British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A HUNDRED YEARS OF DUNHUANG, 1907-2007
Abstracts
Locating Dunhuang in a broader history of the Silk Road
Valerie Hansen, Yale University
Every time archeologists unearth a European-looking object in China, everyone immediately assumes that a merchant on his way from China to Rome must have dropped it. Somewhere in the back of our minds floats an image of a lone figure riding on a camel carrying silk. In fact, though, new evidence from the Silk Road suggests that this is actually the least likely explanation. It is more probable that a local craftsman made a copy of something foreign-looking or that a refugee, an envoy, or a missionary, brought an exotic gift to someone. For the past ten years I have been working on a book tentatively entitled that draws on documents and artifacts excavated at seven Silk Road sites (six, including Dunhuang, in northwest China, one outside Samarkand in Tajikistan) to write a new history of the Silk Road, the different overland routes connecting China to the rest of the world. My paper will sketch some of the book's most surprising findings in light of the evidence from Dunhuang. Silk was neither the most important nor the only good traded on the route. Metals, spices, and glass all moved across Eurasia. Ammonium chloride appears surprisingly often in surviving documents: it was used both as a fixative for dyeing and as flux for metalwork. Paper, invented during the second century B.C.E., moved out of China first into the Islamic world in the eighth century and then Europe in the twelfth. Surely it had a far greater impact on human history than did silk, which was used only for luxury wear. The Paper Road might be a better, if not a catchier name, for these overland routes. Rulers, whether of Chinese dynasties or of the oasis city-states ringing the Taklamakan, strictly supervised the trade and played a major role as the purchaser of goods and service. During the periods when the Chinese --
primarily during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) and the Tang (618-907 C.E.) stationed troops in Central Asia, the trade boomed. China's main overland trading partners were the peoples of Iran (not Rome), and the trade peaked between 500 and 800. When they did not, the trade declined. Most of the Dunhuang documents date to the ninth and tenth centuries. Silk Road communities, including Dunhuang, were largely sedentary, meaning that most people worked the land and did not engage in trade. They lived and died near where they were born. Although the most famous Silk Road traveler of them all, Marco Polo (1254-1324), claimed to travel all the way from Europe to China, few individuals covered long distances along the Silk Road. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the few who did moved between Khotan in the west and the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Mount Wutai (in modern Shanxi province) in the east and often stopped in Dunhuang en route. The trade that existed was mainly local and often involved barter. Merchants were only one of several types of people traveling on the route, and other groups -- notably refugees and diplomatic envoys -- outnumbered merchants. Surprisingly little evidence of overland trade survives, an indication of how limited the trade was. Finally, the new discoveries reinforce what Aural Stein and other early explorers seem to have grasped the instant their spades went in the ground - that the Silk Road was principally a transmitter of ideas, technologies, and artistic motifs, and only secondarily a transmitter of goods.