The Silk Road: A New History (31 page)

When the Tibetans gained control of Gansu in the 780s and Kucha in the 790s, the Tang saw its revenues decline even further. In 787, in response to the fall of Gansu Province, the prime minister Li Mi proposed a budget-cutting measure: slashing the subsidies for all foreign envoys resident in the capital. He was “aware that many of the Central Asians were long-term residents, some having been in the capital for more than forty years, that they had all married, purchased land and housing and made other investments on which they earned interest, and that they had no intention of ever returning to their homelands.”
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The minister put the number of foreign envoys, most of them Sogdian, at four thousand, a surprisingly high figure given that many foreigners would have fled or concealed their identity after the An Lushan rebellion.

Fictional tales document the lives of these Sogdians, particularly rich merchants, who remained in Chang’an after 763. A new genre of short story, the “wonder tale,” peaked in popularity in the early ninth century.
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Different authors describe the Sogdians as possessing the same traits: excessive generosity coupled with an uncanny ability to judge goods, especially jewels. In exile from their homeland, many were born to noble families but forced, in these narratives, to take menial jobs so that they could survive in China.

In one story set in Chang’an in the years after the An Lushan rebellion,
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a young man from a wealthy Chinese family finds an unusual rock, “half ocean-colored, half red, with deep stripes,” on the beach. He chances upon the annual gathering of some thirty foreign merchants: “The person with the most valuable treasures wears a hat and sits in the place of honor; the others sit in ranks below him.” The youth watches as they compare their riches—one merchant has four beautiful pearls, one more than an inch across. Others present their wares, mostly pearls, and then the youth displays his stone to the assembled merchants, who promptly stand up and escort him to the place of honor. When he asks for one million strings, they retort, “Why are you insulting this treasure of ours?” and insist on paying ten million. It turns out that the jewel is a national treasure that has been lost for over thirty years; they call it the “treasure mother,” because their king places it on the shore, prays to it in the evening, and when he returns the next morning, he finds the precious stones that have surrounded it of their own accord. The jewel’s magic powers fulfill the genre’s promise of marvels, but the setting is realistic: it is entirely plausible that thirty or so Sogdian merchants would gather annually in the Tang capital.

Stereotypically wealthy Iranian merchants also appear in a different literary genre, model legal decisions. During the Tang dynasty, and particularly after 755, increasing numbers of young men sat the civil service examinations, and they proved ready consumers for this type of literature. Not based on actual legal cases, these model decisions treated hypothetical situations that allowed authors to display their reasoning skills.

One model decision tells of two Sogdian brothers who live in Chang’an.
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One is so wealthy that his garden, pond, house, furniture, and male and female servants “rival those of marquises and princes.” His brother, on the other hand, is so poor that he is unable to repay the loan of a garment from another wealthy Sogdian merchant. That merchant takes the wealthy brother to court for refusing to pay the poor brother’s loan, and the prefect rules that the wealthy brother must give some livestock to the younger brother so that he does not die of starvation.

The marvel tales and the model cases document the existence of a powerful stereotype: Tang-dynasty authors viewed Sogdian merchants as tremendously wealthy because of the jewel trade. Sogdian merchants did indeed deal in jewels and gemstones, which had the twin advantages of being both valuable and light. But the existence of a stereotype does not make it true: we cannot conclude that the Silk Road trade was so prosperous that it enriched thousands of Sogdians living in Chang’an. Of the thousands of Sogdians who settled in the cities of Tang-dynasty China, merchants constituted only a minority.
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Emissaries, military dependents, refugees, farmers, metalsmiths, and soldiers also came in large numbers.

In 843 the emperor gave voice to the persisting anti-foreign sentiment in the capital when he banned Manichaeism, and two years later in 845 forbade the practice of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. His stated goal was to increase the amount of money available for minting coins, so he ordered that statues and bells be melted down. In addition, the authorities confiscated the property of all but a handful of Buddhist monasteries in Chang’an and Luoyang. When the emperor died in 847 his successor lifted the ban on Buddhism but not on the other religions.

These measures came at a time when the dynasty was ceding large chunks of territory in the northwest to newly powerful regional leaders, often former military commanders who controlled their own armies and who gradually refused to pay taxes to the ruling dynasty. After the withdrawal of Chinese troops from the Taklamakan oasis towns in the 750s, the land routes gradually declined, while sea travel gained primacy.
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Though perilous, sea travel had occurred in earlier centuries, and many of those traveling by boat began their journeys at Chang’an.

Since ancient times the residents of Southeast Asia had voyaged by boat in the South China Sea and the western Pacific, and over time they linked different coastal routes together to form longer routes. By at least the first century of the Common Era sailors had learned both how to harness the monsoon winds and how to navigate the straits of Malacca so that they could sail all the way from China to India, but they had to stop for several months in Srivijaya (modern-day Palembang, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia) to wait for the winds to shift.
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The monk Faxian (active 350–414) wrote vividly about the difficulties of sea travel between India and China. Living more than two centuries before Xuanzang, he had the same motivation for going to India: to study texts in the original that were not available in China. On the outward leg, he proceeded overland from Chang’an through Khotan and then to India. After studying for more than six years in the major Buddhist centers on the Ganges River, he caught a boat to Sri Lanka at the port of Tamluk, on the mouth of Hoogly River, south of Calcutta in West Bengal.
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The two-week voyage to Sri Lanka turned out to be the only uneventful leg of his long sea voyage. In Sri Lanka Faxian visited an image of the Buddha made from jade and other precious substances that stood over 22 feet (6.6 meters) tall. While he was in the temple, a merchant, probably Chinese, presented a white silk fan as a donation. Suddenly, in a rare personal note, Faxian admits to being overcome with homesickness and weeping.
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Faxian stayed for two more years in Sri Lanka, where he noted the presence of “many scholars, venerable monks, sabao and merchants.”
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As in Sogdian Ancient Letter 5, Sogdians used the term sabao to indicate the leaders of their communities, and here Faxian contrasts the Sogdian sabao with Chinese merchants.

Faxian does not give the reasons for his decision to take the sea, and not the overland, route to China, but for those departing from either Tamluk or Sri Lanka, the sea route was faster and cheaper. In Sumatra he found passage on a “large merchant boat” carrying two hundred people, which was tied to a smaller boat intended for use as a lifeboat.
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After three days, a great wind—perhaps a typhoon—rose up and did not subside for thirteen days. Those in the smaller boat cut the line connecting them to the larger boat. The merchants, desperate to save their lives in the leaking larger boat, pitched much of their cargo overboard, but Faxian refused to part with the Buddhist texts he had so painstakingly collected. He prayed to the bodhisattva Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, for protection, and his account reports that she answered his prayer. When the storm subsided, the larger boat landed on an island where the crew was able to patch the leak and proceed to Sumatra.

Faxian stayed in Sumatra for five months before taking a different ship, about as big as the first, which could carry two hundred people on their way to Guangzhou, along with fifty days’ worth of provisions. This leg of the journey proved to be even more perilous than the trip from Sri Lanka to Sumatra. After more than a month on the water, a “black wind and torrential rain” rose up. Faxian again prayed to Guanyin. The Indian passengers had a different response: blaming the Chinese monk for the storm, they decided to leave him alone on an island and continue on without him. Faxian calls these Indian passengers “Brah-mans,” the general Chinese term for all Indians. The person who paid for his passage interceded on the monk’s behalf and threatened that the Chinese ruler, himself a Buddhist, would punish the passengers if they abandoned the monk. Hesitating, the Indians could not bring themselves to abandon Faxian and so permitted him to continue his journey.

The persistently cloudy skies prevented the ship’s navigators from determining the right course. Since they did not use a compass, they could only set their course by examining the position of the sun, moon, and stars. When it rained or was cloudy, they had no way to determine their location. They knew that the trip to China should take fifty days, but they simply could not get their bearings. The boat continued to sail in the ocean, its food and water supplies fast dwindling. After seventy days at sea—twenty more than planned—the crew distributed two Chinese pints of water to each passenger and began to cook with seawater. The ship shifted its course northwest in search of land. After eleven more days, it made landfall.

On the basis of the plants they saw on shore, the passengers concluded that they were somewhere in China and sent Faxian to ask where. When he returned to the ship, he informed them that they had arrived at the southern shore of the Shandong Peninsula, about one thousand miles (1,600 km) north of their original destination of Guangzhou. Faxian’s trip vividly illustrates the perils of sea travel before 1000, approximately the time the Chinese began to use compasses while on shipboard. (They had been using them on land for more than a thousand years.)
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Even with all its perils, Faxian’s sea journey was three years shorter than the outbound overland leg, which had taken him six years.

In the late seventh century, when the Buddhist monk Yijing (635–713) traveled to India to seek original Buddhist texts, he also sailed there and back by ship. Like Faxian, he started his trip in Chang’an. He then traveled to the port city of Yangzhou in modern-day Jiangsu. There he met an imperial envoy who paid for his passage to Guangzhou. In Guangzhou he arranged with the captain of a “Persian ship” to travel to Palembang on the island of Sumatra. (The ship may have had a Persian crew or captain, or it may simply have been Persian in style.)

Departing in late 671, the two men arrived in Palembang after less than twenty days. Yijing describes constellations in the sky, a clue that Chinese sailors were still navigating by the stars and did not use the compass. After six months of studying Sanskrit in Palembang, Yijing then made his way by boat along the northern edge of the island of Sumatra, crossed the Indian Ocean without stopping at Sri Lanka, and arrived at the port of Tamluk, near modern Calcutta, early in 673, slightly more than a year after his departure from China.

Yijing took the same route back to Palembang, where he planned to stay to record more texts. In 689 he wrote a letter to supporters in China asking for paper, ink, and money to pay scribes to write these texts. He boarded a ship in port so that he could mail the letter, but “just at that time the merchant found the wind favorable, and raised the sails high,” carrying the reluctant Yijing all the way back to Guangzhou.
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The suddenness of his trip testifies to its frequency. Yijing said that he went to Guangzhou simply because of the workings of karma, but his experience shows how developed sea travel had become since 400 when Faxian traveled. The express boats that sailed from Palembang to Guangzhou stopped for no one—not even someone who had boarded the ship in error.

On his arrival in Guangzhou, Yijing announced his intent to return to Palem-bang. His friends introduced him to another monk who wanted to study in India, and, in the same year that he arrived, after the monsoon winds had shifted, the two men went back to the island to retrieve the books Yijing had left behind. Yijing stayed there until 695, when he finally came home to China, again by boat.

The trip between Palembang and Guangzhou had become so routine that Yijing managed it three times in his lifetime, and others plied the route too. After Yijing returned to China he wrote a collective biography of fifty-six monks who had traveled to India. Forty-seven were Chinese, one was Sogdian, and eight were from the Korean kingdom of Silla. Of the fifty-six, twenty-one traveled overland and thirty traveled by sea. Yijing’s sample may exaggerate the size of the sea trade, since he recorded the names of monks that he learned about during his travels on the sea route and during the months he stayed at Palembang, but even so his survey suggests the popularity of sea travel in the late 600s.