THE SILK ROAD
The Greatest Years
The height of the importance of the Silk Road was during the Tang dynasty, with relative internal stability in China after the divisions of the earlier dynasties since the Han. The individual states has mostly been assimilated, and the threats from marauding peoples was rather less.
During this period, in the seventh century, the Chinese traveller Xuan Zhuang crossed the region on his way to obtain Buddhist scriptures from India. He followed the northern branch round the Taklimakan on his outward journey, and the southern route on his return; he carefully recorded the cultures and styles of Buddhism along the way. On his return to the Tang capital at Changan, he was permitted to build the `Great Goose Pagoda’ in the southern half of the city, to house the more than 600 scriptures that he had brought back from India. He is still seen by the Chinese as an important influence in the development of Buddhism in China, and his travels were dramatised by in the popular classic `Tales of a Journey to the West’.
The art and civilisation of the Silk Road achieved its highest point in the Tang Dynasty. Changan, as the starting point of the route, as well as the capital of the dynasty, developed into one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities of the time. By 742 A.D., the population had reached almost two million, and the city itself covered almost the same area as present-day Xian, considerably more than within the present walls of the city. The 754 A.D. census showed that five thousand foreigners lived in the city; Turks, Iranians, Indians and others from along the Road, as well as Japanese, Koreans and Malays from the east. Many were missionaries, merchants or pilgrims, but every other occupation was also represented. Rare plants, medicines, spices and other goods from the west were to be found in the bazaars of the city. It is quite clear, however, despite the exotic imports, that the Chinese regarded all foreigners as barbarians; the gifts provided for the Emperors by foreign rulers were simply considered as tribute from vassal states.
After the Tang, however, the traffic along the road subsided, along with the grotto building and art of the period. The Five Dynasties period did not maintain the internal stability of the Tang dynasty, and again neighbouring states started to plunder the caravans. China was partially unified again in the Song dynasty, but the Silk Road was not as important as it had been in the Tang.
From the point of view of those in the far west, China was still an unknown territory, and silk production was not understood. Since the days of Alexander the Great, there had been some knowledge of India, but there was no real knowledge of, or contact with, the `Seres’ until about the 7th century, when information started to filter along the Road. It was at this time that the rise of Islam started to affect Asia, and a curtain came down between the east and west. Trade relations soon resumed, however, with the Moslems playing the part of middlemen. The sea route to China was explored at this time, and the `Sea Silk Route’ was opened, eventually holding a more important place than the land route itself, as the land route became less profitable.
But the final shake-up that occurred was to come from a different direction; the hoards from the grasslands of Mongolia.
The Mongols
Trade along the route was adversely affected by the strife which built up between the Christian and Moslem worlds. The Crusades brought the Christian world a little nearer to Central Asia, but the unified Moslem armies under Saladin drove them back again. In the Fourth Crusade, the forces of Latin Christianity scored a triumph over their Greek rivals, with the capture of Constantinople (Istanbul). However, it was not the Christians who finally split the Moslem world, but the Mongols from the east. Whilst Europe and Western Asia were torn by religious differences, the Mongols had only the vaguest of religious beliefs. Several of the tribes of Turkestan which had launched offensives westwards towards Persia and Arabia, came to adopt Islam, and Islam had spread far across Central Asia, but had not reached as far as the tribes which wandered the vast grasslands of Mongolia. These nomadic peoples had perfected the arts of archery and horsemanship. With an eye to expanding their sphere of influence, they met in 1206 and elected a leader for their unified forces; he took the title Great Khan. Under the leadership of Genghis Khan, they rapidly proceeded to conquer a huge region of Asia. The former Han city of Jiaohe, to the west of Turfan, was decimated by the Mongols as they passed through on their way westwards. The Empire they carved out enveloped the whole of Central Asia from China to Persia, and stretched as far west as the Mediterranean. This Mongol empire was maintained after Genghis’ death, with the western section of the empire divided into three main lordships, falling to various of his descendents as lesser Khans, and with the eastern part remaining under the rule of the Great Khan, a title which was inherited from by Kublai Khan. Kubilai completed the conquest of China, subduing the Song in the South of the country, and established the Yuan dynasty.
The partial unification of so many states under the Mongol Empire allowed a significant interaction between cultures of different regions. The route of the Silk Road became important as a path for communication between different parts of the Empire, and trading was continued. Although less `civilised’ than people in the west, the Mongols were more open to ideas. Kubilai Khan, in particular, is reported to have been quite sympathetic to most religions, and a large number of people of different nationalities and creeds took part in the trade across Asia, and settled in China. The most popular religion in China at the time was Daoism, which at first the Mongols favoured. However, from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, buddhist influence increased, and the early lamaist Buddhism from Tibet was particularly favoured. The two religions existed side by side for a long period during the Yuan dynasty. This religious liberalism was extended to all; Christianity first made headway in China in this period, with the first Roman Catholic arch-bishopric set up in Beijing in 1307. The Nestorian church was quite widespread in China; Jews and Moslems also populated several of the major cities, though they do not seem to have made many converts.
It was at this time that Europeans first ventured towards the lands of the `Seres’. The earliest were probably Fransiscan friars who are reported to have visited the Mongolian city of Karakorum. The first Europeans to arrive at Kubilai’s court were Northern European traders, who arrived in 1261. However, the most well known and best documented visitor was the Italian Marco Polo. As a member of a merchant family from Venice, he was a good businessman and a keen observer. Starting in 1271, at the age of only seventeen, his travels with his father and uncle took him across Persia, and then along the southern branch of the Silk Road, via Khotan, finally ending at the court of Kubilai Khan at Khanbalik, the site of present-day Beijing, and the summer palace, better known as Xanadu. He travelled quite extensively in China, before returning to Italy by ship, via Sumatra and India to Hormuz and Constantinople.
He describes the way of life in the cities and small kingdoms through which his party passed, with particular interest on the trade and marriage customs. His classification of other races centre mainly on their religion, and he looks at things with the eyes of one brought up under the auspices of the Catholic Church; it is therefore not surprising that he has a great mistrust of the Moslems, but he seems to have viewed the `Idolaters’ (Buddhists and Hindus) with more tolerance. He judges towns and countryside in terms of productivity; he appears to be have been quick to observe available sources of food and water along the way, and to size up the products and manufacture techniques of the places they passed through. His description of exotic plants and beasts are sufficiently accurate to be quite easily recognizable, and better than most of the textbooks of the period. He seems to have shown little interest in the history of the regions he was passing through, however, and his reports of military campaigns are full of inaccuracies, though this might be due to other additions or misinformation.
The `Travels’ were not actually written by Marco Polo himself. After his return to the West in 1295, he was captured as a prisoner of war in Genoa, when serving in the Venetian forces. Whilst detained in prison for a year, he met Rustichello of Pisa, a relatively well-known romance writer and a fellow prisoner of war. Rustichello was obviously attracted to the possibilities of writing a romantic tale of adventure about Polo’s travels; it should be remembered that the book was written for entertainment rather than as a historic document. However, the collaboration between them, assuming that the story has not been embroidered excessively by Rustichello, gives an interesting picture of life along the Silk Road in the time of the Khans. Some of the tales are no doubt due to the romance-writing instincts of Rustichello, and some of those due to Polo are at best third-hand reports from people he met; however, much of the material can be verified against Chinese and Persian records. As a whole, the book captured public notice at the time, and added much to what was known of Asian geography, customs and natural history.
The Decline of the Route
However, the Mongolian Empire was to be fairly short-lived. Splits between the different khans had erupted as early as 1262. Although the East was considerably more stable, especially under the rule of Kubilai, it also succumbed to a resurgence of Chinese nationalism, and after several minor local rebellions in the first few decades of the fourteenth century, principally in the south of China, the Yuan dynasty was finally replaced by the Ming dynasty in 1368. With the disintegration of the Mongol empire, the revival of Islam and the isolationist policies of the Ming dynasty, the barriers rose again on the land route between East and West.
Despite the presence of the Mongols, trade along the Silk Road never reached the heights that it did in the Tang dynasty. The steady advance of Islam, temporarily halted by the Mongols, continued until it formed a major force across Central Asia, surrounding the Taklimakan like Buddhism had almost a millennium earlier. The artwork of the region suffered under the encroach of Islam. Whereas the Buddhist artists had concentrated on figures in painting and sculpture, the human form was scorned in Islamic artwork; this difference led to the destruction of much of the original artwork. Many of the grottos have been defaced in this way, particularly at the more accessible sites such as Bezeklik, near Turfan, where most of the human faces in the remaining frescoes have been scratched out.
The demise of the Silk Road also owes much to the development of the silk route by sea. It was becoming rather easier and safer to transport goods by water rather than overland. Ships had become stronger and more reliable , and the route passed promising new markets in Southern Asia. The overland problems of `tribal politics’ between the different peoples along the route, and the presence of middlemen, all taking their cut on the goods, prompted this move. The sea route, however, suffered from the additional problems of bad weather and pirates. In the early fifteenth century, the Chinese seafarer Zhang He commanded seven major maritime expeditions to Southeast Asia and India, and as far as Arabia and the east coast of Africa. Diplomatic relations were built up with several countries along the route, and this increase the volume of trade Chinese merchants brought to the area. In the end, the choice of route depended very much upon the political climate of the time.
The encroach of the deserts into the inhabited land made life on the edges of the Taklimakan and Gobi Deserts particularly difficult. Any settlement abandoned for a while was swallowed by the desert, and so resettlement became increasingly difficult. These conditions were only suitable in times of peace, when effort could be spent countering this advance, and maintaining water sources.
The attitude of the later Chinese dynasties was the final blow to the trade route. The isolationist policies of the Ming dynasties did nothing to encourage trade between China and the rapidly developing West. This attitude was maintained throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, and only started to change after the Western powers began making inroads into China in the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, the Qing dynasty subdued the Dzungar people, however, and annexed the whole Taklimakan region, forming the basis of present-day Xinjiang province. This restored China to the state it had been in in the Han dynasty, with full control of the western regions, but also including the territories and Tibet and Mongolia.
However, as trade with the West subsided, so did the traffic along the Road, and all but the best watered oases survived. The grottos and other religious sites were long since neglected, now that the local peoples had espoused a new religion, and the old towns and sites were buried deeper beneath the sands.
Foreign Influence
Renewed interest in the Silk Road only emerged among western scholars towards the end of the nineteenth century. This emerged after various countries started to explore the region. The foreign involvement in this area was due mostly to the interest of the powers of the time in expanding their territories. The British, in particular, were interested in consolidating some of the land north of their Indian territories. The first official trip for the Survey of India was in 1863, and soon afterwards, the existence of ancient cities lost in the desert was confirmed. A trade delegation was sent to Kashgar in 1890, and the British were eventually to set up a consulate in 1908. They saw the presence of Russia as a threat to the trade developing between Kashgar and India, and the power struggle between these two empires in this region came to be referred to as the `Great Game’. British agents (mostly Indians) crossed the Himalayas from Ladakh and India to Kashgar, travelling as merchants, and gathering what information they could, including surveying the geography of the route. At a similar time, Russians were entering from the north; most were botanists, geologists or cartographers, but they had no doubt been briefed to gather whatever intelligence they could. The Russians were the first to chance on the ruined cities at Turfan. The local treasure hunters were quick to make the best of these travellers, both in this region and near Kashgar, and noting the interest the foreigners showed towards the relics, sold them a few of the articles that they had dug out of the ruins. In this way a few ancient articles and old manuscripts started to appear in the West. When these reached the hands of Orientalists in Europe, and the manuscripts were slowly deciphered, they caused a large deal of interest, and more people were sent out to look out for them.
The study of the Road really took off after the expeditions of the Swede Sven Hedin in 1895. He was an accomplished cartographer and linguist, and became one of the most renowned explorers of the time. He crossed the Pamirs to Kashgar, and then set out to explore the more desolate parts of the region. He even succeeded in making a crossing of the centre of the Taklimakan, though he was one of only three members of the party who made it across, the rest succumbing to thirst after their water had run out. He was intrigued by local legends of demons in the Taklimakan, guarding ancient cities full of treasure, and met several natives who had chanced upon such places. In his later travels, he discover several ruined cities on the south side of the desert, and his biggest find, the city of Loulan, from which he removed a large number of ancient manuscripts.
After Hedin, the archaeological race started. Sir Aurel Stein of Britain and Albert von Le Coq of Germany were the principle players, though the Russians and French, and then the Japanese, quickly followed suit. There followed a period of frenzied digging around the edges of the Taklimakan, to discover as much as possible about the old Buddhist culture that had existed long before. The dryness of the climate, coupled with the exceedingly hot summers and cold winters, made this particularly difficult. However the enthusiasm to discover more of the treasures of the region, as well as the competition between the individuals and nations involved, drove them to continue. Although they produced reports of what they discovered, their excavation techniques were often far from scientific, and they removed whatever they could from the sites in large packing cases for transport to the museums at home. The manuscripts were probably the most highly prized of the finds; tales of local people throwing these old scrolls into rivers as rubbish tormented them. Removal of these from China probably did help preserve them. However, the frescoes from the grottos also attracted their attention, and many of the best ones were cut into sections, and carefully peeled off the wall with a layer of plaster; these were then packaged very carefully for transport. To their credit, almost all these murals survived the journey, albeit in pieces.
The crowning discovery was of a walled-up library within the Mogao grottos at Dunhuang. This contained a stack of thousands of manuscripts, Buddhist paintings and silk temple banners. The manuscripts were in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uyghur and several other less widely known languages, and they covered a wide range of subjects; everything from sections of the Lutras Sutra to stories and ballads from the Tang dynasty and before. Among these is what is believed to be the world’s oldest printed book. This hoard had been discovered by a Daoist monk at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he had appointed himself as their protector. The Chinese authorities appear to have been aware of the existence of the library, but were perhaps not fully aware of its significance, and they had decided to leave the contents where they were, under the protection of the monk. On hearing of this hoard, Stein came to see them; he gradually persuaded the monk to part with a few of the best for a small donation towards the rebuilding of the temple there. On successive visits, he removed larger quantities; the French archaeologist Pelliot also got wind of this discovery, and managed to obtain some. The frescoes at Dunhuang were also some of the best on the whole route, and many of the most beautiful ones were removed by the American professor Langdon Warner and his party.
The archaeological free-for-all came to a close after a change in the political scene. On 25th May 1925 a student demonstration in the treaty port of Shanghai was broken up by the British by opening fire on them, killing a number of the rioters. This instantly created a wave of anti-foreign hostility throughout China, and effectively brought the explorations of the Western Archaeologists to an end. The Chinese authorities started to take a much harsher view of the foreign intervention, and made the organisation of the trips much more difficult; they started to insist that all finds should be turned over to the relevant Chinese organs. This effectively brought an end to foreign exploration of the region.
The treasures of the ancient Silk Road are now scattered around museums in perhaps as many as a dozen countries. The biggest collections are in the British Museum and in Delhi, due to Stein and in Berlin, due to von Le Coq. The manuscripts attracted a lot of scholarly interest, and deciphering them is still not quite complete. Most of them are now in the British Library, and available for specialist study, but not on display. A large proportion of the Berlin treasures were lost during the Second World War; twenty eight of the largest frescoes, which had been attached to the walls of the old Ethnological Museum in Berlin for the purposes of display to the public, were lost in an Allied Air Force bombing raids between 1943 and 1945. A huge quantity of material brought back to London by Stein has mostly remained where it was put; museums can never afford the space to show more than just a few of the better relics, especially not one with such a large worldwide historical coverage as the British Museum.
The Chinese have understandably taken a harsh view of the `treasure seeking’ of these early Western archaeologists. Much play is made on the removal of such a large quantity of artwork from the country when it was in no state to formally complain, and when the western regions, in particular, were under the control of a succession of warlord leaders. There is a feeling that the West was taking advantage of the relatively undeveloped China, and that many of the treasures would have been much better preserved in China itself. This is not entirely true; many of the grottos were crumbling after more than a thousand years of earthquakes, and substantial destruction was wrought by farmers improving the irrigation systems. Between the visits of Stein and Warner to Dunhuang, a group of White Russian soldiers fleeing into China had passed by, and defaced many of the best remaining frescoes to such an extent that the irate Warner decided to `salvage’ as much as he could of the rest. The Chinese authorities at the time seem to have known about the art treasures of places like Dunhuang, but don’t seem to have been prepared to protect them; the serious work of protection and restoration was left until the formation of the People’s Republic.
Their only consolation is that many of the scrolls which had been purchased from native treasure-hunters at the western end of the Taklimakan at the beginning of the century were later found to have been remarkably good forgeries. Many were produced by an enterprising Moslem in Khotan, who had sensed how much money would be involved in this trade. This severely embarrassed a number of Western Orientalists, but the number of people misled attests to their quality.
The Present Day
The Silk Road, after a long period of hibernation, has been increasing in importance again recently.
The fight of man against the desert, one of the biggest problems for the early travellers, is finally gaining ground. There has been some progress in controlling the progress of the shifting sands, which had previously meant having to resite settlements. The construction of roads around the edges of the Taklimakan has eased access, and the discovery of large oil reserves under the desert has encouraged this development. The area is rapidly being industrialised, and Urumchi, the present capital of Xinjiang, has become a particularly unprepossessing Han Chinese industrial city.
The trade route itself is also being reopened. The sluggish trade between the peoples of Xinjiang and those of the Soviet Union has developed quickly; trade with the C.I.S. is picking up rapidly with a flourishing trade in consumer items as well as heavy industry. The new Central Asian republics had previously contributed much of the heavy industry of the former Soviet Union, with a reliance for consumer goods on Russia. Trade with China is therefore starting to fulfill this demand. This trading has been encouraged by the recent trend towards a `socialist market economy’ in China, and the increasing freedom of movement being allowed, particularly for the minorities such as those in Xinjiang. Many of these nationalities are now participating in cross-border trade, regularly making the journey to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The railway connecting Lanzhou to Urumchi has been extended to the border with Kazakhstan, where on 12th September 1990 it was finally joined to the former Soviet railway system, providing an important route to the new republics and beyond. This Eurasian Continental Bridge, built to rival the Trans-Siberian Railway, has been constructed from LianYunGang city in Jiangsu province (on the East China coast) to Rotterdam; the first phase of this development has already been completed, and the official opening of the railway was held on 1st December 1992. It is already promised to be at least 20% cheaper than the route by sea, and at 11,000 kilometres is significantly shorter. From China the route passes through Kazakhstan, Russia, Byelorussia and Poland, before reaching Germany and the Netherlands. The double-tracking of the railway from Lanzhou to the border of the C.I.S. has now been put high on the Chinese development priority list.
Restoration and Tourism
Since the intervention of the West last century, interest has been growing in this ancient trade route. The books written by Stein, Hedin and others have brought the perceived oriental mystery of the route into western common knowledge. Instilled with such romantic ideals as following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, a rapidly increasing number of people have been interested in visiting these desolate places. Since China opened its doors to foreign tourists at the end of the 1970s, it has realised how much foreign currency can be brought to the country by tapping this tourist potential. This has encouraged the authorities to do their best to protect the remaining sites; restoration of many of the sites is presently underway. The Mogao grottos were probably the first place to attract this attention; the Dunhuang Research Institute has been studying and preserving the remains of the grottos, as well as what was left of the library. Restoration is presently underway; the outside of the grottos was faced in a special concrete to prevent further subsidence, and some of the murals are being touched up by a team of specially trained artists and craftsmen.
Archaeological excavations have been started by the Chinese where the foreigners laid off; significant finds have been produced from such sites as the Astana tombs, where the dead from the city of Gaochang were buried. Finds of murals and clothing amongst the grave goods have increased knowledge of life along the old Silk Road; the dryness of the climate has helped preserve the bodies of the dead, as well as their garments.
There is still a lot to see around the Taklimakan, mostly in the form of damaged grottos and ruined cities. Whilst some people are drawn by the archaeology, others are attracted by the minority peoples; there are thirteen different races of people in the region, apart from the Han Chinese, from the Tibetans and Mongolians in the east of the region, to the Tajik, Kazakhs and Uzbeks in the west. Others are drawn to the mysterious cities such as Kashgar, where the Sunday market maintains much of the old Silk Road spirit, with people of many different nationalities selling everything from spice and wool to livestock and silver knives. Many of the present-day travellers are Japanese, visiting the places where their Buddhist religion passed on its way to Japan.
Although Xinjiang is opening up, it is still not an easy place to travel around. Apart from the harsh climate and geography, many of the places are not fully open yet, and, perhaps understandably, the authorities are not keen on allowing foreigners to wander wherever they like, as Hedin and his successors had done. The desolation of the place makes it ideal for such aspects of modern life as rocket launching and nuclear bomb testing. Nevertheless, many sites can be reached without too much trouble, and there is still much to see.
Conclusions
From its birth before Christ, through the heights of the Tang dynasty, until its slow demise six to seven hundred years ago, the Silk Road has had a unique role in foreign trade and political relations, stretching far beyond the bounds of Asia itself. It has left its mark on the development of civilisations on both sides of the continent. However, the route has merely fallen into disuse; its story is far from over. With the latest developments, and the changes in political and economic systems, the edges of the Taklimakan may yet see international trade once again, on a scale considerably greater than that of old, the iron horse replacing the camels and horses of the past.
BOOKS
Peter Hopkirk, `Foreign Devils on the Silk Road’, Oxford U.P., 1980.
`China: A Guidebook to Xinjiang’, Xinjiang Educational Press, Urumqi 1988.
Marco Polo, `The Travels’, translated by R. Latham, Penguin, 1958.
Jin Bohong, `In the footsteps of Marco Polo’, New World Press, Beijing 1989.
Xinjiang Educational Press, `China: A Guidebook to Xinjiang’, Urumqi 1988.
Shaanxi Travel and Tourism Press, `The 40 Scenic Spots along the Silk Road’, Xian (1990****?)
Zhang Yehan (Ed.), `Si Lu You (Silk Road Tour)’, Xinjiang People’s Publishing House, Urumchi, Vol.1 (1988), Vol.2 (1990).
Brian Hook (Ed.) `The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China’, Cambridge U.P., (1991,2nd ed.)
Also the exhibition `The Crossroads of Asia’, Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), on until mid-December 1992.
– oliver@halo.ps.uci.edu
– Source : ww.ess.uci.edu
