The Silk Road: A New History

by Valerie Hansen

  The princes could not go on toward Ganzhou because of the unrest; the Dunhuang ruler feared that the Chinese court would hold him personally responsible if the gifts from Khotan did not arrive in the capital.74 Yet he allowed three monks to proceed—once they had drawn their finger marks on a formal document absolving him of responsibility—because he thought that clerics who did not carry gifts were in less danger.

  Two members of the delegation explained how some of the participants reacted to the collapse of the delegation. In each case, the individual in question absconded with the tribute sent by the Khotanese king intended for the Chinese.75 Of the eight men, only two went to China: one slave who hoped to obtain his freedom and a trader who planned to give “one hundred blankets to the Royal Court.”76 Everyone else returned to Khotan with the pilfered goods.

  At various points, the members of the delegation bartered away the gifts to cover their own travel expenses. After delivering a letter to the three monks who had gone on ahead, two men departed from Ganzhou, headed for Dunhuang “to do trade.”77 They were subsequently robbed in Guazhou. During the difficult trip during which so many of the princes’ animals died, two of the party “lost their merchandise,” and a Sogdian trader could not locate either his pack animals or the “merchandise he had hidden in the mountains.”78 Clearly traders accompanied the unfortunate envoys and encountered some of the same difficulties they did.

  The princes engaged in trade as well. One Khotanese prince named Capastaka gave 40 pounds (18 kg) of jade to the Dunhuang authorities in exchange for one hundred fifty bolts of silk, nominally a gift for the Khotanese court, and fifty for his Chinese mother, Lady (Furen) Khi-vyaina. When his brother Wang Pa-kyau wrote to his mother to complain that Capastaka had cheated him, he asked that she send him jade as well: “When the envoys go there do you deign to send a little ira [jade] stone?”79 It certainly sounds as if he, like his brother, planned to trade jade for silk, which he could use to cover his expenses on the road.

  Bolts of silk were the main currency used by travelers, according to a list of expenses incurred by a different group of Khotanese travelers. They spent bolts of silk to buy barley, a camel, and horses, to make payments to a guide, and to give to “forty compatriot merchants.” The silk did not always function as money; the travelers also made a garment from one bolt. In addition to paying expenses with silk, the group traded live sheep and antelope skins, an indication that in the Silk Road economy of the tenth century, people accepted goods in kind.80

  A leading scholar of Khotanese, Professor Hiroshi Kumamoto of Tokyo University, explains why this list of expenditures is unusual: “This is one of the few Khotanese commercial documents found in Dunhuang. They are noteworthy in that the local Chinese documents in the ninth and tenth centuries only mention Khotanese envoys and priests, but hardly ever Khotanese merchants.”81 Kumamoto is absolutely right: few sources from the tenth century mention merchants specifically as a group.

  While the Silk Road has long been viewed as a highway for a procession of camels led by a merchant in business for himself, the documentary record challenges this impression. The Khotanese-language documents about the seven princes mention different participants in the delegation: envoys of higher and lower rank, the princes, monks, and lay people.82 The lines dividing these groups were permeable and became even more so in difficult times. Even the princes resorted to selling jade to obtain silk for travel expenses. In such a situation, anyone and everyone had to engage in trade, but the trade consisted of impromptu exchanges of locally produced and locally obtained goods. If someone needed a particular item, he might pay for it with a bolt of silk, if available, but he might also trade a sheep or even an antelope skin. In such unsettled times few people ventured on the road. Those who did often attached themselves to official delegations, which were entitled to special treatment—even if they did not always receive it.

  The Khotanese-language materials from the Dunhuang library cave focus almost entirely on Khotan’s relations with its neighbors to the east: Dunhuang, the Uighur kaghanates, the Tang dynasty and its successors in China. Yet the changes taking place to the west transformed Khotan.

  The Kirghiz defeat of the Uighurs in 840 prompted the mass migration of the core Uighur populations out of Mongolia south to Turfan and Ganzhou, where they formed smaller successor states called the Uighur Kaghanates. In the aftermath of 840 another tribal confederacy formed: contemporary documents refer to them as “khans” or “kaghans,” and modern scholars call them the Karakhanids to distinguish them from other Turkic peoples. Sometime before 955 their leader Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam, and his son continued both his military campaigns and the effort to convert the Turkic peoples to Islam. In 960 Muslim chronicles record that “200,000 tents of the Turks” converted to Islam.83 The chronicles do not specify which Turks they mean or where exactly they were based, but modern scholars assume this passage refers to the Karakhanids, based in Kashgar, 350 miles (500 km) west of Khotan. After the Karakhanid conversion, they ordered their armies to destroy any existing non-Muslim religious structures, including Buddhist temples.

  Living on the far eastern edge of the Islamic world, far from the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, the Karakhanid rulers probably converted in order to associate themselves with the great prestige of the Islamic powers. Several contemporary leaders, including those of the Khazars, the Kievan Rus’, and the Hungarians, weighed the advantages of each of the medieval world’s great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and then chose one. The Karakhanid conversion to Islam was similar.84

  The Khotanese initially defeated the Karakhanid army in 970 and won control of Kashgar. The king of Khotan, Visa Sura (reigned 967–77), the son of Visa Sambhava, sent a royal edict (see page 198) to his uncle, the ruler of Dunhuang, who was the brother of his mother who had married into the Cao family of Dunhuang.

  The letter explains why the Khotanese are late in sending tribute to Dunhuang and to the Chinese. The Khotanese king exults in what “wonderful things, wives and sons, elephant and thoroughbred valuable horse and the like” they have obtained in Kashgar—but complains a little, too: “As to what is the work of occupying an alien territory and maintaining the government, that is great and difficult. And as an alien we do not secure control.” He amplifies the theme of his government being stretched thin: “The money increases, and the corn, and the transport animals, and men, and troops, but there are many conflicts and men are dying.” Although the Khotanese armies have won, the Karakhanid forces lie just outside Kashgar. The victory is not conclusive.

  The king’s letter closes with a list of gifts for his uncle. From Khotan the king sends the usual items: three lumps of jade (the weight specified for each), a piece of leather armor, some tools and vessels. From the goods captured from the Karakhanids, he has chosen a cup with a silver case and a steel tool, also with a cover.85 The capture of Kashgar was clearly a major victory for Khotan, and Chinese-language sources record that the Khotanese king wrote to the Chinese asking permission to send them a “dancing elephant” captured from Kashgar, which the Chinese government duly granted.86

  The Khotanese and the Karakhanids continued to fight after 970, but the sources give no details about the progression of the war. We know only that in 1006 the leader of the Karakhanids, Yusuf Qadir Khan, launched a major military campaign toward the west. Accordingly, scholars assume that he had successfully conquered Khotan before 1006 but not too much before.87 Mahmud al-Kashgari (d. 1102) wrote a famous poem about the conquest of Khotan:

  We came down on them like a flood,

  We went out among their cities,

  We tore down the idol-temples,

  We shat on the Buddha’s head!88

  Waves of panic spread eastward. Cave 17 in Dunhuang does not record the fall of Khotan, possibly because, as Professor Rong Xinjiang of Peking University speculates, the news of the destruction of the Buddhist buildings in Khotan prompted the sealing of the library cave, which included
its rich Khotanese-language holdings.89

  Overnight, Khotan stopped being Buddhist. The historical record is painfully scanty. We know that soon after Khotan’s fall the Kitan ruler of the Liao dynasty gave a gift to the Dunhuang ruler of horses and “beautiful jade” that could only have come from the vanquished Khotan.90 The next mention of Khotan is in Chinese records, which record a tribute mission from the Karakhanid-controlled Khotan in 1009.91

  The sources, largely chronicles focusing on rulers, reveal very little about the impact of Islam on the new Karakhanid subjects. One exception is some documents in Arabic and Uighur that were “discovered under a tree in a garden outside Yarkand in 1911.” Yarkand is about 100 miles (160 km) to the west of Khotan. These materials, like so many other documents found in the region, were sent for safekeeping to the British consul George Macartney. The group includes three contracts in Uighur and twelve in Arabic, five of which are written using the Uighur alphabet. Reflecting the transition from the Uighur to the Arabic alphabet, these materials date to the period between 1080 and 1135, about one hundred years after the Karakhanid conquest.

  The contracts all concern the sale of land; the three legal judgments treat the appointment of a guardian, inheritance division, and land rights. The Karakhanid state, at least by 1100 and at least in Yarkand, implemented the rudiments of Islamic law. Legal officials knew enough Arabic to draft simple legal documents in Arabic and then to translate them into Uighur for the parties involved and the witnesses, some of whom signed in Arabic, some in Uighur.92 Three of the Arabic documents explicitly state that the document was translated into a language known to the participants and read aloud to them. At the minimum, the legal officials of the Karakhanid state were familiar with Islamic law, but the effects of the state’s conversion to Islam on ordinary people are still little known.93

  While the Karakhanids may have converted to Islam, the other oasis kingdoms in the Western Regions did not. The Uighur rulers of Kucha and Turfan supported both Manichaeism and Buddhism in different periods; the Xixia, who controlled Ganzhou, Dunhuang, and the southern Silk Route east of Khotan, were also Buddhist.94 This three-way division of Xinjiang continued in the twelfth-century, a period when Xinjiang nominally came under the rule of the Western Liao, a successor state to the Liao dynasty (907–1125) of north China. Under them, the Church of the East increased its influence throughout Xinjiang, particularly among the Kereit and Naiman tribes of the Mongols.95

  Then in 1211 a Naiman leader named Küchlük took over the Western Liao. Originally an adherent of the Church of the East, Küchlük converted to Buddhism and became a ferocious opponent of Islam. He attacked both Kashgar and Khotan, forcing the inhabitants of both cities to renounce Islam and adopt either Christianity or Buddhism. But Küchlük was the last ruler in the region to ban Islam. In 1218 he was defeated by Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan is the transliteration of the Persian spelling), who had unified the Mongols in 1206 and launched a series of stunning conquests. Chinggis rescinded Küchlük’s religious policies.96

  The Mongol conquests continued after Chinggis’s death in 1227; by 1241 the Mongols had conquered much of Eurasia, creating the largest contiguous empire in world history. They pursued a policy of general religious tolerance, giving support to all holy men while privileging their own shamanistic traditions. During the period of Mongol unification, sometimes called Pax Mongolica, it became possible—for the first time in world history—to travel all the way from Europe to China, on the easternmost edge of the Mongol Empire. Many people made the trip, and some left records of their travels. Most travelers began at the Crimean Peninsula and crossed the vast ocean of unbroken grasslands all the way from Eurasia to modern Mongolia. They did not use the traditional Silk Road routes around the Taklamakan.

  Curiously, Marco Polo was an exception. He claimed to have taken the southern Silk Road route through Khotan, and no one knows why he did not take the more traveled grasslands route. Marco left Venice in 1271 at the age of seventeen, traveling with two uncles. The Mongol Empire had broken into four sectors only ten years earlier. Each sector was ruled by one of Chinggis’s sons. The Chaghatai Khanate stretched all the way from Turfan in the east to Bukhara in the west and included the territory of modern Xinjiang. In the company of his uncles, Polo visited Yarkand and Khotan, both in the Chaghatai Khanate, on his way to China:

  Let us turn next to the province of Yarkand, five days’ journey in extent. The inhabitants follow the law of Muhammad, and there are also some Nestorian Christians. They are subject to the Great Khan’s nephew, of whom I have already spoken. It is amply stocked with the means of life, especially cotton. But since there is nothing here worth mentioning in our book, we shall pass on to Khotan, which lies towards the east-north-east.

  Khotan is a province eight day’s journey in extent, which is subject to the Great Khan. The inhabitants all worship Muhammad. It has cities and towns in plenty, of which the most splendid, and the capital of the kingdom, bears the same name as the province, Khotan. It is amply stocked with the means of life. Cotton grows here in plenty. It has vineyards, estates, and orchards in plenty. The people live by trade and industry; they are not at all war-like.97

  These descriptions of Yarkand and Khotan typify Polo’s narrative. Repetitive, and startlingly short of persuasive detail, they hardly read like an eyewitness account. Polo then describes a place called Pem, not yet identified by scholars. The entry repeats much of the same information as that for Khotan, with one significant addition about jade:

  Passing on from here, we come to the province of Pem, five days’ journey in extent, towards the east-north-east. Here too the inhabitants worship Muhammad and are subject to the Great Khan. It has villages and towns in plenty. The most splendid city and the capital of the province is called Pem. There are rivers here in which are found stones called jasper and chalcedony in plenty. There is no lack of the means of life. Cotton is plentiful. The inhabitants live by trade and industry.

  It certainly seems as though Polo’s information is incorrect: the information he gives for Pem all fits Khotan. But his Pem could be Phema, an ancient name for Keriya, the oasis between Khotan and Niya.98 Polo’s description of Pem continues:

  The following custom is prevalent among them. When a woman’s husband leaves her to go on a journey of more than twenty days, then, as soon as he has left, she takes another husband.

  Historians have debated the veracity of Polo’s account for centuries; generally speaking, historians of China have more reservations about Polo, perhaps because they have access to so many other sources, than do historians of the Mongols, who heatedly argue for the reliability of Polo’s account on the basis of his insider knowledge of Yuan-dynasty court politics.99 Everyone concurs that medieval travel accounts often contain descriptions of places—like Khotan and Pem—that their authors never actually visited. Medieval readers did not expect Polo to have direct knowledge of each place he mentioned.

  Merchants, like Polo and his uncles, provided a crucial service for the Mongols. Because they were businessmen, they knew how to convert the vast holdings of gold, silver, and other plundered goods taken in battle, and find creative ways to exchange these assets for things the Mongols really wanted, like textiles. The Mongols lent vast sums of silver to groups of merchants with whom they formed partnerships; the merchants used this money to purchase wares. These merchants were predominantly Central Asian Muslims but also included Syrians, Armenians, and Jews. Polo and his uncles may have entered into a similar implicit partnership agreement.100 These partnerships were new and unlike anything during earlier Chinese dynasties.

  In the 1300s the Mongol Empire began to unravel, with the different sectors becoming independent of each other. Although the Yuan-dynasty emperors in China did not convert to Islam, the rulers of the three other sectors, including the Chagatai Khanate, did. In the early 1330s the first Muslim ruler of the Chagatai Khanate took the throne, and he encouraged his soldiers to convert to Islam. His subjects alread
y included some Muslims; these measures increased their numbers.101 The influence of Islam increased in Central Asia during the reign of Timur the Lame (Tamerlane, reigned 1370–1405), who was also a Muslim. In the late 1300s the descendents of the Chagatai Khanate rulers gained control of much of Xinjiang, while a native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, succeeded in pushing the Mongols out of central China back to their homeland in Mongolia. In the following centuries, the oases of modern Xinjiang continued to send tribute missions to the Ming court at Beijing. As late as 1400 Buddhism was still flourishing in Turfan, according to accounts from envoys.102

  In 1602 one European, Bento de Goes, a Jesuit born in the Azores, grew a beard and allowed his hair to grow long. Disguised as a Persian merchant, he traveled all the way from India to China.103 He adopted the name Abdullah Isai. Abdullah means “servant of God” in Arabic, while Isai is a Spanish version of the Arabic name Isa (Jesus). At his first stop, Kabul, he met the mother of the king of Khotan (also the sister of the king of Yarkand) who had been robbed and needed funds. De Goes sold some of his goods so that he could lend her six hundred pieces of gold interest free, and she promised to pay him back with Khotanese jade. The route west over the Pamirs to Yarkand was so fraught with danger that his caravan of five hundred men hired four hundred guards to protect them.

  After arriving safely in Yarkand, de Goes proceeded to Khotan, where he was able to collect the jade due to him. Then he had to wait in Yarkand a full year for a caravan to Beijing. Caravans were hard to organize. In this case, the Chinese stipulated that the caravan could have only seventy-two merchants. The ruler of Yarkand sold the position of caravan leader to the highest bidder, who paid two hundred sacks of musk for the position, and the other seventy-one positions in the caravan went for less. When every spot was finally filled, the caravan set off along the northern route around the Taklamakan in the fall of 1604.