The Silk Road: A New History Read online

  The most plausible explanation is the simplest: multiple nomadic groups moved across vast stretches of territory in the third and second centuries BCE, but we cannot trust Chinese observers writing three centuries later to give an accurate account of these migrations. Although the Chinese ascribed a Chinese homeland to the Yuezhi, we can only be certain that the Yuezhi were in Bactria (the lands between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus River in north central Afghanistan, with its capital at Balkh) in 138 BCE, because that is where Zhang Qian encountered them. Any claims about their earlier movements must remain speculative.

  Following the same arduous route through the mountains that the ancient migrants had taken, Stein finally entered Xinjiang. He visited a series of oasis towns—Yarkand, Khotan, Keriya, Niya—strung along the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert like beads on a necklace. Most were a day’s travel apart; travelers had to prepare enough water and supplies for those legs of the journey that were longer. In Keriya, a “respectable old” farmer named Abdullah told Stein about seeing old ruins in the desert. The Niya ruins were 75 miles (120 km) north of the modern town of Niya, now called Minfeng, which lies on today’s Khotan-Minfeng highway. When Stein arrived in Minfeng, his camel driver met an “enterprising young villager” named Ibrahim who tried to sell him the wooden tablet with Kharoshthi writing shown in the photo at the beginning of the chapter.

  Stein immediately hired Ibrahim to guide Stein’s work crew north along the Niya river to the last inhabited village, the site of an active shrine to a revered Muslim teacher, Imam Jafar Sadik. There the river ended. Stein and his men followed the dry riverbed north for another 24 miles (39 km) to the ancient site of Niya. The site consisted of the ruins of many wooden houses lying in the sand and a Buddhist brick tower, or stupa, shown in color plate 6.

  Characteristically, Stein recorded his first impressions of the site in great detail:

  Shrivelled trunks of ancient fruit-trees appeared rising from the low sand. Moving on northward for less than two miles I soon sighted the first two “old houses,” standing on what looked at first sight like small elevated plateaus, but which closer observation proved to be merely portions of the original loess soil that had escaped the erosion proceeding all round.…

  Marching about two miles further north, across broad swelling dunes, I arrived at the ruined structure of sun-dried bricks of which Abdullah had already spoken at Keriya.… It proved, as I expected, to be the remains of a small Stupa, buried for the most part under the slope of a high conical sandhill.…

  As I retired to my first night’s rest among these silent witnesses of ancient habitations my main thought was how many of the precious documents on wood, which Ibrahim declared he had left behind at the ruin “explored” by him a year before, were still waiting to be recovered.

  Drawn by the direct evidence of connections among civilizations, Stein visited ancient Niya four times—for fifteen days in 1901, eleven in 1906, five in 1916, and a week in 1931. Each time he unearthed new houses, Buddhist remains, and documents on wood.

  The Fourth Expedition did not go as smoothly as the first three.20 By the 1930s, the Chinese authorities had passed laws stipulating that only excavations jointly conducted by foreigners with Chinese collaborators could remove artifacts from the country. Working closely with British authorities, Stein thought that he had obtained permission to excavate in Xinjiang, but when he arrived in Kashgar, the local authorities assigned guards to make sure that he did not take anything. At Niya, Stein wandered around the site trying to distract his keepers, while his assistant, Abdul Ghafar, looked surreptitiously for documents. When they returned to Kashgar, Stein had somehow managed to collect 159 packets of materials.

  Yet his expedition failed: the Chinese authorities did not allow Stein to ship anything out of the country, and the artifacts have since disappeared. All that remain from that expedition are Stein’s meticulous notes and photographs. From Kashgar, a disconsolate Stein wrote to his friend Percy Stafford Allen: “I said farewell for the last time to that favorite ancient site where I could live more than anywhere else in touch with a dead past.”21

  Even before he arrived at the site for the first time, Stein realized that he had to identify the ancient Chinese name of the site before he could tap the extensive geographical information in the Chinese official histories. The History of the Han Dynasty and its sequel, The History of the Later Han, give capsule descriptions of all the different kingdoms of the northwest: their distance from the capital, their population (total number of households, individuals, and “those who could bear arms”), and an overview of their history. Established around 60 BCE and dismantled in 16 CE, the office of the protector general, the Han-dynasty official in charge of the Western Regions, provided this information to the history office in the central government.22

  A century later, the staff of the history office drew on this information to describe the various oasis states of the northwest.23 They wrote that the Shanshan Kingdom (using the Chinese name for Kroraina) was located 6,100 li (approximately 1,550 miles, or 2,500 km) from the Han-dynasty capital of Chang’an.24 (The actual distance from Loulan to Chang’an is 1,120 miles, or 1,793 km). The distances given in the official histories were probably calculated by approximating how far an animal could travel in a day and then multiplying that rate by the number of days it took to reach the destination. These distances are not exact, but they do indicate the positions of the different oasis kingdoms in relation to each other.

  In 1901, Stein found a wooden seal with four characters that said “edict of the king of Shanshan,” which the Han dynasty, or a later dynasty, had bestowed on the local ruler with whom they had diplomatic relations.25 Stein believed that Niya was too small to have been the capital of Shanshan. He uncovered only about fifty dwellings at the site. (According to Stein’s numbering system, “N.xiv.i.1” referred to “N” for Niya, the 14th house he discovered, room 1, and the first item discovered in room 1, whether an artifact or document.) Since then archeologists have unearthed one hundred more structures, far too few for the 14,100 people living in 1,570 households mentioned in the official history. In Serindia, published in 1921, Stein identified the ancient site of Niya as the seat of the Jingjue Kingdom, which reportedly had 480 households and 3,360 individuals.26 Even these figures are too large for the site. Some say that more houses lie still undiscovered under the sand, but it is also possible that the Han-dynasty population figures for the distant kingdoms of the northwest were not accurate.

  While most scholars accept Stein’s identification of Niya as Jingjue, his view that the archeological site of Loulan was the capital of the Shanshan Kingdom remains controversial. Like Niya, the site of Loulan has a single brick stupa, the wooden remains of houses, and a few wooden carvings in Gandharan style. Loulan was the Chinese transliteration of “Kroraina,” which denoted both the name of the kingdom and its capital in the Kharoshthi documents.27

  Since 108 BCE, The History of the Han records, the Han dynasty had occasionally sent armies to attack Loulan but had never conquered the city, which was the capital of a small kingdom, also called Loulan. For several decades, the ruler of Loulan had tried to maintain amicable relations with the two rival states of the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu peoples living in modern-day Mongolia by sending princes as royal hostages to each of these empires.

  The strategy failed in 77 BCE, when the brother of the reigning Loulan king informed the Han officials that the king favored the Xiongnu. The Chinese sent an emissary who first feigned friendship, then invited the king to his tent and killed him. Han armies then invaded Loulan, and the Chinese renamed the kingdom Shanshan. The Han dynasty established a new capital for Shanshan at Endere (modern Ruoqiang), and stationed the official charged with overseeing all Han-dynasty activities in the Western Regions in Loulan.28

  The histories report that Loulan was occupied for more than five centuries, starting in 77 BCE, but few finds suggest such a long period of occupation. The most direct evidence o
f Chinese presence is newly minted coins, most likely from a Chinese garrison, outside of Loulan. Stein discovered 211 round bronze coins with square holes, distributed evenly over an area some 30 yards (27 m) long and 3–4 feet (ca. 1 m) wide.29 The coins, apparently freshly minted, were of the wuzhu (literally “five-grain,” a measure of weight) type and dated from 86 BCE to 1 BCE.30 Stein explained:

  It was clear that all these coins had dropped from a caravan moving in the very direction in which I had supposed the ancient route to lie. They must have got loose from the string which tied them and gradually dropped out unobserved through an opening in their bag or case. The swaying movement of the camel or cart in which this receptacle was carried sufficiently explains why the line marked by the scattered coins had the width above indicated.31

  About 50 yards (ca. 45 m) away from the last coin, one of Stein’s workmen found a pile of unused arrowheads, surely part of the same shipment of military supplies as the wuzhu coins. The coincidence of coins and arrowheads suggests that in Han China, payments to soldiers constituted a major source of fresh coins in a given region.32

  A small number of Chinese documents from Niya, and probably dating to this early period, suggest a nonmilitary Chinese presence during the Han dynasty as well. House 14 had two rooms in addition to a large hall measuring 56 feet (17 m) by 41 feet (12.5 m).33

  Inside the hall, Stein’s men dug through a refuse heap and found eleven wood slips with Chinese characters on both sides; eight were legible. Each records the name of the giver and the recipient—the king, his mother, his wife, the heir apparent in the royal family, and a courtier.34 The front side of one, for example, says “Minister Chengde bows his head to the ground and sincerely presents this piece of jade. He bows again to ask,” while the reverse gives the name of the recipient, in this case, “the great king.”35 These tags suggest that a Chinese advisor, who visited, or lived at, the Jingjue court sometime early in the first century CE, taught the ruler to attach them to gifts. Three of the wood slips from room 14 use the distinct language of the usurper Wang Mang (reigned 9–23 CE), who founded the Xin (“New”) dynasty, a fourteen-year-long interregnum between the Former and Later Han dynasties.36 Several other Chinese documents from the refuse pit in Niya house 14 mention envoys: “The seat of the envoy of the King of Ferghana [Dayuan]; below him on the left, the Great Yuezhi.”37 These various documents all indicate that the Chinese must have had some type of outpost at Niya before and after the start of the Common Era.

  According to Chinese laws, every time a traveler arrived in a new place within China, he had to present his guosuo travel document to local officials who verified that he was the person whose name appeared on the pass. Travel passes found at Niya, which date to the third century, state whether or not the traveler was a free man, give a physical description, and specify his destination. One, for example, describes a thirty-year-old traveler “of medium build, black hair, big eyes, with moustache and beard.” They also list the itinerary of the travelers, who had to keep to a predetermined route. Two of the wood slips instruct officials what to do if someone’s pass was missing, but do not reveal what actually happened when local officials discovered the problem. Did the border officials simply issue a new pass? Or did they punish the errant merchants? Regardless, Chinese officials at Niya were clearly aware of existing regulations about travel passes.38

  Assessing Chinese power in the region during this early period has direct political implications for today. The Chinese government’s legitimacy in Xinjiang rests partially on the precedent of Han-dynasty control. But that claim seems weaker if local rulers were largely independent and simply hosted Chinese garrisons and received the occasional advisor or envoy, as surviving documents indicate.

  HOUSE 26 AT NIYA

  After he finished excavating house 26 at Niya in 1906, Stein asked his workers to place the double wooden bracket that provided support for the main room’s ceiling on a pillar so that it could be photographed. Typically Gandharan, the carved wooden bracket shows a vase with fruit and flowers at the center and a mythical animal with wings, a dragon’s head, and a horse’s body. Measuring 9 feet long and 1.5 wide (2.74 m by .46 m), the bracket was too large to transport. Stein’s men sawed it into pieces and hollowed it out so that it could be shipped to London. Courtesy of the Board of the British Library.

  Whatever they suggest about the Chinese presence at the turn of the Common Era, the wooden slips from house 14 at Niya reveal little about the lives of those who lived at the site. Fortunately, material evidence supplements these early Chinese documents. Niya’s ancient residents joined several wooden beams together to form a foundation and slotted vertical poles into the floor beams to make walls. They then packed the walls with grasses and mats to protect occupants from the wind. They crafted roofs from beams, too. The houses ranged from small dwellings with just one room to larger houses with multiple rooms with walls over 16 feet (5 m) long. Stein and Hedin found a few elaborate carvings at Niya and Loulan; their designs matched wooden objects made in the Gandhara region, confirming that their makers had come to Xinjiang from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  The extreme dryness of the Niya and Loulan sites has preserved about one hundred ancient corpses of the residents. At Loulan Stein found one corpse with “fair hair,” while another had a “red moustache.” Both he and Hedin sensed that these desiccated corpses did not look either Chinese or Indian. All subsequent excavators in the region have marveled at the excellent state of preservation of corpses whose light skin, fair hair, and heights nearing six feet (1.8 m) mark them as Caucasoid. It seems most likely that the original inhabitants of the Kroraina Kingdom, like many others living in Central Asia, originally came from somewhere on the Iranian plateau.39

  Burials at the Niya and Loulan sites have much to tell us about the lives of those interred there because they carried their most precious articles with them to the afterlife. In 1959 a team of ten archeologists from the Xinjiang Museum entered the desert on camels (lacking desert vehicles) and walked seven days before reaching the site where they discovered the graves. They found a huge coffin measuring 6.5 feet (2 m) long with four wooden legs, which they dated between the second and fourth centuries CE.40 The coffin held the corpses of a man and woman and two wooden staffs for carrying their possessions. The man carried a bow and four arrows in an arrow holder, while the woman had a makeup box along with combs and other female grooming articles. Although the clothing of the deceased couple had decayed wherever it touched their skin, the archeologists managed to recover pieces from more than ten different textiles, some cotton, some silk. The presence of the two fabrics testified to Niya’s location midway on the overland routes linking China with the West.

  While the knowledge of how to raise silkworms and to spin silk originated in central China and traveled west, cotton traveled east to Niya from West Asia. This and another tie-dyed piece of cotton are the earliest cotton textiles unearthed in China to date.41 A Chinese encyclopedia reports that in 331 CE the king of Ferghana (in western Uzbekistan) gave cotton cloth and glass to a north Chinese ruler, confirming the introduction of cotton from the west.42

  COTTON TEXTILE FROM NIYA

  A distinctive printed cotton textile from the tomb had different squares showing a checkerboard pattern, a Chinese dragon, a goddess holding a cornucopia, and the tail and two paws of an animal whose body has been cut off. The dragon motif is clearly of Chinese origin, but the goddess is Tyche, the Greek city guardian who frequently appears in the art of Afghanistan. Because Tyche is often paired with Hercules, it is likely that the paws and the tail are those of Hercules’s lion.

  The Niya site also produced cocoons and seeds from mulberry trees, the main foodstuff of silkworms. The residents knew how to spin silk thread and how to make a simple tabby weave (one thread over, one under—a basket weave), but they did not have the sophisticated looms required to make the elaborate silk brocades found in the coffin. Those found in 1959 included gloves and socks for the man
and a pillow for the couple, all cut from the same bolt of cloth with seven Chinese characters woven into the design: “increased longevity over the extended years and multiple sons and grandsons.” These twin goals—a long life and many male descendants—date back to the earliest times in China. These textiles, which closely resemble one of the brocades found at Palmyra, were clearly of Chinese manufacture, as was a mirror found with them. Four characters along the rim of bronze mirror urged the deceased tomb owner: “You should be a high official.”43 While it is unclear if the deceased couple could read Chinese, the placement of the inscribed textiles and mirror in the coffin indicate that these were valued items.

  A 1995 expedition to Niya unearthed eight more burials, three in rectangular coffins, five in boat-shaped coffins made from poplar trees that had been hollowed out after being set on fire. The coffin in the largest tomb (M3) contained the desiccated bodies of a man and a woman that were remarkably well preserved (shown in color plate 7). As in the tomb found in 1959, gender roles were apparent. The man was buried with bows, arrows, a small dagger, and a knife sheath; his wife had a makeup box, a bronze mirror of Chinese manufacture, combs, a needle, and small bolts of cloth. Knife marks stretching from the man’s ear to his neck are from the wound that caused his death, while his wife’s body was unscarred, suggesting death by suffocation so that she could be interred at the same time.