paintings, musical works, and dramas have depicted her beauty, her musical talent, her sorrow about leaving her homeland, and her loneliness living in a foreign land. The story of Wang Zhaojun became one of the most popular themes of literature and art along the Silk Road.
She was only one of the Han princesses who married nomad chiefs and carried dowries of Chinese culture to the steppe. While such intermarriages brought temporary periods of peace on the border, the nomads and the Chinese continued to war and trade for many centuries, in spite of the rise and fall of various powers on the steppe and of different regimes in agricultural China.
A capable Chinese emperor, Wudi, took the offensive against the Xiongnu soon after he ascended the throne in 140 BcE. He sent military expeditions to the steppe and captured numerous herds of horses and sheep, while pushing the nomads away from the Chinese borders. However, the Xiongnu, as a migratory people, never considered a retreat a defeat, and they never intended to conquer and rule the agricultural lands. They continued to loot Chinese villages and towns. The emperor Waudi still desperately needed allies among nomadic warriors to ensure peace along the borders of his empire.
When news of conflict between the Yuezhi and the Xiongnu reached the Han court early in the reign of Wudi, he decided to send an envoy westward to the Yuezhi, hoping to make an alliance with them against the Xiongnu. No dignitary was willing to undertake the dangerous journey into this region unknown to the Chinese, but a petty official named Zhang Qian answered the call. He set off for the west with a hundred followers, including a native of the steppe, Ganfu. The only known route to the west passed through the territory of the Xiongnu, who detained Zhang Qian and his men. He had no choice but to stay with the Xiongnu imperial camp, a delay that cost him a decade. He spent ten years moving with them on the steppe, during which time he married a Xiongnu woman and fathered her children.
Nevertheless, he kept the emblem of his office as envoy of the Han emperor throughout his captivity and eventually managed to escape the Xiongnu camp and reach the territory of Dawan (modern Ferghana in Uzbekistan). The king of Dawan escorted him south to Kangju, or Sogdiana, also in modern Uzbekistan, and from there he reached the court of the Yuezhi on the bank of the Oxus River in 129 BCE.
Around 130 BcE, the Xiongnu had defeated the Yuezhi, traditional allies of the Chinese. The number of horseback-riding archers a confederacy could muster was the measure of its strength, and the Xiongnu confederacy could claim about 300,000 cavalrymen, the entire adult male population.’ In triumph, the chief of the Xiongnu had killed the leader of the Yuezhi and had his skull made into a drinking vessel, a symbol of victory on the steppe. The Yuezhi, defeated and humiliated, left their homeland in what is now Xinjiang Province and migrated across the pastures north of the Tianshan range all the way to Bactria. Along the way, some branches of the Yuezhi left the main group and settled at the eastern end of the Tianshan range.
Another group also splintered off and stayed along the route through Ferghana in present-day Uzbekistan. The main contingent, however, with a military strength of 100,000-200,000 horse archers, arrived at the north bank of the Amu Darya, as it is known today (the Greeks had called this river the Oxus). Some two hundred years earlier, this area had been a Greek colony established during the eastern expedition of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, and the Greeks had called it Bactria. Stretching from what today is the northern part of Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, Bactria was a fertile agricultural land, dotted with Hellenistic cities.
When Zhang Qian arrived, the Yuezhi chief, with his father’s killing at the hands of the Xiongnu fresh in his mind, had no interest in a military alliance with the Han against them. He was happily settled in Bactria and had no wish to go back to the steppe to face the Xiongnu again. Although Zhang Qian spent more than a year in the Yuezhi court, he was unable to persuade their chief to change his mind. On his way back to China, Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu again. However, this time he managed to get away from them much sooner; just a year later, the death of the shanyu and the civil war that followed provided him with an opportunity to escape. He returned with his Xiongnu wife and children and the loyal Ganfu to the Han court in the city of Chang’an.°®
Zhang Qian reported all the details of his thirteen-year journey to the “Western Regions” to the emperor Wudi. His original reports no longer exist, but both Sima Qian’s History and the official History of the Han preserve large portions of it. Although Zhang Qian failed to carry out his political mission, his report opened the eyes of the emperor and his courtiers. Prior to Zhang Qian’s journey, the so-called Western Regions had been little more than a mythic land mentioned in ancient Chinese legends. Having spent eleven years following the movement of the Xiongnu camp, Zhang Qian had not only became familiar with the mountains, deserts, and routes of the steppe but also learned much about the customs and political structure of the Xiongnu and other nomadic peoples.
Virtually all knowledge about these early nomads on the eastern steppe comes from Zhang Qian’s report. Excavations of tombs presumably belonging to Xiongnu chiefs of this period in Mongolia have revealed information largely in agreement with his observations about these nomads’ lives. In addition to the information he provides regarding other nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies in Central Asia, he tells about the Parthians who lived on the Iranian Plateau.
This people, whose country he called Anxi, made exquisite silver coins engraved with the face of their king, a novel practice to Chinese emperors. Zhang Qian also refers vaguely to countries further west, including those on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, one of which he calls Tiaozhi, probably a transliteration of Antioch. His report also contains information about the migrations of the Yuezhi, who were willing to resume contacts with the Han court.
During his stay in Bactria, Zhang Qian had noticed that a specific kind of bamboo and cloth from southwest China’s Shu region was selling well in the markets of Bactria. This bit of information was very interesting to him and the Han court. When he asked the Bactrian traders where they had acquired these goods, they answered: India.’ He did not go to India himself, but he gives a fairly accurate account of it, including its tropical climate and its use of war elephants.
Presumably, he had gathered this information in Bactrian marketplaces. His report about all the exotic goods he had seen, such as the large, beautiful horses of Central Asia and glassware from even further west, and the existence of international trade goods made in a southwestern region of China, impressed the emperor Wudi very much. But the only known routes to these luxuries lay through the steppe, still under Xiongnu control.
Zhang Qian had been very lucky to escape twice from Xiongnu captivity, and he was not anxious to enter their territory again. On the basis of the bamboo and cloth he had seen in Bactria, he thought that there must be an alternate route to the west. If those southwestern Chinese goods had reached Bactria from India, there had to be a more direct route connecting India and China.
He suggested to Wudi that he send expeditions to explore other ways to get to India that circumvented the Xiongnu. Wudi took his advice and did so, but without success. In order to get from Sichuan to India, the only possible land route was to cut through the mountainous regions of Yunnan, which was then outside the bounds of China. People living in that area saw no benefit to themselves from any encroachment of Han trade routes into their territory. They resisted or killed any intruders. As a result, dangerous though it might be, the steppe route remained the most viable thoroughfare to Central Asia and parts further west.
Meanwhile, the Han campaign against the Xiongnu outside the Great Wall continued. After several successful military expeditions sent onto the steppe by Wudi, the Xiongnu were no longer a direct threat to the farmers along the north borders of China. The interests of both sides shifted to trade and protecting trade routes. To secure China’s access to the routes to the Western Regions, Wudi had to protect the long corridor between part of the Tibetan plateau and the Mongolian desert from Xiongnu raids. Wudi had the Great Wall extended northwestward all Zhang Jun, a cavalry commander for the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 cE), was buried with this chariot, along with an array of sculptures of mounted soldiers, in Wuwei, China. The chariot symbolized Zhang Jun’s status in life. Cavalry presence increased in Han military forces during their prolonged war with the Xiongnu along the Great Wall and on the steppe. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
the way to the Gate of Jade (Yumen), the westernmost garrison town, near Dunhuang. He then set up a system of garrisons all along this part of the Great Wall and put its headquarters in a town called Anxi (“Tranquil West”).
This relatively safe route drew many foreign merchants to the gates of the Great Wall. More and more exotic goods—Roman glassware, Indian cotton textiles, spices and fragrances, gemstones, and woolen textiles of various origins—arrived in the capital city of Chang’an via the Gate of Jade. In addition to the goods, information on foreign climates, foods, clothing, and currencies came over this route, and Chinese historians began to accumulate details about places as far away as South Asia and the Mediterranean.
Chinese rulers also started to realize the international value of silk textiles, which were so common at home that every farming household paid a tax to the Han government in grain and silk cloth. Men tilled the land and women raised mulberry trees, using the leaves to feed silk worms. They extracted silk fiber from the cocoons, spun silk yarn, and wove silk textiles. Exquisite textiles such as brocade, tapestry, and embroidered silk cloth, which demanded complicated looms, high technical skill, and a sophisticated division of labor, were mainly the products of large workshops under government control.
The trade in silk with the nomads spread the fame of these Chinese textiles beyond the steppe. In Zhang Qian’s later career as ambassador to the Wusun, a nomadic group roaming to the west of the Xiongnu, he and his three hundred envoys with six hundred horses carried “tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, gold and silk worth millions” to ensure an alliance.* Since most societies knew how to make textiles only from animal fur or plants, the idea of producing silk cloth from a worm seemed miraculous to them. With the migration of the Yuezhi to Bactria, the unique cloth naturally followed them westward. Although military conflicts among the Xiongnu, the Yuezhi, and the Han Empire sometimes disrupted transportation, they also contributed to the demand for certain trade goods on this route, which soon became one of the major communication and transportation arteries of Eurasia that, taken together, came to be known in modern times as the Silk Road. The Silk Road was a system of commercial routes, on both land and sea, that linked various peoples from China to the Mediterranean.
New communities of traders settled along these routes to meet the demand for luxury goods at either end of this route system. The merchants often organized themselves into caravans—trading teams that carried goods on pack animals or carts. To host the caravans, beginning around the early first century BcE during the reign of the Han emperor Wudi, caravan cities started to form along the trunk routes of the Silk Road. Since the Han court took great interest in the goods coming from the west, guaranteeing their safety was high on the agenda of this powerful emperor.
Traveling along the steppe routes on horseback was fast but not safe, as Zhang Qian had learned by being twice detained by the Xiongnu. As mentioned, during the early Han Dynasty’s offensive campaigns against the Xiongnu, Wudi had extended the Great Wall as far as the Gate of Jade in order to protect a newly established trade route, the Hexi Corridor (through modern Gansu Province). Literally “the corridor departing from the west bank of the Yellow River,” this long strip of relatively flat land was flanked by the Qilian Mountains on its southern side and the Mongolian deserts along its northern side.
Wherever water flowed down from the mountaintops, oases had formed between the mountains and the sandy bottom of Talim Basin, and it was possible to grow crops in these scattered locations. However, since the oases were surrounded by sandy deserts, maintaining a sustainable agriculture required a constant struggle against threatening sand dunes. To stabilize the dunes and maintain irrigation channels would require a large investment of time and resources in planting vegetation.
Routes passing through deserts and oases are better suited for camels than for horses. The Hexi Corridor was one of the domains of Central Asia’s domesticated two-humped camel (also known as the Bactrian camel to distinguish it from the one-humped Arabian camel). The camels’ humps store fat that helps them survive travel through the harsh deserts, and the thick pads under their hooves enable them to tread on loose sand smoothly and steadily. The two-humped camels are much larger animals and walk more slowly than horses, but in arid regions they can endure much harsher conditions than horses can, and they can go without water and good pasture for much longer.
The extension of the Great Wall to this area also meant that this far-off border of the empire needed to be defended, but supplying these areas was expensive. In order to defend the new frontier efficiently and economically, the Han government established a new method of combining military garrisons with agricultural settlements. Soldiers went to the frontier along with their families, with agricultural equipment supplied by the government. The men and their families cultivated the land and maintained irrigation on the oases whenever there was no direct threat from north of the Great Wall. From around 100 Bcg, when the Han government started to implement the policy, the population of the oases increased steadily.
During the Han Dynasty, the first landmark for Chinese traders traveling westward was the Great Wall. At various places along it, watchtowers were built into it where Han soldiers who defended the frontier spent long nights and stored their belongings. Before the invention of paper, officers and soldiers kept documents about public business and wrote letters to their families on wooden slips. The thousands of wooden slips and tablets covered with Chinese characters that were left in the towers provide firsthand records of frontier life. However, it is not easy to get information from these wooden slips and tablets. A document or letter was created on a “page” made up of narrow wooden slips tied together with string. Then one or more pages could be rolled up and tied in a bundle. All one had to do to read the pages was to untie the outside string and unroll the slips. However, two millennia later, when archaeologists found these documents and letters, the strings that had bound the slips had completely disintegrated, and the slips and the tablets had become intermingled, forming many complex puzzles. Researchers have had to rearrange the slips and tablets in sequence to restore the documents.
The wooden tablets and books kept in the watchtowers had practical purposes. They have turned out to be records of commercial and legal transactions, including payrolls of soldiers, simple contracts, passports for travelers, official reports, and military orders, as well as family letters. Though many of the documents are fragmentary, they provide a glimpse of the frontier life of that era. For instance, the military payrolls tell us that soldiers were paid in bundles of plain silk textiles, which circulated as currency during Han times. Soldiers may well have traded their silk with the nomads who came to the gates of the Great Wall to sell horses and furs. Passports were issued to officials who traveled on public business and to private travelers, traders, and farmers who pursued their business inside and outside the Wall. These passports tell us that both official and private traders went to the frontier to buy horses.
Other information from the wooden slips has revealed that the soldiers assigned to a watchtower formed a combined military and farming unit. The head of the watchtower assigned a wide variety of jobs, including cooking, digging and repairing well-canals (an irrigation system including wells connected by underground canals), raising vegetables, cultivating crops, repairing tools, and herding stock to the soldiers, in addition to their duties as guards of the frontier. Officers and soldiers had to go through training to fulfill all these duties; they were also subject to regular inspections. A letter a petty officer wrote and left in a watchtower at Juyan, a gate of the Great Wall, reveals the affection he had for his beloved wife and his sense of duty as a frontier officer: “Yousun, my dear wife, your life is really hard....I hope you have enough food and clothing. If this is true, I feel happy at the frontier. Only because of the support of Yousun, Xuan can serve at the frontier faithfully, and have no need to worry about home.”? The style of the writing and the calligraphy is poor, and there are many errors in the letter, but the feeling transcends these shortcomings.
Even in the oases west of the Gate of Jade—that is, west of the western end of the Han Dynasty’s Great Wall—wooden tablets, inscribed in the Chinese language and in Chinese characters, sometimes were used as a media for diplomacy. In a wooden tablet that was part of a letter written in Chinese, found at a site on the southern edge of the Takla Makan Desert, the king of Dawan is helping the Yuezhi communicate with the Han emperor.'° The Yuezhi either did not have a written language or had already adopted a local written language that was unintelligible to the Chinese. In order to address the Han ruler, they had to rely on the good services of the king of Dawan, who somehow had acquired a staff member in his court who could write in Chinese.
Chinese had become a language of crosscultural communication even outside the Great Wall because Chinese military frontier settlements, such as the ones in the Hexi Corridor, had been extended into areas outside the Gate of Jade. From the very name of the gate, one can guess that westward routes led from it to an actual source of jade: the Khotan region on the southern edge of the Takla Makan Desert. Although the jade trade through the Takla Makan Desert began in antiquity, long before the Qin and Han dynasties, the oasis settlements were still very small during the first century BCE. Without an efficient irrigation system, an oasis often could support only a few hundred households. The introduction of new Chinese agricultural technology and irrigation systems helped to increase the population of the oases all around the Takla Makan Basin. The number of households in small oases doubled or tripled, and those in large oases, such as Khotan, increased to many times their original number in about a century."! Improvements in agriculture and these population increases enabled the oases to support more commercial traffic through the Western Regions (as the Chinese referred to Central Asia in general by this time). The larger the settlements were, the more food and fodder they could produce to supply the caravan traders and camels. In return, the caravan trade passing through these areas meant profits for their hosts. The oases became caravan cities, depending on the Silk Road trade for their prosperity.
During the chaotic period of dynastic transition from the Former Han to the Later Han, around the beginning of the Common Era, trade with the Western Regions suffered, whereas agriculture continued to thrive. Oasis states continued to grow and learned to contend with the harassments of the Xiongnu and other nomads. At the same time, the new oasis states fought for dominance. Tensions among the oases could also make the trade routes unsafe. The demand for western goods in the Han cities and an authority capable of maintaining order were necessary for the survival of the Central Asian trade. Eventually, the Han court resumed its control over the trade routes with the West in the midfirst century CE and sent several military missions to recover control of the parts of the Western Regions closest to China.
The Later Han Empire was a much weaker state than the Former Han and could only afford to send a limited military force into this remote area. Even that proved too costly for Emperor Zhangdi, who was ready to give up the region in 76 CE and ordered all military commanders to return to China from the Central Asian frontier. One of these generals, Ban Chao, remained there, however, with only a few hundred soldiers under his command, at the request of chiefs and people in oases such as Kashgar and Khotan, after obtaining the permission of the emperor. A capable military commander thoroughly familiar with local customs and languages, Ban Chao managed to maintain peace in the Western Regions; he protected the trade routes for more than three decades. His military achievements relied heavily on the cooperation of traders on the Silk Road. After his retirement from the Western Regions, his son, Ban Yong, who had grown up there, succeeded to the position of governor and continued to maintain Han control until the 120s ce. Although Han protection and authority weakened in the Western Regions after Ban Yong’s tenure, the oasis states matured into stable, independent caravan cities. With reliable agricultural resources, they looked to caravans for their prosperity and developed into beautiful urban centers. Most of them remained hubs of commercial and cultural activities for many centuries.
Due to the arid climate of the Central Asian oases, many of the silk textiles made in China, in addition to some locally made ones, have survived in local burials there. Some of these samples are dated to the Han times; they range from lightweight tabby and gauze, some plain and some printed, to medium-textured fabrics—such as damask, in which the patterns are formed not by adding different colors but by weaving raised patterns over the material with the same color—and to the heaviest textiles, which included brocades, sometimes with raised designs of varied colors and sometimes with embroidery. The Han law code prohibited commoners, including traders, from wearing brocade and embroidered silks because the fabrics symbolized the wearer’s status within the government and their production involved the greatest technology and skill. The looms during Han times were small, less than half a meter wide. To make polychrome brocade, the weaver arranged threads of various colors on the loom for the warp and then used the shuttle to weave in a weft of a single color. The patterns were sophisticated, but the pieces were small. The most common patterns on Han brocade were flowing clouds and motifs of animals such as geese, deer, and tigers. Chinese characters with auspicious meanings, such as longevity and prosperity, were often part of these designs. The rich religious and cultural textile remains of these caravan cities inspired many nineteenth-century European archaeologists and adventurers to explore these ancient trade routes, which they were the first to call “the Silk Road.”
While Wudi was busy extending the Han Empire to the Western Regions, the Yuezhi moved their headquarters across the Oxus River and into what is now Afghanistan. The Kushan, one of the five tribes that formed the Yuezhi confederacy, unified all five to establish the Kushan kingdom. Chinese historical records refer to the Great Yuezhi as a country on a highland north of India where “the king calls himself ‘Son of the Heaven.’ The cavalry of the state is more than a hundred thousand in strength. The layout of the city and architecture are similar to that of the Romans.”!” In addition to Chinese texts, archaeological remains, including a treasury discovered in Begram, an ancient Kushan site, Kapisi, in Afghanistan, reveal an outline of this society. The Kushan kingdom established in this Hellenized region was a powerful and prosperous state. Its Greek architecture, complete with Corinthian columns, survived for many centuries; several hundred thousand beautiful horses roamed its pastures; and its people were skilled horse archers.
When the Yuezhi became rulers of agricultural societies on the Indian subcontinent during the first century cE, they also helped to further the fame of Chinese silk. In the Kushan kingdom, the former nomads, especially the rulers, were very well dressed, most likely in Chinese silk textiles. The many burial goods from six excavated tombs of Kushan princes in modern Afghanistan include more than 20,000 gold vessels, plates, and buckles, small remnants of decorative clothing, and other treasures, such as a bronze mirror from China and ivory carvings from India. The clothing began to disintegrate long ago, but it is possible to discern the style from the surviving gold buckles and decorative pieces sewn along the hems and seams, whose positions reveal the cut of the garments.'? The Kushan princes and princesses wore knee-length robes and trousers in the steppe style, an indication that they continued to be an equestrian people, even after the Kushan became rulers of a sedentary society. The horse remained important in their rituals and ceremonies. While the cavalry remained the major military force for territorial expansion, horseback riding for the kings and princes living in the palaces was a symbol of royalty, just as it was in contemporary Han China.
Of all the foreign commodities brought to the gates of the Great Wall, the handsome horses from the western part of the Central Asian steppe were the goods most desired by the Han court. After several hundred years of interactions with nomads, sedentary rulers not only had come to understand the advantage of cavalry in warfare but also had started to appreciate equestrian culture as an imperial style. By the first century cE, horses had acquired great significance in parades of power.
The horse-drawn chariot, an outmoded form in warfare, had become the moving throne of rulers, human and divine. Only gods and kings were shown riding in chariots when hunting or fighting. In the royal tombs of the Han time, figurines of cavalry outnumber those of infantry. The Han emperor Wudi craved the spectacularly beautiful horses in the westernmost part of the Western Regions. A breed known as “blood-sweating horses,” which according to legend had been interbred with heavenly horses, came from Dawan. In addition to their breeding, the horses also benefited from the mild climate and high grasses of the Central Asian steppe, which was friendlier to livestock than the Mongolian steppe. Central Asians had also learned to feed horses with alfalfa, a very nutritious species of grass.
Wudi first tried to obtain these superior horses by sending out an envoy who offered to buy them with large quantities of gold and silk. However, the king of Dawan was not just unwilling to trade horses, which he considered the special treasure of the state—he killed the Han envoy! In response to this insult, a military expedition headed by General Li Guangli set off to conquer Dawan in 104 scr. His army experienced great difficulties crossing the deserts and steppes and had many casualties during its first attempt.
The emperor, nevertheless, was determined to own the so-called heavenly horses. When Li’s expeditionary forces retreated to the Great Wall, Wudi had Li stopped at the Gate of Jade and ordered the guards to kill any soldier who tried to come through. Li turned his army around, went back to Uzbekistan, eventually killed the king of Dawan, and brought back 3,000 heavenly horses.'* Such heavenly horses thereafter became the royal symbol of the Han Empire. Even today, in the vicinity of the city of Xi’an—the modern site of the Han capital, Chang’an—next to the monumental tomb of the emperor Wudi a large, muscular stone horse triumphantly tramples a defeated Xiongnu.
The heavenly horses came from a country rich in not only horses and alfalfa but also grapes and wine. Remains of Hellenistic garrison towns in Uzbekistan suggest that the people of Dawan had learned to raise grapes and make wine. Wealthy households stored more than 10,000 jars of grape wine apiece. In the first century cE, Ban Gu, the compiler of the Official History of the Former Han Dynasty, wrote: “The Son of Heaven [the Han emperor] knew there were many heavenly horses and many foreign visitors and thus had alfalfa and grapes planted in various palaces and villas on large plots of land.” '° In Han China, grapes and alfalfa graced palaces and public places and became very popular plants, but there is no evidence of grape wine consumption during this period.
For the Han elite, the exquisite products from the West inspired a curiosity about and admiration for the Roman Empire. On the site of Loulan at the northeast edge of the Takla Makan Desert, in the same place where many Han silk textiles were excavated, archaeologists found a fragment of a woolen tapestry showing half of a man’s face that is strikingly Roman in artistic style and physical features. This kind of artwork was probably the sort of woolen textile the Han elites desired, including both the royal family and the literati-officials. General Ban Chao sent an envoy to the Romans to learn about this rich and large empire at the other end of the trade routes. This envoy, Gan Ying, traveled all the way to the coast of the “West Sea”—possibly the Persian Gulf—but failed to reach Rome.
When he reached the port city he called “Tiaozhi,” which was under the control of the Parthians, a powerful dynasty based in Iran, local people told him that the sea voyage from there to Rome was far too dangerous and would require several more years to accomplish, and he was persuaded to give up the trip. In the lands between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, agents of both the Romans and Parthians profited from the trade that moved along the Silk Road. These merchants included those who plied the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, and those who traveled overland from oasis to oasis. They had the most to lose from any direct Chinese contact with Rome, and presumably they were eager to discourage such ties.
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