The Eurasian Silk Road: Its historical roots and the Chinese imagination

Abstract

This article takes a long historical perspective on the Silk Road, attempting to see it from a Chinese point of view. It focuses on five themes that figure in the Chinese imagination of the Silk Road, all rooted in China’s history. These include influences that came to China via the Silk Road in prehistoric and early historic times, patterns of military expansion of Chinese power in the Western regions, the threat of invasion from the northern and north-western frontiers, commercial exchanges and individual travel. Individuals journeyed across the Silk Road for diplomatic, military, commercial and sometimes religious reasons and the various themes overlap to some extent. Some myths are also dispelled: first, the Silk Road was not one route but many; second, other commodities besides silk travelled along it and third, the maritime Silk Road should also be included in the concept. Under Mongol rule, the route was at times an unbroken corridor between East and West on which many people travelled in both directions. When the Mongol empire broke up, travel overland was restricted again, which may have been why China took to the seas in the Ming. At present, China is building a New Silk Road to connect with the rest of the world in a more integrated way than ever before. The focus of this article is on establishing the patterns of the past in the hopes that it will contribute to the discussion of whether these patterns will be repeated in the present or if we are in completely uncharted territory. China’s perspective on the historical Silk Road is such a large topic that one would need several volumes to do it justice. This article focuses on certain key themes that figure in the Chinese imagination of the Silk Road, all rooted in China’s history and the history of her interaction with Eurasia and the rest of the world in premodern times (roughly before 1800 CE). The first of these themes is that while the term “Silk Road” is relatively new in origin, having been coined by the geologist Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) in 1877, the Silk Road itself, defined collectively from the Chinese perspective as the various overland routes extending from China’s north-western and western frontiers to Central Asia and beyond, was a corridor for the exchange of goods and the transfer of information dating back to prehistoric times. It was the route by which many foreign influences came into China during the formative years of Chinese civilisation. The second theme is that beginning with the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), China’s state expansion into the north-western and western frontiers tended to be sporadic, with military expeditions and the establishment of protectorates undertaken by ambitious emperors during the early years of strong dynasties, such as the Han and Tang, when there was ample wealth to support these operations.When these campaigns became overextended and the regime’s wealth drained away from the provision of essential goods and services to the populace in China’s political centre, however, the state tended to withdraw from such far-flung activities in order to deploy its limited resources on more pressing domestic concerns. In this way, we can see that while China had no lack of interest in 1 It was used in its German form (die Seidenstraße) on a map of Central Asia to indicate the trade route between East and West. The map was published in Ferdinand von Richthofen, China: Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1877). Cambridge J. Eurasian Stud. | 2018 | 2: #XW4ESF | https://doi.org/10.22261/CJES.XW4ESF 1 other parts of the world, her priority was to look after her own people at home. Hence, at times of internal crisis, she tended to abandon her foreign interests to focus attention on domestic concerns. Third, because China’s northern and north-western borders were susceptible to attack by nomadic raiders and other foreign invaders, the frontier regions to the north, north-west and west came to be seen as potential sources of danger to the empire’s peace and security, particularly at times of disorder, division and weakness at home. The fourth theme is that certain commodities tended to be encountered on Silk Road travels or traded along that route, such as grape-wine, jade and horses, and by virtue of their mention in poetry and historical accounts these became associated with and incorporated into the Chinese imagination of the Silk Road. The final theme to be discussed here is that often independently of major political and economic events, certain individuals traversed the long distances separating the East andWest over the centuries. They each had their own reasons for travel, whether on military or diplomatic assignment, for religious purposes or commercial profit. The prose accounts and poems left behind by these individuals, and others inspired by them, are repositories of the images of the Silk Road and are responsible for their transmission down to the present. All these images, including stories of legendary figures, exotic products, geographic features and the emotions associated with distant travel such as fear, loneliness and hardship, help us trace the historical roots of China’s imagination of the Silk Road. Although the various themes enumerated above can be categorised as political, military, diplomatic, economic, commercial, social, cultural and individual, they are not easily separated from each other. Instead they often overlap and intersect with each other. For example, military expansion (theme 2), which sometimes took place in response to military threats from outside (theme 3), also went hand in hand with officially sanctioned state commerce in the form of tribute and led indirectly to private trade (theme 4). Moreover, individuals who travelled for their own particular reasons (diplomatic, commercial, religious: theme 5) often mentioned in their travel accounts and poetry features associated with the different themes. Discussions of commodities and commercial aspects (theme 4) inevitably involve both official trade linked with the state (theme 2) and unofficial and private trading (theme 4). It is thus impossible to separate the political and diplomatic dimensions of the Silk Road from the economic and commercial, or from the social, cultural or individual. The themes also do not align themselves strictly in chronological order. Therefore, as these themes are discussed below, efforts to discuss them separately have been made, and the examples are ordered sequentially where possible. There is inevitably some overlap of categories and discussion of items out of time sequence. Before elaborating on the five themes enumerated above, two important aspects of the Silk Road should be kept in mind, not least because they dispel some of the myths that have been associated with the Silk Road in the past. First, the Silk Road is not a single road with a definite starting and ending point traversing the whole of Eurasia, but a set of different shorter routes that fluctuated over time. Moreover, individuals often sojourned on portions of the route. Very few travelled its entire length; most of the travel and traffic across the Silk Road was done on a relay basis. Travellers also took different routes at different times, skirting around natural obstacles such as mountains and deserts in response to seasonal and climatic changes, as well as fluctuating political and military conditions. As Valerie Hansen says, “the ‘road’ was not an actual ‘road’ but a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of deserts and mountains.” It is thus often referred to as the Silk Roads (plural), to express this multiplicity of routes. In recent years, scholars have also included the sea routes joining China to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and East 2 This multiplicity is shown clearly in the Map of the Silk Road produced by UNESCO: “The Silk and Spice Routes” http://en.unesco.org/ silkroad/about-silk-road. 3 The Silk Road was approximately 3,850 km (2,392 miles) as the crow flies from today’s Xi’an (the capital region in the early dynasties) to Samarkand; it was 7,250 km (4,505 miles) to Istanbul and 8,500 km (5,282 miles) to Rome. 4 See Susan Whitfield’s, Life Along the Silk Road (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015) and The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (Chicago: Serindia Publications, Inc., 2004). 5 Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. 6 Cf. the recent book by Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of The World (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). Church | Silk Road: Historical roots and the Chinese imagination https://www.veruscript.com/a/XW4ESF/ Cambridge J. Eurasian Stud. | 2018 | 2: #XW4ESF | https://doi.org/10.22261/CJES.XW4ESF 2 Africa in the concept of the Silk Road, called the “maritime Silk Road.” This development probably underpins the concept of the “One Belt, One Road” policy of the Chinese government today, which seeks to combine the overland and maritime routes into one. It should be noted that the modern Chinese term for “Silk Road,” sichou zhi lu 絲綢之路, did not come into use until the term became popular in the West; in premodern times, ever since the Han dynasty, the overland region traversed by those routes was called the “Western Regions” (xiyu 西域). The term for the maritime regions to the south, leading to Southeast Asia, India and further west, was the “Western Oceans” (xiyang 西洋) from the Five Dynasties period (907–960) onwards. Second, despite its name, the Silk Road was a route along which many other goods besides silk, as well as ideas, technologies and religions, travelled across Eurasia. In Valerie Hansen’s view, “‘Silk’ is even more misleading than ‘road,’ inasmuch as silk was only one among many Silk Road trade goods. Chemicals, spices, metals, saddles and leather products, glass and paper were also common.” The various products are discusse