The Silk Road: A New History (21 page)

MAP OF GAOCHANG CITY
By carefully examining the roads and buildings in the ruins of Gaochang, archeologists have identified distinct neighborhoods in the city. The Tang authorities divided Gaochang City into different wards, just as in the cities of central China, and these wards continued to be used under the Uighurs. The commercial district in the southwest of the city housed workshops where craftsmen made handicrafts sold at the local market. The authorities divided vendors of different goods into groups, each with its own row of stalls at the market, and visited regularly to record prices.

Once a caravan passed through the official checkpoint into a new town, its members could find innkeepers, who also stored their wares for them, doctors, who treated their illnesses, and prostitutes, who, as today, have left little documentary evidence of their activities.
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The caravans visited the markets in each town they stopped in. Tang-dynasty law required certain designated officials, known as market supervisors, to inspect markets every ten days and record three prices—the high, the low, and the medium—of all commodities on sale.
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Such a register, in 121 fragments, for the main market in Turfan survives and is dated 743; some sections are dated to the fourteenth day of a certain month, others to the twenty-eighth, an indication that officials collected the data on two separate occasions.
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Chinese markets were divided into rows, where merchants sold related goods; the Turfan register lists over 350 goods divided into over ten different rows.

As informative as it is, the price list does not reveal everything about the market. Some of the high-medium-low pricing sequences—6/5/4—seem suspiciously regular, for example, and the register gives the same prices for livestock, regardless of age or overall health. Nor does the register reveal how much of any single item is for sale or how many different stalls offer that particular item.

Like markets all over China today, the Turfan market offered a wide variety of flours and grains, in addition to vegetables like onions and scallions. Other daily-use items, like cauldrons and pots, as well as livestock, including horses, camels, and cattle, were all for sale. One could even buy a cartload of human excrement used as fertilizer for 25/22/20 coins.

The market also offered a variety of goods imported from the Iranian world. Many of these overlap with those in the scale-fee records: ammonium chloride, aromatics, sugar, and brass. The market register lists more than seventy different kinds of medicine. Many of the imported goods are small and light, because they had to be carried overland, but there are some heavier items, including brass-inlaid high-quality iron swords for 2,500/2,000/1,800 coins, which were for sale alongside much cheaper, locally made knives, which went for 90/80/70 coins. The largest goods from the west were animals: gelded Turkish steeds and Persian camels, which could have been walked to Turfan and would have found ready customers among the officers in the Tang armies stationed there. The horses sold for 20/18/16 rolls of silk; the camels for 33/30/27 rolls of silk.
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The different textile stalls offered specialized silks made in Sichuan, Henan, and other interior Chinese provinces, which were precisely the tax silks paid to soldiers.

The market register portrays a market supplied by small-scale traders traveling in small caravans of ten to twenty animals, the same level of commerce documented by the scale-fee documents and the
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travel passes. The major player in the Central Asian economy—which diverges from the prevailing image of the Silk Road trade—was the Tang government. Starting in the 630s with the campaigns against the Western Turks, the Tang administration poured funds into the Western Regions to support its military efforts. To finance their campaigns, the Tang state collected bolts of cloth in central China and then shipped them to Wuwei and Qinzhou (modern Qin’an), also in Gansu Province, and from there to places farther west, closer to the frontier.
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Over twenty examples of this type of tax cloth originating from central China have been found in Xinjiang.
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Immediately after the 640 conquest, the Tang forces in Turfan probably numbered several thousand. Although we speak of Tang armies, many of the soldiers were not Chinese but local.
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The losses of territory in the northwest, including Kucha, to the Tibetans from 670 to 692 resulted in ever-increasing military expenditures in the eighth century. Du You (735–812), the author of the first comprehensive institutional encyclopedia, put the costs of defending the frontier at two million strings of coins in 713, ten million strings in 741, and fourteen to fifteen million strings in 755. Tang officials combined strings of coin, piculs of grain, and bolts of cloth to create an aggregate accounting unit whose value eludes anyone who has tried to make sense of the internally contradictory figures that survive.
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However one understands these figures, the outlays by the Tang state are staggering. Even individual payments dwarf all the transactions recorded in the Turfan documents. In the 730s or 740s, the central government sent 900,000 bolts of silk each year to four military headquarters in the frontier regions of the Western Regions: Hami, Turfan, Beiting, and Kucha. By 742 some five thousand Tang soldiers were stationed in Turfan, yet the tax receipts from local inhabitants covered only 9 percent of their expenses.
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The Tang state’s subsidy for the military injected vast sums of money, in the form of silk, into the local economies of the Silk Road oases.

These massive expenditures by the Tang central government came to a sudden halt with the An Lushan rebellion. The rebellion forced the Tang dynasty to withdraw from Central Asia and nearly brought the dynasty down. Born to a Sogdian father and a Turkish mother, the leader of the rebellion, An Rokhshan, worked his way up from buying horses for the Chinese army to being the general in charge of three different originally separate military commands.
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(An’s given name, Lushan, was the Chinese transcription of the Sogdian “Rokhshan.”) Fearful that his own troops might join the rebels, the emperor Xuanzong (reigned 712–56) accepted their demand that he strangle his consort Yang Guifei, rumored to be romantically involved with An Rokhshan, and then abdicated his throne to his son Suzong, who reigned from 756 to 762. With the largest provinces in central China under the rebels’ control, the tax receipts of the Tang state plummeted after 755, forcing the Tang military to cease payments to the armies in the northwest.
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The Tang emperor had no choice but to hire Uighur mercenaries to fight the rebels. Only in 763 did the much-weakened dynasty succeed in putting down the rebellion.

During the Tang campaign to regain control from the mutineers, Uighur mercenaries occupied Luoyang in 762. There, in a fateful encounter with far-reaching implications for Turfan, which came under Uighur rule fifty years later, the leader of the Uighurs encountered a Sogdian teacher who introduced him to the basic teachings of Manichaeism.
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Manichaeism, a religion founded in Iran by the prophet Mani (ca. 210–76), held that the forces of light and darkness were engaged in a perpetual battle for control of the universe. The Uighur kaghan adopted Manichaeism as the official religion of his people and recorded his decision in a trilingual inscription (in Sogdian, Uighur, and Chinese) on a stone tablet.
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This was the first—and the only—time in world history that any state named Manichaeism its official religion.

The Tibetan Empire seized on this moment of Tang vulnerability during the rebellion to expand its power. During the 780s Tibetan armies moved into Gansu, conquered the Beiting (Beshbalyq) Protectorate immediately to the north of Turfan in 786, and in 792 took Turfan as well. In 803 the Uighurs wrested control of Turfan from the Tibetans. The Uighurs in Mongolia were then defeated by the Kirghiz in 840, and some of these Uighurs withdrew to Turfan. There, between 866 and 872, they established a new state called the Uighur Kaghanate, with its capital at Gaochang City.
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A second Uighur kaghanate was based to the east in Ganzhou (Zhangye, Gansu).

Under the Uighurs, the local people of Turfan continued to record their purchases and sales of land, slaves, and animals in contracts, but they used Uighur, not Chinese, as their written language.
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The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century contracts from Turfan in Uighur show that the economy returned largely to barter, with people exchanging animals and land for fixed measures of grain or cloth, often cotton, which replaced silk as a currency.

The documents in the Uighur language reveal much about the religious life of the community. Under the Tang dynasty, the residents of Turfan had worshipped Buddhist, Daoist, and Zoroastrian deities as well as local ones. Under the Uighurs, devotees of two new religions worshipped in Turfan as well: Christianity and Manichaeism.

Evidence of Christianity was discovered in the early twentieth century by the second German expedition to the region. Outside the eastern walls of Gaochang City, archeologists found a small Christian church, from which they salvaged one mural showing Palm Sunday worship. At Bulayik, a site to the north of Turfan, they excavated Christian manuscripts in Syriac, Sogdian, Middle Persian, modern Persian, and Uighur. One manuscript even gave a line in Greek before translating a psalm into Sogdian. Syriac was the primary language of worship, but some psalters and hymn collections have Sogdian headings in them. These Sogdian headings indicate that the Christians of Bulayik were mainly Sogdian speakers, though the presence of Turkish names and linguistic features in the Sogdian texts suggests that they were gradually giving up Sogdian in favor of Uighur. The dating of these manuscripts is uncertain; most likely they date to the ninth and tenth centuries, when Turfan was the capital of the Uighur Kaghanate.
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MANICHAEAN WALL PAINTING FROM BEZEKLIK
A tree of life heavily laden with fruit, with three intertwined trunks, dominates this large painting from cave 38 at Bezeklik, which stands 5 feet (1.5 m) high, 8 feet (2.4 m) wide, making it one of the world’s largest surviving Manichaean artworks. The Uighur-language prayers at the base of the tree give the name of the donor, who requests the protection of guardian deities. The female donor wears an unusual bird headdress and kneels at the right of the tree; two guardian deities stand behind her, and three others kneel next to her. The opposite side of the painting shows her husband, partially effaced, wearing a similar headdress. This copy was made in 1931, when the mural was already severely damaged.

Like most Christians in Central Asia, the Christians at Turfan belonged to the Church of the East, which was based in Mesopotamia, and the liturgical language was Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. The teachings of the Church of the East held that Christ had two natures—divine and human—and, furthermore, that Mary was the mother of the human Jesus but not the divine Christ. Their opponents sometimes called them Nestorians in an effort to associate them with Nestorius (ca. 381–ca. 451), a Syrian patriarch in Constantinople from 428 to 431, who had been expelled from the church, but members of the church do not refer to themselves as such.
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After the kaghan’s conversion, Manichaeism was the official religion of the Uighur Kaghanate. One charter, 125 lines long, specifies how a Manichaean monastery should be run, and most likely dates to the ninth century. It is not clear whether the Uighur government of Turfan or the monastery’s own leaders issued the document, which charges different monastic officials with supervising fields, vineyards, and the monastery storehouse. Some of the titles, like “elect,” are unique to Manichaeism, but the monastery’s structure closely resembled that of Buddhist monasteries. Dependent workers tilled the fields and supplied the monastery’s residents with grain and clothing. The clergy conducted feasts and were responsible for the spiritual lives of the congregation, whose main obligation was to supply them with vegetarian food that they would eat and so increase the amount of light in their bodies.
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Albert von Le Coq, the German excavator who was so active at Kucha, found some of the most interesting documents about Manichaeism in two buried monastic libraries dating to the period of Uighur rule. Texts of many Manichaean hymns survive: some in the liturgical language of Parthian, which Mani spoke, some in Uighur, the local language of Turfan by the year 1000. These hymns often celebrate the victory of the forces of light over the forces of darkness: