by Parag Khanna
During the mid–6th century BC, India was the epicenter of new religious awakenings. In the eastern Ganges region (today’s Bihar province, as well as southern Nepal and western Bangladesh), ancient kingdoms flourished that differed from the Indo-Aryan strongholds to the north. In the Magadha Kingdom, Prince Siddhartha Gautama broke away from the prevailing Vedic Hindu dharma (eternal order or law), becoming an ascetic sage who attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya and gave his first sermon at Sarnath. The first Buddhist council, convened soon after the Buddha’s death, was held in Magadha’s capital, Rajgir.3
To the north, in China, the Zhou Dynasty’s transition from bronze to iron made it a pioneer of farming plows, while hydrological technologies such as dams, dikes, and canals enabled it to harness the upper Yangtze River for irrigation. Other Zhou inventions included the decimal system in mathematics and the efficient weaving of silk. Even as the Zhou Dynasty’s stability gave way to the Warring States period (481–206 BC), “a hundred schools of thought” flourished. The military theorist Sun Tzu compiled his treatise The Art of War, which revealed strategies in espionage and battlefield tactics. Great sages such as Mozi, Mengzi (Mencius), and Confucius produced deep philosophical reflections on social values. Naturalistic philosophies such as Daoism also emerged, proposing the duality of yin and yang as seemingly opposing forces that actually belong to the same Oneness.
By 221 BC, the Qin Dynasty had risen and restored stability. Its first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, unified China’s language, units of measurement, currency, tax system, and census. To ward off the nomadic Xiongnu in the west, the Qin began the construction of the Great Wall. Meanwhile, as the Qin crushed their rivals to the east and south, many Chinese migrated across the Yalu River, overrunning the Gojoseon Kingdom on the Korean Peninsula. Both Chinese and Koreans also migrated across the Tsushima Strait onto the Kyushu Islands of Japan, which during its Yayoi period had developed distinctive pottery, bronze bells, and Shinto and animist belief systems. The mainland migrants brought with them Chinese script and characters, which became foundational to Japanese and other East Asian languages. Han people from central China also shifted in large numbers to northern Vietnam, where the Chinese commander Zhao Tuo established the Nanyue Kingdom, which spanned the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong.
The Qin quickly collapsed with the death of Qin Shi Huang’s son in 207 BC and, after another period of unrest, were supplanted by the even more powerful Han Dynasty, which promoted Confucianism both as a national religion and as a curriculum for the imperial bureaucracy. Particularly under the half-century-long reign of Emperor Wu-di (140–87 BC), the Han united disparate kingdoms into a vast empire, including subduing the Nanyue to the south. Their strength also allowed them to incorporate the territory of the nettlesome Xiongnu into a tributary region and to push through the fertile Gansu corridor into the Tarim basin toward the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. The Han also forged connections over land and sea with India, Ceylon, Egypt, and Rome, together forming the first trans-Asian trading networks.
The Han westward push forced Yuezhi nomads from Xinjiang to the other side of the Karakoram and Pamir mountains, where they established the Kushan Empire with its center at Peshawar. The Yuezhi assimilated Buddhist culture from the Ganges valley lying to their south and disseminated it northward into Central Asia, where the Sogdian people, who occupied lands between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, were laying the foundations of the great Silk Road cities Samarkand and Bukhara (in today’s Uzbekistan). Meanwhile, from the other direction, the Achaemenid continued their push eastward into this strategic terrain, absorbing Sogdiana as a surrogate province.
The Achaemenid, however, faced a greater challenge from their western frontier as the armies of Alexander III of Macedon (“Alexander the Great”) penetrated eastward as far as the Indus River. Alexander defeated Emperor Darius III but maintained the efficient Achaemenid administrative and tax structures. The eastern Achaemenid stronghold of Gandhara remained a rich mélange of Persian Zoroastrian, Indian Hindu, and Ganges Buddhist cultures with capitals shifting between great cities such as Charsadda and Taxila. The Mauryan Empire, which emerged from the eastern Ganges Magadha region, conquered northward toward Taxila, with King Chandragupta advised by the great strategist Chanakya (also known as Kautilya). As the Mauryans secured their base at Taxila, Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka adorned Gandhara with Buddhist stupas. The Mauryan Empire weakened with Ashoka’s death in 232 BC, opening the door for King Demetrius of Bactria, a successor to Alexander of Macedon, to capture Gandhara by around 200 BC. Subsequently, King Menander, born at Bagram (north of Kabul), propagated the Grand Trunk Road, which stretched from Central Asia through the fertile Punjab all the way to the mouth of the Ganges.
By that time, the Parthians, heirs to the Achaemenid civilization, had arisen from their stronghold just east of the Caspian Sea to dominate as far west as Anatolia and across the Euphrates River valley and Persia to the fringes of China in the east. Even as they skirmished with the Romans (who had succeeded the Greeks in regional power) in the Mediterranean basin and Caucasus region, the Parthians and their Sogdian middlemen fostered the Silk Road of trade in Indian spices and Chinese tea and porcelain bought by Romans and Roman glass, silver, ivory, and gold bought by the Chinese, who sent diplomatic envoys such as Zhang Qian on extensive westward tours to build ties with the Parthians.
Despite the region’s vast geographic and cultural diversity, Buddhism was the glue that held numerous Asian civilizations together. Bamiyan became a major center of Buddhist learning where monks nurtured a distinctive artistic style developed fusing Iranian, Indian, and Gandharan forms. Dunhuang in the Tarim basin, the site of stunning Buddhist grottoes chiseled into mountainsides, was the crossroads of several trade routes linking Mongolia and Tibet to Parthia and the Levant. As Han monks and merchants traveled the Silk Road in search of inspiration, they brought back Buddhist texts translated by Sogdians. Buddhism thus extended its reach through the Han Empire in a pincerlike movement from the west and south from India and Southeast Asia. By AD 155, the Han emperor Huan introduced Buddhist ceremonies into the imperial curriculum to complement Confucian teachings. In East Asia, then, Confucianism came to provide the rules of social organization premised on righteousness and benevolence, while Buddhism, Chinese Daoism, and Japanese Shintoism enabled people’s spiritul aspirations.
The maritime routes linking components of the ancient Asian system were even more significant than those over land. By the first century BC, up to 120 Greek ships per year sailed through the Red Sea and captured the monsoon winds to arrive at Indian ports, returning with jade, beads, and spices brought from Southeast Asian island kingdoms such as Sumatra and Java. Robust trade with the Indian subcontinent accelerated Southeast Asia’s Indianization, especially in the Kingdom of Funan in the lower Mekong Delta and the Khmer people, with whom Indian merchants intermarried, bringing Hinduism and Indian scripts to the Burmese, Javanese, and Thai languages. Indian knowledge of medicine also flowed along this route, finding its way into Chinese pharmacological texts. Funan’s successor, the Srivijayan Kingdom, was a famous Buddhist crossroads. King Songtsen Gampo of the mighty Tibetan Kingdom also adopted Buddhism due to the influence of his Nepali and Chinese wives.
This Indian-Chinese, Buddhist-Confucian exchange spanning India and China via Central and Southeast Asia made ancient Asia a rich cultural zone, lasting well beyond the disintegration of the Han Empire in the second century. The decline of the Han and subsequent Six Dynasties period of chaos empowered the Goguryeo Kingdom of Korea to liberate itself from the Han yoke, creating the largest independent state of the Korean Peninsula; it spanned the Yalu River and the Liaodong Peninsula. Another Korean kingdom, the Baekje, also held its own in territory and trade with China. The Baekje welcomed monks from Gandhara who brought Buddhism to the kingdom in the fourth century, and subsequently many more Indian monks who initiated the construction of monasteries and temples. The princess of Ayo
dhya in India even married into Korean royalty.
As in Korea, disparate Japanese kingdoms awakened, with the Yamato coalescing into a formidable regime that governed from AD 250 to 710. Under the reign of Prince Shōtoku (AD 593–622) in the Asuka period, Buddhism flourished in Japanese society while Confucianism took hold in the bureaucracy. The Yamato adopted the Chinese calendar and sent Japanese students to China to study both Buddhism and Confucianism. At the same time, Japan sought equality with the Chinese emperor and refused to accept a subordinate status. Even as China, Korea, and Japan contested territory, constant migration brought them together into a common East Asian system of commerce and cross-cultural learning.
South Asia, too, continued with its intellectual and cultural advances. The Kushan Empire, led by Emperor Kanishka, strengthened in the wake of the Mauryans’ demise but continued Ashoka and Menander’s nurturing of Buddhism. By the year AD 150, Kanishka came to rule over a vast realm spanning the Bactrian regions of the Tarim basin (today’s Xinjiang) all the way to the Ganges. The Gupta Empire, which subsequently dominated the Ganges region after 320, marked a golden age of cultural and scientific accomplishment with the completion of the epic tale Mahabharata and the invention of the mathematical zero and the game of chess. The great university of Nalanda attracted students from as far as Central Asia and Korea and hosted the reputable late-seventh-century Chinese monks Xuanzang and Yijing, who translated dozens of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. The Guptas also expanded eastward through Bengal and built strong trade ties with the Srivijaya Kingdom, which over a period of nearly a century constructed the world’s largest Buddhist temple at Borobudur on the island of Java. The Guptas exported textiles and perfumes to Rome—until both the Guptas and the Romans succumbed in the fifth century to Hun invaders from the Altai region east of the Caspian Sea (today’s Kazakhstan).
Still, Asia’s continental connectivity continued to thrive. Paper, silk, gunpowder, and luxury goods traversed the Silk Roads in all directions, as did philosophical ideas and religious doctrines. New faiths also emerged from West Asia. In Roman Palestine, followers of the preacher Jesus Christ began to spread his message across the Levant and Caucasus; early missionaries such as St. Thomas the Apostle baptized Christians as far away as Kerala in southern India. Meanwhile, the Nestorian Church of Byzantium, splitting from that of Rome, anchored itself at Constantinople in Anatolia and grew its following in the Sassanian Empire, through which it spread eastward across Central Asia and as far as China. Ancient Asia was a richly diverse milieu of civilizations engaging through the forces of commerce, conflict, and culture.
Asia’s Imperial Expansions
Byzantium was not the only religious empire that surged eastward in the centuries following the sacking of Rome. In Arabia, long home to a polytheistic mix of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Nestorianism, and numerous indigenous faiths, the revelations of the prophet Muhammad in Mecca in AD 610 CE inspired Arabs across the land. After his death in 632, Muslim tribes unified under the Rashidun Caliphate, which launched conquests across Egypt and North Africa and overran the Sassanians and Persians to the east. This early Islamic unity, however, gave way to disputes over succession, causing a rift within the ruling Umayyad Caliphate between rival Sunni and Shi’a sects. Already by the early eighth century, Islam had advanced to reach both the Iberian Peninsula of Europe and the fringes of India.
The Umayyad’s successors, the Abbasids, converted the powerful Turkic tribes of the Ferghana valley (in today’s Uzbekistan) and allied with them—as well as the powerful Tibetan Empire, which ruled a vast expanse covering the Tarim basin, the Himalayas, Bengal, and Yunnan—together defeating the Tang Dynasty’s armies (led in part by the Goguryeo Korean commander Gao Xianzhi) at the momentous Battle of Talas near the Tian Shan Mountains in present-day Kyrgyzstan, in 751. Despite its victory over the Tang, the Abbasid Dynasty came in 755 to aid the Tang to put down a rebellion launched by its own half-Sogdian, half-Turk general An Lushan.
While the Arab-Turkic-Tibetan alliance expelled China’s garrisons from Central Asia, its armies and merchants (including those of the nomadic Uighur people) took westward China’s sophisticated knowledge of papermaking. The Abbasids’ second caliph, Al-Mansur, established a new capital city, Baghdad, on the banks of the Tigris River (just north of the former Sassanid capital city of Ctesiphon). Subsequently, Caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) built a House of Wisdom that gathered scholars such as the Persian mathematician and astronomer Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, who pioneered algebra (al-jabr) and the study of Indian numerals, and Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian polymath who translated more than one hundred works of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle into Syriac and Arabic. Leveraging this collection of translated knowledge, the esteemed mathematician and astronomer Al-Biruni stood at the Nandna Fort in the hills of Punjab and calculated the circumference of the earth in the year 997. The caliphate’s contributions to the region were thus religious, intellectual, and economic.
Despite its defeat at the Battle of Talas, China under the Tang experienced a great awakening of cosmopolitan culture. Just before the Tang, the short-lived Sui Dynasty managed to unite the northern and southern Han and construct the Grand Canal, which linked the capital Chang’an (Xi’an) with eastern cities such as Beijing and Hangzhou, accelerating the movement of troops and grain. The Sui also sinicized major ethnic minorities and elevated Buddhism into the national religion. The Tang then continued to welcome Malay, Arab, and Persian merchants, even inviting them to live in permanent communities in Chinese cities. Such immigrants made up two-thirds of the 200,000 inhabitants of Guangzhou (Canton), where the Huaisheng Mosque became the first of its kind in China. Tang Dynasty merchant ships reflected this diversity, with crews made up of Christians, Parsis, Muslims, and Jews. Tang vessels crossed the Java Sea and Malacca Strait carrying tens of thousands of fine porcelain bowls and other items to be exchanged for Indian fabrics and Abbasid glassware.
At the time, the Tang Empire’s estimated 60 million people accounted for a quarter of the world’s population, and its cities were larger than any in Europe or India. The Tang leveraged this strength to expand aggressively into Manchuria in the north, Tibet in the west, and Annam (Vietnam) in the south. By the eighth century, nearly one hundred Asiatic peoples were sending tributes to the Tang emperor. Tang influence also reached a peak in Korea and Japan, where Buddhist sects came to rival the Asuka for power in the late eighth century. Japan’s two main Buddhist centers, Nara and Kyoto, were modeled on Chang’an (Xi’an). The internal strife that plagued the later Tang had dramatic consequences, including the independence of Vietnam and Korea. It also left a power vacuum in Central Asia filled by the nomadic Turks. Turkic peoples such as the Seljuks came to dominate from the fringes of China across Persia, subduing the Abbasid Dynasty in 1051 and defeating the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071, advancing their Persian-Turkic synthesis across Anatolia. Born to a Turkic father and Persian mother, the Abbasid sultan Mahmud of Ghazni embodied this fusion of Sunni Islam with the warrior spirit of the Seljuks, waging relentless campaigns of jihad into Hindustan. The rise of the Delhi Sultanate all but wiped out Buddhism in favor of a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture in literature, music, and architecture.
As Seljuk raiders sacked north India’s disparate Hindu kingdoms, southern India flourished under one of its longest-ruling dynasties, the Chola, who by the ninth century had reached the zenith of power as a seafaring empire. The Chola Dynasty invaded Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bengal, and Southeast Asia, spreading both Hindu and Buddhist culture across Khmer territory (Cambodia) and Java. The Chola achieved a decisive conquest over the Srivijaya in 1025, making them the masters of the Indian Ocean maritime network, with merchant guilds and temple banks financing ambitious commercial voyages to Yemen and East Africa.
As the Song Dynasty of China reconstituted centralized control in the late tenth century, it rejoined the thriving Indo-Pacific trade and shared its invention of the navigational compass
and its mastery of shipbuilding. The expansion of the Delhi Sultanate eastward and its conquest of Bengal in 1200 spread Islam through Malacca, Sumatra, and Java. Such were the Muslims’ seafaring capabilities that by the later Song Dynasty, many had become dominant traders in China’s import-export industry.
Though the Song never achieved the splendor of the Tang, their prosperity grew as they embraced a capitalist culture and the use of paper money. Indeed, the Song were the first Chinese dynasty to commercialize the “tribute system” that focused on gains from trade with secondary powers rather than heavy taxation of the populace. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Pagan unified central and coastal Burma as well as the Malay Peninsula, strengthening overland trade routes that linked the Bay of Bengal via Yunnan to China. The Chola, Song, and Srivijaya all competed to control strategic maritime passageways such as the Strait of Malacca but also amplified the linkages between their external trade and internal economies.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Eurasia, Europe had been stagnant for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. In the eleventh century, the pope sought to reconcile with Byzantium to repulse the advancing Turks and reclaim the holy land of Palestine. But by 1204, western Christian crusaders had instead plundered Constantinople, further dividing the Christian world and enabling greater gains by the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. The mystic scholar and poet Rumi came of age in this Turkic-Persian milieu, composing literary volumes that both preached a personal love of God and venerated music and dance as pathways to spiritual union. In Central Asia, the Seljuks faced tough resistance from the Karakhanid confederation of nomadic Turkic tribes, which held firm from Kashgar to Samarkand before splintering into several khanates that became Seljuk vassals. Turkic language and Islamic culture thrived in the madrassas of Bukhara.
