The Silk Road: A New History

375 Pages·2012·5.47 MB·English

by  Valerie Hansen

The Silk Road

The SILK ROAD

A NEW HISTORY

Valerie Hansen

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©Valerie Hansen 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and

you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hansen, Valerie, 1958–

The Silk Road : a new history / Valerie Hansen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-19-515931-8 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. Silk Road—History. 2. Silk Road—History—Sources.

3. Silk Road—Description and travel. 4. Silk Road—History, Local.
5. Historic sites—Silk Road. 6. Trade routes—Asia—History. I. Title.

DS33.1.H36 2012

950.1—dc23 2011041804

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

For Jim—

who else?

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Scholarly Conventions

Timeline

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

At the Crossroads of Central Asia

The Kingdom of Kroraina

CHAPTER 2

Gateway to the Languages of the Silk Road

Kucha and the Caves of Kizil

CHAPTER 3

Midway Between China and Iran

Turfan

CHAPTER 4

Homeland of the Sogdians, the Silk Road Traders

Samarkand and Sogdiana

CHAPTER 5

The Cosmopolitan Terminus of the Silk Road

Historic Chang’an, Modern-day Xi’an

CHAPTER 6

The Time Capsule of Silk Road History

The Dunhuang Caves

CHAPTER 7

Entryway into Xinjiang for Buddhism and Islam

Khotan

Conclusion

The History of the Overland Routes through Central Asia

Notes

Art Credits

Index

Color plates follow page 144

Acknowledgments

This project has been a long time in the making, and many people have

provided materials, answered questions, and helped in different ways. Since the
first endnote to each chapter gives a detailed account of the assistance I have
received, here I would like to single out those individuals whose help far
surpassed the usual expectations of scholarly collegiality:

Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara, Yale University, for wise counsel

about diverse Asian religious traditions usually dispensed over delicious family
meals at their house;

Frantz Grenet, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, for imparting

his knowledge of Central Asian Art and his personal collection of images, some
made by the talented François Ory;

Stanley Insler, Yale University, who first encouraged me to enter this field

by agreeing to teach a joint class on the Silk Road and who was always willing
to answer more questions over yet another lunch at Gourmet Heaven;

Li Jian, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who recruited me to work on a Silk

Road exhibit at the Dayton Museum and introduced me to the Hejiacun finds;

Victor Mair, University of Pennsylvania, for unceasing help since he first

taught me in a graduate seminar on the Dunhuang documents thirty years ago;

Boris Marshak, Hermitage Museum, who generously gave of his

knowledge in conversations about and lectures on the Sogdians before his death
in 2006;

Mou Fasong, East China Normal University, who hosted my family during

the academic year 2005–6 and showed by example how his advisor Tang
Zhangru approached his studies;

Georges-Jean Pinault, École Pratique des Hautes Études, for his guidance

on Indo–European languages, particularly Tocharian;

Rong Xinjiang, Peking University, for his unrivaled knowledge of the

region and willingness to lend his personal library of books and articles;

Angela Sheng, McMaster University, for her expertise on textiles and her

loyal friendship;

Nicholas Sims-Williams, School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London, and Ursula Sims-Williams, British Library, London, who

both patiently corrected multiple errors in an article I submitted to the Bulletin of
the Asia Institute and for guidance on Central Asian languages, particularly
Khotanese;

Prods Oktor Skjærvø, Harvard University, who has over the years answered

frequent queries, traveled to Yale to give multiple presentations, and provided
copies of his own unpublished translations;

Étienne de la Vaissière, École Pratique des Hautes Études, for his unfailing

generosity in answering queries about all things Sogdian and many things
Central Asian, often within an hour and always within a day (even in my last
weeks of revising);

Wang Binghua, Renmin University, for sharing his deep knowledge of

Xinjiang archeology, particularly about the sites of Niya and Loulan;

Helen Wang, British Museum, for her command of numismatics and for

close readings of multiple chapters; and

Yoshida Yutaka, Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University, for his advice on

Sogdian and Khotanese language and history.

Susan Ferber, my editor at Oxford University Press, has been consistently

supportive since signing this book more than a decade ago, and her careful edits
improved each chapter. She answered all queries with unusual alacrity, possibly
because she works harder than anyone I have ever met. Joellyn Ausanka, senior
production editor, oversaw the preparation of the book with extraordinary
efficiency, while Ben Sadock copyedited with a gentle touch and great acuity.

The National Endowment for the Humanities provided a year of support

that allowed me to study Russian and, with the help of Asel Umurzakova,
immerse myself in the Mount Mugh materials. The Fulbright Scholar Program
for Faculty financed my stay at East China Normal University in Shanghai,
2005–6. The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly
Exchange (USA) provided a generous subsidy for maps and illustrations.

All the Yale undergraduate and graduate students who have taken classes on

the Silk Road over the years have pushed me to clarify my arguments. Elizabeth
Duggan provided an insightful reading of an early draft of the introduction. The
students in my Silk Road seminar in the spring of 2010, Mary Augusta
Brazelton, Wonhee Cho, Denise Foerster, Ying Jia Tan, and Christine Wight,
and, in the spring of 2011, Arnaud Bertrand, read through an almost-final draft
and made many valuable suggestions for revision, including starting each
chapter with a document. Mathew Andrews, my research assistant, performed
multiple tasks, especially the tedious preparation of images, with speed and good
cheer, even as a first-year student at Yale Law School. Joseph Szaszfai and the
staff of Yale’s Photo + Design unit transformed many problematic images into

digital files ready for publication.

Brian Vivier, now Chinese Studies librarian at the University of

Pennsylvania, carefully edited all the endnotes. Jinping Wang helped to resolve
multiple last-minute queries with her characteristic erudition. Alice Thiede of
Carto-Graphics drew the beautiful maps, which were particularly challenging
because of all the unfamiliar place-names. Pamela Schirmeister, associate dean
of the Yale Graduate School, offered an incisive critique of the introduction just
days before submission.

My husband, Jim Stepanek, and our children, Bret, Claire, and Lydia, have

always supported my writing and teaching with good humor. No question that
the best trips have been when they, either individually or collectively, were
along. The final month in China before submission was an all-out family effort
to proofread, prepare charts, and polish the manuscript. What will we ever talk
about now that Bret, born just before I began this project, can no longer tease me
about the average number of words I wrote each day?

September 30, 2011

Beijing

Note on Scholarly Conventions

The reader will encounter multiple names from different Sanskritic, Turkic,

and Iranian languages. The book gives the most commonly used spelling even if
at the sacrifice of consistency. Similarly, the running text does not include
diacritical marks (even when quoting sources that do), which are distracting to
the general reader and already known to specialists. The notes, however, do give
the diacritical marks for all authors’ names, terms, and titles of books and
articles.

All Chinese names are given in pinyin, the romanization system in use

throughout China. The pronunciation of several letters is not obvious to English-
speakers: x, q, c, and zh are the most puzzling. The Tang monk Xuanzang
(pronounced Shuen-dzahng) met the king of Gaochang, whose surname was Qu
(pronounced like the French “tu”). Xuanzang’s monastery in Chang’an was
called Ci’en (pronounced Tsih uhn), and the Zhang (pronounced Jahng) family
ruled Dunhuang from 848 to 914.

Personal names of Westerners are given in the usual order of given name

before surname, while Chinese and Japanese names follow the Asian practice of
placing the family name before the given name. In the case of some scholars
who publish in multiple languages, the order of given name and surname varies
depending on the language of publication.

Occasionally the text quotes from sources giving quantities of certain

goods. In most cases the original term is included along with a conversion to the
modern equivalent, but the reader should bear in mind that, because all units of
measure in the premodern world were not standardized, the modern equivalents
are only approximate.