A History of the Silk Road

By Jonathan Clements

The Silk Road is not a place, but a journey, a route from the edges of the Mediterranean to the central plains of China, through high mountains and inhospitable deserts. For thousands of years its history has been a traveler’s history, of brief encounters in desert towns, snowbound passes and nameless forts. It was the conduit that first brought Buddhism, Christianity and Islam into China, and the site of much of the “Great Game” between 19th-century empires. Today, its central section encompasses several former Soviet republics, and the Chinese Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. The ancient trade route controversially crosses the sites of several forgotten kingdoms, buried in sand and only now revealing their secrets.
A History of the Silk Road not only offers the reader a chronological outline of the region’s development, but also provides an invaluable introduction to its languages, literature, and arts. It takes a comprehensive and illuminating look at the rich history of this dynamic and little known region, and provides an easy-to-use reference source. Jonathan Clements pays particular attention to the fascinating historical sites which feature on any visitor’s itinerary and also gives special emphasis to the writings and reactions of travelers through the centuries.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Jan 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781907973826

Jonathan Clements

Jonathan Clements presented several seasons of Route Awakening (National Geographic), an award-winning TV series about Chinese history and culture. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Confucius: A Biography, and The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. He has written histories of both China and Japan, two countries that have, at some point, claimed Taiwan as their own. He was a visiting professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2013 to 2019. He was born in the East of England and lives in Finland.

Book preview

Part One

THE VIEW FROM THE ARMCHAIR

1

The Invention of the Silk Road

THE ‘SILK ROAD’ is a modern idea, dating only from 1877 when Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the more famous Red Baron, published a multi-part atlas of China. His first volume included a map of ‘Die Seidenstrasse’, Richthofen’s term for the route that, he assumed, Chinese silk had taken towards the Greco-Roman world in antiquity. Key points included the trading centres of Samarkand and Xi’an (formerly known as Chang’an), from which branches would shoot off in multiple directions. Between those two towns the route was simpler, and limited to only a couple of branches that traversed the west Chinese region known today as Xinjiang.

Richthofen’s term had a romance to it, a sense of mystery and wonder that proved infectious. The term ‘Silk Road’ is now in widespread use, even in the regions through which the trade passed. In Chinese, it is translated as Sichou zhi Lu, an oddly classical construction that makes it sound like some ancient term, and not something knocked up by a German geographer only 150 years ago. In Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken by many natives of the region, it’s Yipek Yoli, connoting, as in other languages, a solid, physical road to the exotic west.

Just to confuse matters, there is a concrete, identifiable Silk Road today. It is the name of a motorway that curves along the northern reaches of the Taklamakan Desert, with signage helpfully written in English so that tourists can feel that they are getting somewhere. But none of the travellers on the historical Silk Road ever used that term. Only a handful of men and women ever travelled its entire length. For most of the participants in the trade route, the ‘road’, if there was even a real road, was only to the next town or oasis. Artefacts and articles might meander along the route from China to the Mediterranean, but only in stops and starts, traded back and forth, buffeted by changing conditions and markets, until they suddenly tumbled out at the far end to the bafflement of their final buyers.

In fact, there was never a single line, even in Richthofen’s original atlas – he spoke of a single Silk Road, but also referred to the route in the plural as Silk Roads. Many writers prefer the term ‘Silk Routes’ in order to point out that there is no single identifiable road, but a number of well-travelled paths and tracks, worn by camel caravans over the years. Towns, of course, were places where caravans of camel-drovers could grab new supplies, rest a little and graze their animals. But the pathways between them fluctuated on the basis of weather, war and local politics – even the towns of the Silk Road could fall in and out of favour, left high and dry by the ebb and flow of trade and by drastic changes in water tables or river courses.

Richthofen’s classical education had exposed him to the writings of the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who complained about all the coins being sent east to pay for silk, and it seems that this was what led Richthofen to draw his line joining China to the Mediterranean. Nor was the traffic all in a single direction. Much of the silk that headed west from China was intended for the Ferghana Valley in what is now Uzbekistan, where it was traded for the region’s highly prized horses. No coins of the Roman republic or early empire have ever been found in China. Those few Byzantine coins that made it all the way along the Silk Road were of little use at its terminus, except as odd souvenirs. Far more Roman coins, in fact, made their way to India, and in such quantities that they were sometimes repurposed as local currency. In fact, much of the material that Richthofen assumed to have reached Rome down his Silk Road may have instead trickled south from Xinjiang, through what is now India and Pakistan, and then by sea to Roman Egypt.

The same trade routes carried glass and gemstones, musical instruments and slaves, medicinal herbs and strange spices. As early as AD 331, princes of Ferghana were sending gifts of cotton east to the rulers of north China. In the distant past, the same routes had carried the ancestor of the modern apple westward from central Asia, and the bulbs of a flower that the Persians called dulband (‘turban’), and which entered medieval Latin as tulipa. However, silk seems to have been the commodity most likely to travel the entire length from east to west. This was partly because of its value at the western end, but also because of its portability and durability. Silk, in both woven and raw form, was a major form of currency for certain early Chinese dynasties, far more convenient than mere coins. It was transported, usually on camels, west from China to the forbidding deserts and steppes as bribes, gifts or soldiers’ salaries, depending on the political situation among the border tribes. Those groups, in turn, would pass the silk on, with much of it continuing further west as payment for livestock or luxuries. Valerie Hansen, in The Silk Road: A New History, comments that trade in the region was more often than not ‘a byproduct of Chinese spending’, as great quantities of silk arrived in lieu of cash money, obliging the locals to get rid of it somehow by bartering it elsewhere.

Meanwhile, other commodities travelled east on the same routes, back towards China. Jade, from Khotan at the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, has been found in Manchuria, in sites dated as early as 3000 BC. Coral, from the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, was highly prized in Buddhist cultures for its use in statuary and decoration. But few other European commodities were hardy enough to be reliably traded over the entire length of the routes. Drop a bolt of silk and it is not necessarily damaged, whereas intricate Roman glassware or similarly fragile items were less likely to survive the journey. As a result, European items were most often traded midway, in exchange for something more durable.

Beginnings and endings

Where does the Silk Road begin? There is a reasonable case to be made for Xi’an, which was called Chang’an and was the capital of China for much of the time that trade flowed across the desert. From Xi’an, all goods could head down the Wei River into the mighty Yellow River and all the canals and tributaries that spidered away from it. However, for a substantial proportion of the Silk Road’s medieval peak in the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese capital was moved several hundred kilometres east, to Luoyang. The two cities have had a sly rivalry ever since, today fought in tourist brochures that proclaim each place’s prominence on the Silk Road. Furthermore, not content with having the Terracotta Army on its outskirts, the city of Xi’an has carved its claim literally in stone with the sculpture The Start of the Silk Road, a massive edifice in the middle of a city junction, depicting a camel train heading west. Notably, the statue is called the Start – it is rare that the Chinese public recognise that any artefacts travelled east towards China.

Where does the Silk Road end? Does it end in Colchester, the old Roman town of Camulodunum, where a tiny fragment of silk, no bigger than a postage stamp, has been unearthed and is displayed in the local museum? Or Marseilles, the old Roman town of Massilia, where ships from the eastern Mediterranean would unload their wares for the wealthy of Gaul? I would argue that its real end is in Samarkand in what was then Sogdiana and is now Uzbekistan, the city from which eastern goods would scatter north, south and west to reach their final destinations.

Silk itself is a commodity that can exist in a number of different states, from gunge exuded out of a worm’s mouth, to cocoons, to raw silk, to thread, and beyond into many forms of material, each of which might have its own specialist area. Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, is not normally regarded as integral to the Silk Road, but those are fighting words in Chengdu itself, which prides itself as being the home of brocades. If we treat the Silk Road as everywhere that silk ends up, we are forced to write a history of the entire world – books on the Silk Road in Japanese, for example, often continue the line eastward from Xi’an, all the way to Japan’s medieval capital of Kyoto. Paul Wilson’s The Silk Roads: A Route and Planning Guide (3rd edition, 2010), attempts the broadest possible compass, including diverse sites as far afield as Turkey and Pakistan. But for the purposes of this book the Silk Road spans a much smaller area, from Xi’an or Luoyang, through the sand-blasted Gansu Corridor that plots a trail around the edge of the mountains of Tibet, and across the fabled deserts of Xinjiang to the nexus of Kashgar, from which it leads through mountain passes, out of the Chinese world and into Central Asia.

None of the people involved in trade on the Silk Road regarded themselves as part of a long route stretching between China and Europe. Nomads of the steppes only knew that the Chinese would bribe them to stay away by sending them gifts – of trinkets, women or cloth.

People in Khotan, who sifted jade pebbles from the nearby riverbeds, only knew that mounted traders would buy their stones to take east. The horse-breeders of Ferghana only knew that their steeds were highly prized in distant China, and that the Chinese would pay for them with silk. If the people of Ferghana had too much silk, they could always offload it on the Bactrians, who would flog it on to Parthians or Romans, and so on.

Geography and topography

The region now known as Xinjiang takes up a sixth of the territory of the People’s Republic of China, an area larger than the UK, France and Germany combined. A folksong of Xinjiang asks ‘Why are the winters so cold? / Why are the summers so hot?’ The answer is ‘continentality’, a geographical condition where the absence of large bodies of water causes inland regions to heat and cool to greater extremes. Xinjiang is enclosed by a wall of mountains on the north, west and south, with only a few hazardous mountain passes linking it to the world beyond. Its eastern side is also mountainous, but with substantially larger gaps affording access to north China and Mongolia. This ‘rain shadow’ on all sides means that clouds dump their precipitation on the mountains, leaving no water for the area in the middle. Ask the modern Chinese about Xinjiang, and they are liable to evoke desert sunsets and camel-trains on the sands. Some will speak of grasslands and steppes, since parts of northern Xinjiang do indeed border on the Mongolian plains, and share several ethnic groups and traditions with the nomads of the steppes. The less geographically-minded or unforgivably thick are apt to confuse Xinjiang (the ‘New Frontier’) with Xizang (Tibet), and end up spinning a bunch of complete fictions about yaks and yetis. On several occasions, pushy Chinese shopkeepers have tried to sell me Tibetan music when their Xinjiang stock proves lacking, as it is ‘almost the same thing.’

‘Our Xinjiang is a good place,’ begins the most famous regional propaganda song of the 20th century, ‘with good pastures south and north of the Tianshan.’ Despite the high temperatures and the legendary desert, it can be shocking to the visitor to discover just how green parts of it can be. Tourist advertisements, aimed at the internal Chinese market, present great vistas of pine forests and meadows, snowy peaks and clear mountain streams like something out of The Sound of Music. The images seem, quite deliberately, to evoke distant Europe, and then hit the onlooker with the twist in the small print… this is Xinjiang! Come and see!

Despite the lush imagery, those parts of Xinjiang can only be found in a relatively narrow strip around the edges of its better-known desert. At the end of his two-year spying mission in Central Asia, the cavalry officer Gustaf Mannerheim filed a secret report to the Russian Tsar in 1908, outlining Xinjiang’s value in a putative war with China. It was all but worthless, he thought. But even ‘barren’ ground has modern values that he did not really consider – oil, gas and precious metals delivering larger returns on China’s investment in the region. Xinjiang remains a remote region of China, but its value to modern China as a whole is indisputable. In the distant past, however, many evaluated Xinjiang in terms that foreshadowed Mannerheim’s; as an unpleasant interlude to be endured on the way to somewhere else.

The desert was a natural deterrent to travellers. Early in the Tang Dynasty, one of Empress Wu’s advisers suggested that she draw the borders of China at the eastern edge of the desert in Dunhuang, all the better to sap the strength of any enemies who had to cross the Taklamakan wastes to raid China. But Wu, and other rulers of the Tang Dynasty, remained interested in what lay beyond the sands, and in trade and possible alliances with rulers in what are now Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. However, while the Taklamakan region was incorporated within Chinese territory, it remained a peripheral area.

The very inhospitability of the Silk Road has often made it a dumping ground for refugees, prisoners and exiles. Entire tribes, fleeing the steppe conquests of the Kyrgyz or the incursions of Arab invaders, have been uprooted and settled among the oases. Entire armies of rebels have been given a last chance out on the frontier, shoved into no-man’s-land on parcels of meagre, parched earth, and told that it is theirs as long as they can hold it against the elements and the enemy. This wildly mixed heritage has given the survivors on the Silk Road an incredible, vibrant vitality, unparalleled elsewhere in China.

And the Chinese like it that way. Go to the evening dance show at the Tang Paradise theme park in Xi’an, and the musical numbers start with mundane ballets and callisthenics – soldiers banging drums and concubines emerging from symbolic baths, celebrating the famous events of the Tang Dynasty. But the show only comes alive when it hits the dances of Xi Cheng, coyly untranslated in the theatre supertitles, but referring to the ‘Western Regions’, which is to say the deserts and mountains that we call the Silk Road. These ‘Western Regions’ retain a fascination for the Chinese majority, an exotic frisson of belly dancers and slave girls, romantic desert settings and rapacious bandits, lost cities and buried treasure. In other words, it retains many of the stereotypes and narrative traditions associated in Europe with the ‘orient’, that admixture of the Turkic and Chinese worlds that give us those staple stories of our own culture, Aladdin and Turandot.

For those who really experienced it, the Silk Road often proved anything but romantic. Aurel Stein, the great explorer, wrote of moving from ‘one wretched roadside station to another, each established with its refuse-filled mud hovels and a tiny post of soldiers at a point where some shallow depression offers a scanty supply of water in a spring or a well…. the utterly barren wastes of gravel, crumbling rock or drift sand which extend between these miserable halting places could certainly have changed but little since ancient times.’ A thousand years after the time of the Silk Road, Stein’s travel along the route in 1907 served as a reminder to him of the harsh logistics of the region.

For medieval travellers who required animal fodder, the desert offered little opportunity to replenish stores. Caravans would need to carry much of their supplies with them. Horses and oxen, the default means of transport in China, could be more trouble than they were worth, causing the locals to rely heavily on camels. The sparse nature of habitation made it absolutely imperative that travellers would be able to lurch from oasis to oasis. One wrong turn on the sands and travellers would find themselves on a one-way trip, like one of the region’s dead rivers, wandering ever further into the sands until supplies ran out and death took hold.

Even today, it is difficult to draw a map of the region. The mountains stay in the same place, of course, but the areas between them are literally formed from shifting sands, which can in turn block and reroute rivers. Sometimes the rivers just die in the middle of the desert. Sometimes they flow into a depression in the ground and form new lakes, for a season, or for a generation, before vanishing, only to reappear a few miles away. It is for this reason that the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin called his book on the search for the fabled Lop Nur The Wandering Lake. In an environment low on lumber, traditional buildings are often built from mud bricks. This makes them swift to erect but also swift to erode. One of the greatest dangers to the old town of Kashgar is the simple likelihood that a single earthquake might turn it back into dust.

Territory is similarly hard to define. Even those who professed to be ‘kings’ of parts of the region were only the rulers of dots on the map – fortress towns in the more hospitable foothills of the mountains, or clinging to oases on the periphery. But these dots can still be substantial, for example Turfan is 1,000 square miles of lush greenery, surrounded by desert and sustained by man-made underground channels, bearing water from the upper slopes of the Flaming Mountains.

In northern Xinjiang, where the Tianshan (‘Heaven Mountains’) cut across the middle, rivers of snowmelt cascade into remarkably green and unexpectedly lush valleys, with ample space for grazing livestock, and areas suitable for growing crops. In southern Xinjiang, similar rivers tumble down from the mountains, only to land in a vast desert – the oddest of sights on a map, familiar riverine blue lines that simply end in the middle of nowhere, evaporating in the desert