In 414 AD, the Chinese monk Faxian returned home from a long journey to the holy places of Buddhism in India. On his return, he recounted his religious experiences and, above all, his many adventures. The worst for him was the journey through the Taklamakan desert: “There was not a bird to be seen in the distance, let alone animals. Even if I looked carefully in all directions to find the right path across the desert, I looked in vain. The only signposts were the dried bones of the dead.”
Those who travelled the Silk Road in antiquity or in the Middle Ages could only rely on their right or wrong assessment of the risks. There was too much chance of getting lost in snowy mountainsides, inhospitable deserts or falling prey to robbers. Some of the mountain ranges, with their sheer cliffs, huge debris fields and perpetual glaciers, seemed insurmountable.
Yet those who managed to cross the Taklamakan desert to the foothills of the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Pamirs were not so rare. While the trails passed far below the year-round snow-capped mountain peaks, crossing the mountain ranges required a tremendous amount of physical and mental effort. Similarly inhospitable as the mountain ranges were the areas where perpetual drought reigned. Many of the plateaus, troughs and slopes are still only part of the arid belt that stretches from the north of Africa to the tip of East Asia, and there is also the Gobi Desert, which is the second largest desert in the world.
The sand dunes, which are constantly shifting in the wind, can be up to 200 metres high. The sand carried around by the wind in the desert Taklamakan can be yellow, grey or brownish in colour, and even reddish or black in Kizilkum. Karakum itself is 81 metres below sea level, and the oasis of Turfan is 154 metres below sea level. It is blisteringly hot in summer, and temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees in winter. What were people looking for in such inhospitable places, what drew them to go further into the unknown?
Since pre-Christian times, there have been trade links between Europe, India and China, and one export commodity has been at the heart of this trade for centuries: Chinese silk. All of us have heard of the Silk Road and most of us do not think of it as a specific word, even though it is only a little over 100 years old and was first mentioned in a work by the German geographer and geologist Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen. Since then, it has been used by everyone, but today we know that it does not just refer to a single trade route, but to a whole network of different routes linking East and West. In later times, they were used by priests, monks, craftsmen, artists and even explorers, who travelled at the behest of emperors, kings, princes and entrepreneurs, and gave us the first information about the Silk Roads and the people who built the towns and caravanserais here, of which only the ruins have survived to this day.
This is particularly true of the southern part of the Silk Road, which served its purpose as a mighty trade route through cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara a thousand years ago, before touching down in Persia and Syria and ending on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It was different in the northern part of the route, in the area between Mongolia, Siberia and the steppes of Asian Russia, where the route ended in Ukraine. There, the route was dominated by dynamic nomadic peoples who had the fastest means of transport of the time: horses.
Restless nomadic tribes constantly moved along this route in search of suitable pastures for their horses. This is where the great difference between the northern part of the route, which allowed entire migrations of peoples across the steppes, and the southern part, which was mainly used by trading caravans, becomes apparent. Although silk was only one of the products that travelled east-west, it was one of the most important. Silk, whose value in Rome was then estimated at gold, gave this route a unique significance.
There were several Silk Roads
Ancient Chinese records say that Emperor Huang-ti, who is said to have reigned for three hundred years, is credited with inventing silk weaving, and his wife, Xi-ling-shi, is considered to be the first silk weaver. On a walk in the garden, she saw a silk caterpillar enclosed. She thought that the threads in which the caterpillar was wrapped could be unwound and used. She was right, and an important new chapter in economic history began.
But this is just one of the many legends about the origins of silk. In the beginning, the wearing of silk was only a privilege of the Chinese emperors, who soon realised the importance of having a monopoly on the silk trade, and the export of silkworms was punishable by death. As a result, until the 4th century AD, China was the sole producer of pure silk. Only in Korea did early Chinese emigrants manage to bring mulberry seeds and silkworm eggs.
For more than 2000 years, silk-making was a secret and a privilege of the Chinese, and silk-making became a national cult. Chinese empresses personally supervised the planting of mulberry trees and the cultivation of silkworms. The rearing of silkworms was extremely demanding, as the eggs required a constant temperature, and once the caterpillars hatched, they had to be fed twice an hour with fresh, finely chopped mulberry leaves.
During their growth, they not only needed to be protected from cold and draughts, but also from too much noise. When the caterpillars had grown to the point where they began to wrap around, they were placed on a rice straw grid when the temperature was suitable, and the resulting cocoons were of a particularly high quality. They were then thrown into the water to remove the sticky mass. This was followed by drying and unwinding to obtain a base for the raw silk. Only then did the technical process of spinning and weaving begin.
Silk was the beginning of civilisation in China, the early age of capitalism. Silk was not only a proof of wealth for the wearer, it was capital, the first currency, the first convertible money between East and West. It was so precious that for a long time merchants were forbidden to wear it, even though they had it in abundance in their warehouses. It was the equivalent of gold, which, with the advent of silk, ceased to be the exclusive means of adorning the dead. This fulfilled one of the conditions for the creation of the Silk Road in pre-Christian times. Silk had an almost magical effect on all who saw it, touched it, wore it.
No one knows when or from where the first trading caravan headed west from China; there were probably sporadic trade contacts between the various provinces of the east and west before then, until the traders realised that they needed a fixed place where they could meet their customers from near and far. When they realised that it was possible to sell their products at a significant profit in such a place, they set off on the first trading caravan.
Since ancient times, people have known places where nomads have met to exchange their products and find out what’s new in the rest of the world. These places were in oases, where there was plenty of water, or at important points in deserts and steppes. The routes to get there were not chosen at random, following safe routes of arrival and avoiding places where there were marauders, sandstorms, difficult-to-cross gorges or fast-rising rivers. These routes were never the shortest, but they were the safest. There were permanent resting places, caravanserais, settlements and even safe fortified towns along them.
Trading on these routes was not initially a privilege of the state, although it soon realised that it could also fill the state’s coffers with taxes. That is why the Han emperors in particular realised that if they wanted to make money, they had to support these places militarily. This was a very expensive thing to do, and the result was that product prices went up. All the profits, customs duties, bribes and the cost of maintaining the military crews were eventually reflected in higher selling prices.
Of course, there has never been a continuous route between China’s capital Chang’an and the eastern Mediterranean. It has always been interrupted by parts that were difficult to cross. It was necessary to wait for the situation to improve, avoid these places and return. The Silk Road was thus one of the most precarious and dangerous trade routes in the world. Today, we can ask whether the Central Asian cultures, about which we know much more today, would have arisen at all if it had not been for the trade between China and the Mediterranean basin, if it had not been for the Chinese silk that provided the driving force. This is not just about silk as a luxury export commodity, of course, but about silk as a currency, since it was only through such use that silk achieved the importance that made it a Chinese monopoly by the 4th century AD.
The Silk Road could be divided into several sectors. It started in the imperial city of Changan and headed west until it reached Lanzhou, crossed the fertile Hexi Corridor and split into southern and northern sections at the eastern end of the Gobi Desert at Anxi. The southern part followed the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, while the northern part crossed part of the Gobi Desert and followed the northern part of the Taklamakan Desert. The two parts of the route joined at Kashgar. The crossing of the glacial Pamirs and the western part of Tian Shan was only possible in the summer months and the destination was the fertile Fergana Valley in Kyrgyzstan.
Following the Sirdar River, the route then headed to the Uzbek cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, and after crossing the Amudar River, reached the Turkmen town of Merw, on the southern edge of the Karakum Desert. The route had to continue across the Iranian high plateau and desert belt, where there were several oases supplied with water from underground sources. Via Zargos, the route reached the fertile plain of Iraq, with Baghdad as its political centre.
The crossing of the Syrian desert was fast, and from here various routes led to Damascus and Aleppo, and then to the Mediterranean Sea at Antioch or Tyros. Of course, these Mediterranean cities did not mean the breaking of the Silk Road. From here it was possible to reach the cities of North Africa, which were in contact with the trading centres south of the Sahara, or to continue on to the ports of southern Europe. From the route thus mapped out, however, there were also side routes to the north or south, to the plateau of Tibet, to Pakistan and India, and to the north to Mongolia.
But what were the caravans travelling along the Silk Road to the Mediterranean guided by? During the reign of the Khans, there were two voluminous chronicles that not only described history, but also provided general knowledge. These were the Tsien-Han-schu, which described events up to 24 AD, and the Hou-Han-schu, which described events up to 220 AD. The latter, in particular, described the western provinces of the empire and the countries bordering them.
It not only listed the towns and their population by name, but also the distances between them and the existing roads or routes. The Empire constantly sent its sightseers and spies into the troubled western provinces to record the necessary information. In this way, the caravans could set out on their journeys properly equipped with information.
It would be naive to believe that the Chinese Empire would leave something as important as international trade traffic to chance and send out caravans without the necessary information. However, the Silk Road leading to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea was not the oldest, but it was certainly the most famous during the Han dynasty. The oldest route, which took the caravans to Europe, went much higher than the Himalayan mountains and turned into the forested areas of Asian Russia until it reached the mouth of the Don River in the Sea of Azov. But very little is known about this route, which was later abandoned, and most information about it has been found in the graves of the Scythians.
With camels, mules and yaks
How was the Silk Road? In Imperial China, grandly built roads were considered an important structure of cities. But just a few kilometres outside them, they often turned into potholed roadways. This is not to say that China did not undertake important and complex construction projects. Especially in mountainous areas, it built and carved out of the rock, at great expense, a number of galleries fortified with wooden structures. Elsewhere, these were just narrow lanes, unsuitable for carts.
In the steppes and deserts, there were no roads at all, and only experienced guides knew where to go. The only signposts here used to be the skeletons of people and animals who had died on these paths. The camel was the dominant pack animal on the Silk Road well into the 20th century. The one-horned dromedary was much used on the west of the route, and the two-horned camel on the east. The camel was able to withstand the extremely low temperatures of the mountainous slopes, but at the same time its large flat feet, which prevented it from sinking into the sand, made it well suited to the desert. With a load of 250 kilograms and an average of 30 kilometres a day, the camel could go without water for up to two whole weeks. In the high mountains, mules and mules also carried loads, often including Tibetan yaks.
The cultural and political centres of East, Central and West Asia were often located along major rivers. There were no such major centres on the Silk Road, and the Silk Road did not pass close to them. More important for this route was the orientation of the Tarim River in the Taklamakan Desert, which received water in the spring when the ice masses in Tianshan were melting. But the glacial water flow alone was insufficient. To keep the oases in the desert permanently irrigated, water had to be provided in other ways.
A system that had already been established in antiquity in large parts of desert Asia was used to ensure that the oases were supplied with sufficient water. It consisted of a network of underground canals through which water flowed by means of a gradient from the foot of the mountains. A regular supply of water and food was one of the most important requirements of travelling caravans. In true desert areas, it was extremely important that the oases were not too far from each other. Sometimes hundreds of people and many more animals had to be accommodated.
This was mainly ensured by caravanserais, surrounded by walls and guarded by gates and a well in the centre. Sometimes it was also a multi-storey building, which, in addition to the bedrooms, also contained guest rooms, storage rooms and sales areas. The caravanserai was also a place to hire guides and translators, buy new pack animals, hand over cargo to a business partner and exchange experiences and news. Travellers from foreign countries, especially Western countries, travelling along this route to China were viewed with suspicion by the authorities. For this reason, the city administrations of Changan or Luoyang, the cities that alternately served as the Han and Tang dynasties’ capitals and thus as the starting points for the Silk Road, assigned them residence, which was restricted to a certain quarter of the city or to a surrounding plot of land outside the city gates. Caravanserai was therefore inaccessible to foreigners.
Of course, the alternative to land travel has always been sea travel, especially when the land route was blocked. However, here, individual ships or fleets carried out sea transport only on isolated stretches, and then the cargo had to be transferred at the ports to other ships owned by Persians or Arabs, with many intermediate stops and additional costs.
The first people to demonstrably cross the Indian Ocean were the Persians and Arabs. The rhythm of these voyages was controlled by the weather. During the summer months, navigation was only possible in the direction of the south-west monsoon back to the north and east, while during the winter months the northern monsoon allowed only south and westward navigation. All these were inconveniences that did not allow for the real large-scale international traffic that took place over land. European expansion to south-west Asia and beyond therefore came only relatively late, because by then the Chinese no longer had ships suitable for ocean navigation.
Rome is obsessed with silk
When the remnants of the Seleucid Empire became part of the Roman Empire around 64 BC, the centre of political power shifted sharply westwards. Rome would never have become an empire without its Asian provinces, for it was here that everything we call Hellenism took place. Even before then, Rome had a profound influence on the life of the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, and soon great changes were taking place along the old Silk Road.
The first organised Chinese caravans appeared at this time, carrying silk and other products to the West. Cleopatra, the last queen of the Ptolemaic dynasty, whose fate was closely linked to Rome, was the first woman to wear dresses made of Chinese silk. It was also the first time that Rome encountered the precious fabric and it soon became a highly desirable luxury item for the rich.
Rome was the world’s number one metropolis at the time Christ was born. Everything that meant anything began to flock there. Here were the biggest squares, the biggest temples, the best social life, the most beautiful villas and thermal baths, here was the centre of the world’s fashion, here were the greatest poets of antiquity. The desire for a life of luxury was immense. Three million litres of wine alone were consumed for a banquet given by the richest man in the world, Lucullus.
Roman cuisine offered unusual dishes; snails in wine sauce, stuffed mashed potatoes, cock’s claw ragout, numerous pâtés, pheasants from the Black Sea, oysters from Spain and England, unusual spices from Asia and essential oils. Ladies dusted their hair with gold dust and wore dresses set with precious stones. In such a world, Chinese silk must have worked wonders.
The opaque, shimmering and light fabric became the pinnacle of the Roman style of enjoyment. Of course, Chinese silk was not available in unlimited quantities; on the contrary, it was very rare and therefore all the more desirable. But there were plenty of buyers for it on the route from China to the Mediterranean. On the way, therefore, its value, and hence its price, rose steadily, reaching its peak in Rome. Here, they were prepared to pay any price for silk.
In Rome, silk was initially just a fashion accessory, a kind of jewellery like diamonds and gold. Silk fibres were used to decorate tunics and togas. Soon afterwards, it was woven into lightweight ladies’ dresses, which became a fashion sensation. The second fashion turn happened with colours. The traditional Roman dress was white, but then the rich began to embellish their togas with gold and scarlet. The first pieces of silk with which the Romans decorated their clothes were also dyed scarlet, because scarlet, which was extracted from a kind of snail, was as valuable and desirable as silk. Goldsmiths, silk weavers and scarlet dyers were the most sought-after craftsmen in Rome.
In Rome, among the thousands of millionaires, a new breed of rich men emerged – silk merchants, most of whom were not Romans but Orientals. People were spending a lot of money on silk and the rulers began to look with concern at this outflow of money from Rome abroad. But even the passing of laws forbidding men to wear silk garments did not bear fruit, as hardly anyone took any notice.
Emperor Egabalamus, who was proclaimed emperor by the soldiers in May 218 at the age of 14, dressed exclusively in silk. When he invaded Rome the following year, he caused a scandal. He was wrapped in silk garments of oriental colours, badly dishevelled and full of gold. He was one of those late Roman emperors who was only interested in enjoying himself and never took his imperial duties seriously.
But the more the empire declined, the greater the role of silk. They stole, killed and cheated for it. But until the 3rd century AD, no one knew how silk was made or where it came from. No wonder, since the Chinese kept the origin of silk a most sacred secret, never to be known to outsiders. Even the famous orator and philosopher Seneca took issue with the Roman craze for silk, writing:
“I look at garments made of silk – if they even deserve the word garment – with nothing on them to protect the body or the pubic area. If a woman puts on such a garment, she can in good conscience claim that she is not naked. We get these garments for large sums from peoples who are not known as merchants, so that our wives can show the public what their husbands see in the bedroom.”
This warning of Seneca did not, of course, fall on deaf ears. Demands for more silk grew as Islam took hold in the Orient. Thus, when the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid died in 806, he is said to have bequeathed not only weapons, jewellery and perfumes, but also textiles, including large quantities of cushions, curtains and carpets – all made of pure silk.
The will also mentions 1000 containers from China. This is not Chinese porcelain, as the Chinese Empire at that time produced “white gold” in very small quantities and its use was limited to the imperial court. It was not until the 17th century that porcelain became a Chinese export commodity, and its buyers were mainly the Dutch and the English, who then shipped it to Europe by sea.
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A stolen secret
A small votive plaque dating from the Dandan-oilik monastery in the Taklamakan desert, 100 kilometres from the commercial centre of Kotan on the Silk Road, can be seen in the British Museum. The plaque is called the Silk Princess. The monastery also houses a wooden statue of a four-armed bearded god, made in Persian style, holding the devices that give him the name ‘silk-weaving god’. The same devices are also held by the silk princess from the votive panel.
But although the votive plaque and the wooden statue were found in the same place, they differ from each other both physically and in their clothing. In the case of the wooden god, the Persian influence cannot be ignored, as it does in the case of the Central Asian princess. The princess could be compared to a Uighur woman, representative of a people who still live in the Tarim Valley. She is the daughter of a Chinese emperor who married a prince from Kotan in 420 and managed to hide silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds in her large and ornate headdress and smuggle them from China into the Tarim Valley. She has committed a crime punishable by death under Chinese law.
At the Chinese border, they searched her luggage thoroughly, but did not dare to touch her hair. And so an insignificant princess managed to take the secret of silk production to the West and break China’s long-standing monopoly. When the Prince of Kotan competed for the Princess’s hand in marriage at the imperial court, he declared that he did not care whether she wore her silk Chinese clothes in his country. He knew that he would not be able to pay for the increasingly expensive silk he had to import from China and therefore wanted the Princess to provide her own silk for her clothes. So she would have to make her own silk.
But the Princess proved to be a true Buddhist in Kotan. She forbade the destruction of the silkworm larvae. They were also not allowed to throw the cocoons into boiling water and then dry them, as they did in China. The butterflies had to hatch and only then was the yarn put through further processing. Thus, it was some time before silk equivalent to Chinese silk was produced west of China.
The story of the smuggler princess already foreshadows the changes in the Central Asian economic structure that were a late consequence of the collapse of the Han dynasty and the consequent political and military weakening of China in the 3rd century AD, when there was now no longer a unified Chinese empire. Different dynasties fought for supremacy and the empire broke up into three parts; Wei, Wu and Shu Han. Each of these parts tried to bring under their control economically important cities on the Silk Road, such as Turfan, Kucha and Kotan.
Kotan in particular was important for its jade deposits. All Chinese jade products came only from there. The trade in jade westwards to Mesopotamia was already ancient and its transport, as well as that of Afghan lapis lazuli, probably followed the same routes as the later Silk Road. The lords of Kotan have thus always sought to be independent of China in the production of silk. Silk was precious and could be produced in any quantity, but jade had to be sought with great pains. The unsightly pieces of jade, which at first could hardly be distinguished from the gravel and only after grinding showed their different shades of colour, from milky white to strong green, have been a symbol of male vitality for the Chinese since ancient times.
Thus, Kotan was not only an important trading centre in the days of the old Silk Road, but also an important manufacturing centre, in fact the only industrial centre in the inhospitable Tarim Valley. And it was at that time that China lost its monopoly on silk production. Incidentally, Chinese emigrants in Korea brought mulberry trees and silkworm larvae there as early as 200 BC, and from there silk production spread to Japan.
This made the Chinese all the more careful not to lose their remaining monopoly in the west. But lose it they did. The meaning of the Silk Road began to change from that time on. It was not only a transport route, but also a way for the towns along the Silk Road to send their own products. This shortened routes, lowered prices and meant less danger.
Once the Chinese monopoly was gone, silk production expanded along the Silk Road to Persia. Silkworms became native wherever climatic conditions allowed. The Roman historian Procopius used the term ‘Serindia’ in the 6th century AD to refer to that 4 000 kilometres long area where silkworms and silk production from China, through the Tarim valley, Central Asia, Persia and Byzantium were almost a vital product.
In this way, the Silk Road took on another meaning and was no longer just a transport route for silk. Silk from China was not the main export product of caravans to the West as early as the 4th century. Apart from the production in the Tarim Valley, where Kotan and Kucha were the main producers, silk was also produced in Persia. All this meant shorter journeys, which lowered prices. Chinese silk producers felt this keenly.
As prices fell, silk production increased in parallel and silk became an increasingly consumable material that had to compete with other consumables such as ceramics, cotton, perfume and jewellery. And living standards along the Silk Road were rising. Even the Vicus Tuscus, once the silk merchants’ quarter of Rome, frequented only by the rich, while the poor came there only out of curiosity, now had to make do with only moderately well-off customers.
While luxury goods travelled along the entire Silk Road network, religious ideas used only the opposite direction; that of the East. Obviously, the persuasive systems of Confucianism, which originated in China, as well as Taoism, which was largely just a collection of local cults, were never export hits in Western countries. It was different with Buddhism, which originated in India. It was the transformation of Buddhism that was important for its success in China.
The Buddha’s actions were only meant to guide people towards right living, and he never had religion in mind. It was only when his teachings merged with the deities that people trusted that, 400 years after his death, his teachings became a religion, spreading from India to China via the Silk Road. Many events in the early history of Buddhism are still unclear, but it is accepted that without trade routes and heavy international traffic, there would have been no spread of Buddhism to Central Asia, Siberia, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan.
But we can trace evidence of Buddhist activity along the Silk Road, as Indian traders came to China via the Tarim Valley and Buddhist communities already existed, especially at the edges of the Chinese empire. Monks came with the traders, especially in the first centuries AD, and even came to the imperial city of Loyang. This, in turn, changed the cities along the Silk Road. Temples and monasteries now appeared in addition to caravanserais. In doing so, the new religion used the route that led from the eastern edge of the Tarim Valley over the Karakorum passes to India.
The next step was India’s cultural expansion. Two mighty empires with completely different spiritual conceptions – India and China – exchanged what they considered the best of each other’s cultures.
Buddhism comes to China
But nowhere has the economic development associated with new cultures been more visible than in the oasis towns along the Silk Road, between Dun Huang and Kashgar. One city in particular, on the Chinese frontier, has managed to establish itself despite nomadic attacks and depredations by various peoples, and to retain considerable independence under different rulers. Dun Huang is the oldest settlement, which developed thanks to the Silk Road. Today it is a modest, insignificant town, near which Buddhist caves were discovered just over 100 years ago.
The monk Wang Yuan-lu left his province of Hobei due to widespread famine and discovered a series of caves in a dry riverbed near Dun Hang with a veritable library of sacred texts dating from the 5th to the 10th centuries, as well as Buddhist ceremonial devices. Buddhism thus penetrated into the very heart of China.
Dun Huang was a town close to where the Great Wall ended and therefore had a strong military garrison to keep the Silk Road safe. Here we are already confronted with a problem that everyone who has travelled the Silk Road has encountered. Danger lurked for travellers who ventured out of the safe shelter of the Great Wall of China. But even in Dun Huang, order and security could only be maintained by taking the strictest measures and building high walls, watchtowers and being constantly prepared for the worst. Nevertheless, the upper classes of the city lived luxuriously, albeit cautiously, as the city bustled with foreigners, merchants, pilgrims, soldiers and members of unknown tribes.
Fires on watchtowers warned the population of the approaching danger and troops were deployed along the walls. At the time of the Buddhist missionaries, Dun Huang was a strongly fortified city and one of the most important Chinese outposts on the frontiers of the empire. Dun Huang along the Silk Road was considered one of the richest cities with a population of over a hundred thousand and several barracks. There were large warehouses full of goods that would then continue their journey to the West. Here the caravans rested and recharged their batteries. It was also here that trade took place, money was exchanged, camels were bought and guides were hired. There was a lot of bargaining and the city made a lot of money from customs duties on exports as well as imports.
An important date for the city was 336 AD, when the Buddhist monk Lo-Tsun built the first cave monastery near the city, followed by other monastic buildings. For almost a thousand years, Dun Huang was a crossroads of Chinese trade with the West and, at the same time, a melting pot with the Tarim Valley, where foreign peoples, lifestyles, languages and cultures collided.
The earliest and most detailed description of the route through the Tarim Valley is due to the Greek wholesaler Marinos of Tyre in Lebanon, who not only employed agents here, but also had his agents describe the caravan routes, where to find accommodation, customs posts and money-changers, the distances between places and the greatest dangers for the caravans.
A thousand years later, Swedish researcher Sven Hedin found that most of this information was true. Some documents say that in the beginning, only twelve caravans a year travelled the Silk Road, but later caravans were constantly arriving at least once a week and stopping at certain places. Nowhere else can the traces of the former Silk Road be traced so strongly than in the Tarim Valley. This is true for the oasis towns to the south as well as for places further north.
Of particular importance is the Turfan Oasis, which lies 154 metres below sea level and is also one of the few fertile areas as we slowly approach the Gobi Desert. Turfan Oasis was in early times a farming area of the Tarim, artificially irrigated by an extensive system of wells and canals. Here lived a happy and hospitable people, very different from the Chinese who settled here later. Much of the Tarim Valley has been inhabited for thousands of years by the Uighur Turkic people, who are still a thorn in the side of the Chinese.
Jesus on the Silk Road
The earliest and best-known evidence that the Silk Road was also a route of travel, or rather a route of refugees, can be found in the apocryphal writings of the New Testament, where we can read about the missionary journey of the Apostle Thomas to India. An even earlier journey from the Mediterranean to the West is reported in the ancient Tibetan scriptures discovered by the Russian explorer Nikolai Notovich in 1887 at the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh. According to these writings, the 30-year-old Jesus was the first known pilgrim to travel the Silk Road. In the Tibetan scriptures, the only sentence in which Jesus is mentioned calls him Issa: “Then it happened that Issa secretly left the house of his parents and went with the merchants from Jerusalem to Sindh.”
The book also contains a brief history of the people of Israel as we know them from the Old Testament. The text then goes on to say, “All this was done in order to perfect himself in the word of God and to search out the laws of the great Buddha.”
But Jesus was just as persecuted by the Brahmans as later in Palestine by the priests of Israel. No matter how one evaluates the historical truth of the Tibetan narrative of Jesus, this cannot diminish the importance of the Silk Road as a means of transmitting the religious messages of the West to the East. Christian thought thus slowly made its way through Syria and Persia to the oasis of Turfan and then on to China. The intermediate stations were even more important for monks and preachers than for merchants, because here too it was possible to preach and win converts.
But at these intermediate stops, life was pulsating to the full; it was colourful, vital and seductive. But the influences, Christianity in India, Central Asia and China, Manichaeism in Central Asia, Buddhism in China, eastern Persia and Central Asia too – all these were the consequences of the Silk Road, the beginnings of which disappear into the darkness of history.
The first historically documented Chinese pilgrim to India was Faxian, mentioned at the beginning, who set out in 399 AD and stayed for 15 years. The reason why he, and others after him, endured such dangers and hardships to come all the way to India to investigate the places where the Buddha worked was often a mere pretext. The pilgrims were at the same time diplomats, or in more modern terms agents of the state, since they had to report everything they saw to the Chinese court.
But at a certain point, the Chinese Empire abandoned its strict control over those coming from the Mediterranean to China. It was then that the first groups of Nestorians arrived in China, working in north-eastern Persia, and in the 7th century established a monastery in China, where they spread their religion. The Nestorians emphasised the duality of Jesus, that is, that he was both man and the Son of God. Christian monks came to China later, mainly by sea. Their efforts to convert the Chinese emperor to Christianity failed, of course.
Relatively late, from the 15th century onwards, Turkish tribes began to arrive in the areas around the Silk Road and gradually became important. At this time, the Silk Road was as lively as never before. More and more merchants and consumers wanted to participate in international exchange and competition was increasing after the monopolies had been broken up. Companies started to emerge along the Silk Road, producing products only for international sale. This had to be reflected in transport costs. Caravans now had to be full of goods in both directions – west and east – or business was not worthwhile.
And the Turks understood this extremely well. As their influence spread from the borders of western China to the borders of Persia and the Byzantine Empire, it meant that they controlled or held all the internal traffic in Central and Central Asia and made sure that no one interfered with it too much. What is more, they were interested in the products produced by both sides and wanted to make a profit out of it for themselves.
An interesting example of West-East technology transfer is the export of Persian silk to China, stimulated by the exchange of valuable embroidered garments between the Chinese and Persian courts. The luxurious Persian garments were immediately copied at the Chinese court and presented to the Japanese regent Shotoku-Taishi, who also introduced Buddhism to Japan. Apparently, the knowledge of Persian patterns on silk pleased the Chinese royals and it was considered fashionable to wear Persian fabrics. For the Chinese, Persia became the centre of world fashion.
There are even Byzantine Christian motifs in the silk that came to China via Persia, and the Chinese emulated them in their weaving. This transfer of technology was passed on to the Chinese court by Turkish merchants, who now shipped silk in the opposite direction to the way it used to be shipped – from west to east to China.
The Silk Road then led from Merwa on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea into Persia, where it split. One route led to the Persian Gulf and the other to Palmyra, which was anything but one of the oases on the Silk Road. Palmyra was the beginning of the end, the interception point and the repository of the whole world. Most of the traders from the East no longer went on from Palmyra, but kept coming back. Here they could sell their goods at the best price, buy new things and start returning eastwards in caravans.
Palmyra was the place where everyone met. It was the richest city in this part of the world, and the most powerful. It took a caravan more than six years to get from the Chinese capital to Palmyra and back. From there it was only a short journey to Rome and Alexandria, the main consumers of Eastern luxury goods, which were no longer just silk.
The Islamisation of the Silk Road
Islam brought a completely new change in political as well as religious relations to the Silk Road. But the Arab conquerors were wise enough in the early days to allow the local rulers enough autonomy to allow religious freedom to those who were willing to pay the price. The widespread belief that Islam broke up East-West trade along the Silk Road is thus only partly true. This is certainly not the case for the first centuries of Arab conquest in this part of the world.
Only later did the political agents of Islam realise that their tolerance of other religions was hurting them, and they decided on a violent Islamisation that finally led to the severance of the old trade routes between East and West. It was only with the arrival of a completely different culture, one that was not familiar with pictorial motifs and was mainly oriented towards ornamental culture, that the Silk Road culture lost its influence and significance. New structures emerged, both geographical and stylistic.
In the annals of the Sung dynasty, we can read about the arrival of the last two Byzantine envoys to the Chinese court in 1091. They tried to persuade the Chinese Emperor to join a common alliance against the Turks, who were already a major threat to the Byzantine Empire at that time. The Chinese Emperor politely turned them away and sent them back richly endowed with 200 bales of the finest silk, gold and silver utensils and expensive clothes. Almost 400 years after this visit by Byzantine envoys, Byzantium was still resisting the Turks. It is doubtful whether the Byzantine envoys were able to return home. The Silk Road was already controlled by the Turks and the sea route by the Arabs.
Despite Islamisation, silk was still an important product that everyone bought. Its production increased, not only in China but also in Persia and Byzantium, and new markets had to be found. In parallel, the production of jewellery, make-up, perfumes and other fragrances also increased. This despite the Prophet Mohammed’s warnings against pleasure and luxury, knowing full well what had brought down some empires. He advised: “Do not dress in silk and brocade like the infidels.”
This, of course, did not help, and Caliph Omar, who conquered Jerusalem, was reported to have been greeted by Muslims in silk robes. Even the Muslim world could not resist the allure of silk. For the harem ladies, silk was synonymous with beauty. Then silk made its way to Europe and Charlemagne wore a red silk coat, which was supposedly presented to him by the Caliph Harun al-Rashid.
It is more than a thousand years since Islamisation helped break the millennia-old trade links between East and West. In that time, those who have dared to retrace the former Silk Road and reach their destination can be counted on one hand. One of them was the Italian Marco Polo. His journey to China fell in the exciting 13th century, when the new trading and maritime power of Venice was looking for new trade routes.
In 1271, Marco Polo accompanied his father and uncle through Baghdad to Central and Central Asia. The three Italians crossed the Pamirs and the Tarim Valley to reach Beijing. Marco Polo was then in the service of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan for four years. He wrote about this in his memoirs, which he wrote as a prisoner of war in a Genoese dungeon three years after his return from China in 1295.
The Islamic peoples of Asia, as well as the Chinese and Japanese, have not kept pace with the rapid technical and cultural development of Europe since the Renaissance, so that the once close contacts between East and West have also been broken by the East’s mistrust of the Western way of life. Only maritime transport provided a link between East and West, and it was from here that porcelain, silk and stylish furniture came to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The land route remained closed during the Mongol period. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that Germans, Russians, English and Swedes began to visit the former Silk Road again, but only as explorers and geographers, not as traders.
