https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/secrets-silk-road Skip to main content Home User menu logged out * Subscribe * Sign in History Today October 2024 Subscription Offers Give a Gift Enter your keywords [Search ] [Search] Subscribe Search Toggle navigation Main menu * Home * The Magazine * Subscribe * Buy the Current Issue * Institutions * Explore the Digital Archive * Sign in Home Mini header menu * Search * Magazine * Latest * Subscribe [printnew] Subscribe Feature Secrets of the Silk Road The discovery of a cave full of manuscripts on the edge of the Gobi Desert reveals the details of everyday life on the Silk Road. Xin Wen | Published in History Today Volume 73 Issue 2 February 2023 frontispiece to the earliest complete block printed 'book', the Chinese translation of the Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra, AD 868, found in the Dunhuang caves in 1907 Frontispiece to the earliest complete block printed 'book', the Chinese translation of the Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra, AD 868, found in the Dunhuang caves in 1907. British Library/Bridgeman Images. On a summer night in 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu was sweeping sand from the entrance to the caves known as the Grottoes of Unparalleled Height near the town of Dunhuang in northwest China. These medieval caves housed Buddhist statues and murals dating from the fourth to the 14th centuries. By the late 19th century, however, this erstwhile centre of Buddhist worship had lost its lustre and few visitors came to see the caves anymore. Wang was originally from a violent, desolate county in Hubei province in south China and had fled in his late forties to Dunhuang, hoping to find peace. Perhaps the lone resident at the caves, Wang was eager to rebuild parts of them, not in their original forms, but as a Daoist 'Palace of Celestial Purity'. On this night in 1900, as he channelled running water in front of one of the caves, an opening appeared in its wall, 'giving out a flickering of light'. Intrigued, Wang dug through the opening and found a small hidden chamber about 13 square metres in size. As scholars would eventually realise, this chamber had been sealed in the early 11th century and remained undisturbed for 900 years. It contained 60,000 manuscripts. Left: Wang Yuanlu, c.1900. Wikimedia/Creative Commons. Right: Zhang Jinshan's bilingual document in Chinese and Khotanese, 10th century. British Library/Bridgeman Images. Documents in the caves, piled up for examination, 1908. British Library/Bridgeman Images. Two decades before Wang opened this hidden library, a scholar at the other end of the Eurasian continent made a different kind of discovery. Ferdinand von Richthofen was a German geologist and geographer. Unlike Wang, who stumbled upon the sealed chamber, von Richthofen was a trained scholar who spent years travelling in China and other parts of Asia. In a world that was mostly interested in 'civilisational centres' on the edges of Eurasia, von Richthofen cast his eyes towards the heartland of the continent, motivated in part by an ambitious project to construct a trans-Eurasian railroad. He took the long view in his efforts, reaching back to the records of ancient geographers for precedents of a connected Eurasia. In both the Greek geography of Marinus of Tyre (c.70-130), transmitted by Ptolemy, and in Chinese treatises on Central Asia by Sima Qian (c.145-86 BC) and Ban Gu (32-92), von Richthofen detected a tenuous route through which, it seemed, luxury goods like silk might have travelled from workshops in China to the markets of the Roman Empire. He called this route the 'Silk Road'. Wang and von Richthofen did not know each other, but their discoveries together opened up a new way of understanding the history of Eurasia. The continent would no longer be seen as a collection of disparate states and regions but as an entity that had been profoundly integrated and connected since antiquity. If von Richthofen provided us with a provocative concept - to think about ancient trans-Eurasian connections around a network of roads through which luxury goods such as silk were exchanged - Wang uncovered the most important archive of documents for understanding the Silk Road. Left: Wang Yuanlu, c.1900. Right: Zhang Jinshan's bilingual document in Chinese and Khotanese, 10th century. Left: Wang Yuanlu, c.1900. Wikimedia/Creative Commons. Right: Zhang Jinshan's bilingual document in Chinese and Khotanese, 10th century. British Library/Bridgeman Images. What exactly did Wang find in 1900? It took decades of cataloguing, transcription, translation, dating and interpretation of these manuscripts to answer the question with any precision. It is now clear that Chinese - and to a lesser extent, Tibetan - Buddhist texts account for the bulk of the collection. The chamber is thus known as a Buddhist 'library cave'. Non-Buddhist manuscripts, which account for about ten per cent of the entire collection, were likely to have been brought into the chamber in a more or less random fashion, as Buddhist monks collected whatever pieces of paper they could get their hands on. Many of these manuscripts were pasted at the back of tattered Buddhist texts as physical support. These non-Buddhist manuscripts included famous items from Nestorian Christian and Manichean manuscripts in Chinese, and the first Tibetan written history, to edicts issued by the Tang emperor and a Hebrew prayer book, but many more were commercial contracts, private letters, account books, official reports and governmental orders before they were deposited into the library cave. Collectively, they offer a panoramic view of Dunhuang society ranging far beyond the gates of the monastery where they were housed. In particular, because of Dunhuang's location at the crossroads of eastern Eurasia, these manuscripts record, in various forms, the life of long-distance travellers on the road. Life in Dunhuang In 982 a man named Zhang Jinshan arrived in Dunhuang, then an independent oasis kingdom, as part of a 115-member diplomatic mission from the Central Asian kingdom of Khotan about 1,800 kilometres to the west. During his stay in Dunhuang, Zhang produced a scroll of bilingual texts that eventually entered the library cave. On one side, he wrote a brief note in Chinese on top, and a text in Khotanese, a Middle Iranian language with no modern descendants, below. The Chinese text runs vertically in accordance with the standard Chinese writing practice at the time; but instead of starting from the left the way Chinese was conventionally written, Zhang began from the right. This Chinese note relates Zhang's personal experiences in Dunhuang: he lit ceremonial lamps at the Buddhist caves, burned incense to honour the Buddha, turned the sutra-wheels and initiated the project of constructing a stupa, all in the hopes of safe passage on the road. The Khotanese text is a panegyric that compares the Khotanese king to the legendary Indian king Asoka (r.268-32 BC) and describes Zhang's diplomatic mission, the purpose of which was to ask for the hand of a 'queen, pure, born among the Chinese' in Dunhuang. a traveller riding a Bactrian camel. Chinese, Tang Dynasty, seventh-ninth century. Traveller riding Bactrian camels. Both Chinese, Tang Dynasty, seventh-ninth century. Pictures from History/ Bridgeman Images. In addition to this manuscript, Zhang left several other texts in the Dunhuang library cave. His enthusiasm for writing - and the incredible good fortune of their survival - makes him one of the best-documented travellers from the Dunhuang archive. In the colophon of a collection of stories of the Buddha's previous lives ( Jatakastava), Zhang (whose name is written as Ca Kima Sana in Khotanese) lists the names of his parents, wife, siblings and two daughters as benefactors of the writing of this Buddhist text. Some of them have names transcribed from Chinese, just as Zhang Jinshan (Jinshan meaning 'Golden Mountain'), while others have Chinese surnames (Zhang, or Ca in Khotanese) with Khotanese given names. Zhang's Sino Khotanese family might have been descendants of Chinese soldiers and officials posted in Khotan during the height of the Chinese rule in the Tang dynasty, two centuries earlier. By Zhang's time, however, the world was much broader. He produced texts in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism, which had gained wide popularity in Tang China and Tibet. He was also interested in Indian medicine and commissioned a copy of Siddhasara on palm-leaf manuscripts. These texts were likely to have travelled with Zhang to Dunhuang on his diplomatic trip and were then donated to a Buddhist monastery, disseminating new knowledge from Central Asia to Dunhuang. Nor was Zhang merely looking to the east, from Khotan to Dunhuang. On the other side of the bilingual scroll, Zhang copied a detailed itinerary from Khotan to India, which mentions a king named Abhimanyugupta, who ruled from 958 to 972. At the end of his copies of the Jatakastava and Siddhasara, both Sanskrit texts translated into Khotanese, Zhang Jinshan signed his name, in a cheeky manner, in Sogdian script as kyms'n and cw kyms'n. Sogdian is another extinct Middle Iranian language spoken in oasis kingdoms in Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan). These many documents reveal the life of a Sino-Khotanese diplomatic traveller who had broad interests in geography and contemporary politics, Indian medicine, Vajrayana Buddhism and Sogdian writing. Zhang was the product of a tightly integrated Eurasian world. Barbarian bread The multilingual (Chinese, Tibetan, Khotanese, Sogdian, Uyghur and Sanskrit) Dunhuang manuscripts, most of which date from the ninth and the tenth centuries, show that Zhang was not an exception. In fact, the overwhelming majority of long-distance travellers recorded in Dunhuang manuscripts were people like Zhang, who were making their journeys for diplomatic purposes. In a legal petition, a monk who served as an envoy for the Dunhuang government described his intense trips to all three major neighbours of Dunhuang within two years. In an expenditure account from the Dunhuang government, envoys from various Central Asian kingdoms received urns of 'daily wine' for many months at a time. A Khotanese envoy, writing in an official report, complained about having neither food nor clothing to support his trip further to the east beyond Dunhuang. Elsewhere a biographical account, meant to accompany a portrait painting of the deceased, celebrated its protagonist as an envoy who 'travelled to the Chinese court five times'. In a personal note, a Dunhuang official who had just returned from the east expressed relief that it was the Chinese envoys travelling just after him who were robbed and killed by Tibetan bandits, not him. Another Dunhuang envoy was not as fortunate: he was trapped by the neighbouring Uyghur state of Ganzhou to the east of Dunhuang on his way back from a successful journey to China and murdered. Buddha statue, 1935. Left: Buddha statue, 1935. Right: Buddhas and bodhisattvas, Dunhuang caves, 1935. British Library Board/Bridgeman Images/Desmond Parsons Collection. The minutiae of the envoys' lives are also visible in the Dunhuang documents. We learn that they often ate 'barbarian bread', a kind of naan made from fermented dough of flour mixed with oil, which was baked and then dried; they used geographical manuals to locate springs and other water sources on the road and carried cauldrons to heat up water. Camels and horses were hired by envoys to carry food, water and luxury goods; when travellers were struggling to communicate with those they encountered on the road, they often relied on bilingual phrasebooks - examples found in Dunhuang include texts written in Sino-Tibetan, Sino-Khotanese, Sanskrit-Khotanese and Turco Khotanese - to conduct simple conversations. On reaching their destinations, envoys often exchanged these luxury goods as gifts with their host: in an 878 Dunhuang mission to Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty in China, in exchange for one piece of jade, one antelope horn and a yak tail from Dunhuang, the Tang government offered 1848 pi (about 22,000 metres) of silk, 42 sets of clothes and 19 pieces of silverware. Objects taken on the Silk Road often travelled further and lasted longer than their human companions. Daily necessities and luxury items such as silk, jade and gold, along with the camels, horses, elephants and other animals used to transport them, were not entirely controlled by people. The appeal of a potent thing, like an especially large piece of jade, could itself drive several rounds of diplomatic trips over thousands of kilometres and, like people, these items also underwent transformations during the long months spent on the road. A piece of brocade made in the Central Asian kingdom of Kucha was just that when produced; but when it arrived in Dunhuang, it became 'Kucha brocade'. An elephant, most likely from India, was captured by the Khotanese army in a battle with its western neighbour, the Turkic Qarakhanids, in 970; when the Khotanese king proposed to send the elephant to the court of the Song dynasty in Kaifeng, it was described not as war booty, but as a 'dancing elephant', ready to perform for the Chinese emperor. In these cases, the skeins of silk transported from Chang'an to Dunhuang in 878 and the dancing elephant going from Khotan to Kaifeng in 970 were both diplomatic travellers on the Silk Road, just like the Khotanese envoy Zhang Jinshan. In the largely riverless landscape of Central Eurasia, the most powerful means of transportation was using domesticated Bactrian camels. To make full use of their capacity, the envoys-to-be invested heavily, sometimes recklessly, to acquire camels, but the high cost of raising and caring for them meant that even the richest travellers could have only so many, which limited the quantity of goods they could bring on their trips. Travellers therefore opted to bring mostly high-value, low-weight luxury goods at the expense of food and water; as a result, envoys acquired much of the food they needed from their hosts on the road. Left: two young boys riding an elephant. Chinese, Qing dynasty, c.19th century.Right: A king of Khotan, fresco from the Dunhuang caves, 10th century. Left: two young boys riding an elephant. Chinese, Qing dynasty, c.19th century. Pictures from History/ Bridgeman Images. Right: A king of Khotan, fresco from the Dunhuang caves, 10th century. Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images. The manuscripts discovered in Dunhuang also illuminate the political, economic and social impact of the Silk Road on the city and the broader region. We see that Dunhuang envoys often spent astronomical amounts to fund their trips: the investment to hire a camel for a journey to China described in one contract was enough to purchase a small house in Dunhuang. These expensive and risky journeys made economic sense because diplomatic travellers, like those participating in the 878 Dunhuang mission to Chang'an, often received prized gifts that more than offset their investment. The influx of these gifts and other income from diplomatic journeys profoundly reshaped the economy of Dunhuang and other Silk Road oasis kingdoms. At the same time, the kings of these states engaged in constant political negotiation and information exchange in order to keep the road safe and open. In peaceful times, these kings would celebrate the 'road that made us two states a family', but when one king decided to block the flow of travellers for one reason or another, the other would use military force to try to 'reopen' the road. Songbooks The Dunhuang manuscripts also show how normal people in the region thought about the Silk Road. In a song performed in a New Year's exorcist ritual, during which people from all walks of life gathered in Dunhuang and danced along its streets to chase away ill spirits and welcome a better new year, we hear people's hopes: The ten thousand commoners sing songs with full bellies like drums, ... Do not worry about the eastern road being blocked. In the spring, the heavenly envoys will arrive, and they will contribute large jin-silks with coiled dragons, and different kinds of damask, gauze, plain silk, coloured silk. ... All within the border [of Dunhuang] chant the song of happiness and enjoy a long life like Ancestor Peng! The crowd in Dunhuang wished for happiness and long life, remembering a time when kings ruled in the manner of ancient sage kings such as Yao and Shun, and commoners prospered like 'Ancestor Peng', who lived for 800 years. In this song, these better times will not come about through the establishment of any new social institution, the realisation of any moral or religious obligations, or the dissemination of any school of thought. Instead, the key to this ideal world is the network of roads that connect Dunhuang to its neighbours. Singers of this song reassured their audience that the road leading eastward to north China would remain open, allowing Chinese envoys to bring silk the following spring. Meanwhile, the road to the west to Khotan would be smoother than cotton cloth and Khotanese envoys would offer jade as tribute. To the singers, the operation of diplomacy was crucial to the happiness of the Dunhuang people. the thousand Buddhas, Dunhuang caves, 1935. Left: the thousand Buddhas, Dunhuang caves, 1935. Right: detail from a mural, Dunhuang caves. British Library Board/Bridgeman Images/Desmond Parsons Collection. The deep engagement with the world of the Silk Road is further discernible from a children's song from Dunhuang, which celebrates the city's close relation with its neighbours: Foreigners in four directions all come and kneel down; Offering camels and sending horses without interruption. The khaghan of Ganzhou personally dispatched envoys; And expressed the wish to be the son of the Aye ['father', meaning the king of Dunhuang]. The road to the Han at this day has no obstacles; The journeys back and forth cause no concern. The singer applauds the peaceful relationship with Ganzhou, because it ensured that the 'road to the Han' that connected Dunhuang to north China remained unobstructed. The singer also extols, like the lyricists of the New Year's song, luxury goods such as camels and horses that were offered to Dunhuang because of an open road. What is surprising, however, is the identity of the singer: 'This children's song came from our little son.' Part of the Dunhuang caves containing frescos from the Tang Dynasty, China. Part of the Dunhuang caves containing frescos from the Tang Dynasty, China. British Library Board/Bridgeman Images/Desmond Parsons Collection. In premodern China, children's songs were often considered vox dei, or oracles from heaven. Here, the parents of a little boy recorded his 'babblings' because they saw them as an auspicious message. After laying out the natural - indeed, the supernatural - genesis of this song, the parents ask to be compensated for their effort in presenting these lines to the king of Dunhuang: We pray that you bestow one pi of jin-silk on us; So that we can make a set of daily clothing. Rather than land or official titles the parents ask for the very thing that defines the connections that their boy's song celebrates: silk. Were their request granted, this family would be among those enriched by connections on the Silk Road. Roads of silk In these songs and other Dunhuang manuscripts, all discovered in the small chamber reopened by Wang Yuanlu on that summer night in 1900, von Richthofen's idea of the Silk Road finds rich, but also surprising, resonance. The stories of these travellers show that the two elements of the term - the 'silk' and the 'road' - are both central to trans-regional connections in and around Dunhuang, making the 'Silk Road' not just a convenient shorthand with which we are saddled, but a term that is historically accurate. At the same time, Dunhuang manuscripts describe the travellers as 'envoys' and the goods they exchanged as 'gifts'. The activities of these envoys almost always included delivering official letters, meeting with kings and the exchange of items. The infrastructure of the road was maintained by the different governments of eastern Eurasia, which offered accommodation and replenishment of provisions for travellers. The goods that these individuals exchanged and transported occasionally entered the everyday markets, but more often were stored in the treasuries of kings and the elite. Travellers without insignia showing their official status were frequently prevented from participating in diplomacy. Detail from the Sutra of the Ten Kings describing the ten stages through which the soul must pass after death. Dunhuang, 10th century. Detail from the Sutra of the Ten Kings describing the ten stages through which the soul must pass after death. Dunhuang, 10th century. British Library Board/Bridgeman Images. It is, then, hardly a coincidence that the 'Society for Long Distance Travel' in Dunhuang, a mutual-help group organised to offer financial and social support to long-distance travellers, states explicitly in its regulations that 'trips for private purposes do not fall within the parameters of this stipulation'. Aside from the private business that envoys sometimes engaged in when they were on the road, there is very little that can be described as strictly commercial in the stories of long-distance travellers found in Dunhuang manuscripts. In revealing the day-to-day lives of envoys on the Silk Road, from the clothes that they wore and the food they consumed to the gifts they exchanged and the goods and animals that accompanied them, the contents of the Dunhuang cave convey the significance of the route as a form of diplomacy. Journeying on the Silk Road and navigating linguistic boundaries and dangerous terrain, these envoys participated in a complex system of cultural reciprocity and political negotiation between Eurasian kings and their realms. Unlike the Greco-Roman histories and Chinese annals that von Richthofen and other subsequent historians of the Silk Road relied on, the Dunhuang manuscripts reveal the inner life of a different kind of Silk Road, not organised around commercial interest, but animated by the competition for prestige and glory among Eurasian kings, who dispatched envoys through the difficult but traversable terrain of an integrated central Eurasia. Xin Wen is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University and author of The King's Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023). AsiaChina Related Articles Jewel of the Empire: the Hagia Sophia Succession in the Silk Roads Study by Albrecht Durer, 1508 (c) akg-images. The Hidden History of Black Diplomacy Popular articles Silk Road Secrets of the Silk Road The assasination of George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, and favourite to King James IV and I, by Romeyn de Hooghe, 1699. Herzog August Library. Public Domain. 'The Scapegoat' by Lucy Hughes-Hallett review Recently published Artisans' Dwellings, Petticoat Square, London, by William Haywood, 19th century. Bridgeman Images. Solving the Victorian Housing Crisis King Mongkut of Siam, by John Thomson, 1865. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain. 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