The Silk Road: A New History (41 page)

In 2004, the National Library of China in Beijing decided to purchase some documents from Dandan Uiliq. Experts in Khotanese have worked intensively to date these documents, to decipher and translate them, to provide them with a provenance (sometimes possible because they mention some of the same individuals who appear in documents whose findspot is known), and—most important of all—to explain their significance. These new finds have changed our understanding of key developments in Silk Road history.

The earliest documents from the Dandan Uiliq region date to 722.
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Found at a small settlement south of Dandan Uiliq called Domoko (Damagou in Chinese), these wooden tallies measure an inch (2.5 cm) or less across and range from 7.5 inches (19 cm) to 18 inches (46 cm) long. With a round hole at one end where they were attached to a container holding grain, they have evenly spaced notches that officials marked with ink each time they received a payment of tax grain. Here is a typical example:

[Chinese text]: Boluodaocai of Bajia delivered 7
shuo
s [roughly 1.2 bushels, or 42 L] of wheat on the 5th day of the 8th month of the 10th year of Kaiyuan [722]. Clerk: He Xian. Officials: Zhang Bing, Xiang Hui.

[Khotanese text]: Bradaysaa of Birgamdara delivered 7
kusa
s of wheat in the year of the shau Marsha.
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Both the Chinese and the Khotanese give the name of the taxpayer, the amount of grain paid, and the year of payment (722). The Chinese text gives more information, including the exact day and month of the tax payment as well as the name of the receiving clerk and his superiors. The tallies mention three types of tax grain: barley, wheat, and millet.
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All the tallies (there are thirty-five in the set bought by the National Library of China; others are in private hands) follow this same format.

These tallies afford a clear glimpse of how Tang-dynasty tax collection system functioned in Khotan. These documents are all bilingual. Living in the modern era, we have grown accustomed to multilingual documents of the European Community and other international organizations. There is something extraordinary, though, in seeing these bilingual grain tallies. In the eighth century, the reach of the Chinese state extended down to the lowest level; even the smallest payment of grain was recorded in Khotanese, the language of the local people, and in Chinese, the language of the rulers. Similarly, all the officials in the government had both Chinese and Khotanese titles. The Khotanese bureaucracy employed clerks who could translate Khotanese documents into Chinese; some Chinese-language documents refer to petitions in Khotanese from the local people that were translated so that Chinese officials could understand them.
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A different group of wooden documents, only in Khotanese and most likely contemporary with the grain tallies, reveals more about local society. Shaped like a box and made from two pieces of wood, an undertablet holds a cover tablet that, like a drawer, can be pulled in and out with a knob. Writing covers almost every surface, including the interior, sides, and exterior of the two pieces of the box. These pieces record contractual agreements among different residents.
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These documents refer to an “assembly” that enforces decisions reached by officials, a distinctive feature of Khotanese society. One dispute involved payment for the use of water for irrigation; the officials hearing the case stipulated that one man should temporarily receive the water, which belonged to the village collectively, and that the village should retain the right of future use. The decision ends with the phrase “This case was presented in the judicial assembly before” two officials, whose names are given.
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This case shows that, by the early eighth century and quite possibly earlier, the Khotanese had developed a sophisticated legal system in which individuals recorded transactions such as the transfer of irrigation rights, a loan, or the adoption of a child. Witnesses vouched for the details of these transactions, and officials signed the documents—customarily before an assembly—to ensure that they were maintained. Once a decision had been reached, everyone in the community was supposed to abide by it. Whole villages bore some collective tax responsibilities; when a village had paid the required tax, officials issued a receipt—but only for payment in full.

This system was in place in 755, when the An Lushan rebellion erupted in central China. In the following year, the Khotanese king sent five thousand troops, many of them Chinese soldiers garrisoned at Khotan, to help the Tang emperor suppress the rebels. After 755, the Chinese retained only tenuous control of Khotan. Power rested in the hands of the local commissioner, a Chinese official, who often could not get messages to his superiors in the Chinese capital because overland travel was so difficult.

During the decades after 755, as elsewhere in northwest China, the Chinese state stopped paying military units stationed in the northwest; Dunhuang experienced a coin shortage at this time. Even before 755 Chinese coins may not always have been available in Khotan; in one instance, adoptive parents paid five hundred coins for a child and substituted white silk for the remaining two hundred coins they owed, presumably because coins were already in short supply.
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Some Chinese-language documents from Dandan Uiliq, which date to the 780s, record loans for over ten thousand coins.
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We cannot tell if coins were actually paid or were simply used as a unit of record while local people substituted cloth or grain as payment. In one bilingual contract, the Chinese text mentions payment in coins, while the Khotanese version specifies how much cloth was paid as a substitute for coins.
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By the end of the eighth century, a subsistence economy in which textiles and grain in measured amounts served as money replaced the coin economy of earlier times.

The Chinese forces continued to collect taxes from the Khotanese populace, as shown by a document requisitioning sheepskins for the soldiers’ winter clothing. This document, like others found in a single cache at Dandan Uiliq, was addressed to a local official named Sidaka who served as
spata,
the village head in charge of nonmilitary matters. The author of the document, himself also a spata officeholder, explains that, since the people in Sidaka’s hamlet own 90 sheep, they owe 28 sheepskins; the tax rate is 2 sheepskins for every 6.5 sheep owned, or 27.69 for the hamlet. Sidaka submitted 27 sheepskins, but his colleague explains that no receipt will be issued until the hamlet pays the full amount due. Such a document presupposes the existence of detailed household registers listing not only the human occupants of the village but also the animals they owned; without such records—some of which have been found—the occupying Chinese government could not have known how many sheepskins to levy from the village.

Yoshida Yutaka, a professor of linguistics at Kyoto University, has painstakingly identified four different places where different Khotanese-language documents were found. Two were at Dandan Uiliq; one contains documents dated between 777 and 788 that mention Sidaka.
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As this and other documents from the same spot show, Khotan had a Chinese-run government between 777 and 788, the years in which documents with Sidaka’s name appear. During these decades, the Tibetans seized on the weakness of the Tang central government and aggressively expanded into Central Asia. After conquering Dunhuang in 786 they fought the Uighurs in Turfan for three years starting in 789 before defeating them in 792, and they conquered Khotan before 796.
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Historians of the Western Regions have known that the Tibetan Empire collapsed from within during the 840s; during the same decade, the Kirgiz defeated the Uighur Empire based in Karabalgasun, in today’s Mongolia, and many Uighurs fled south to modern Xinjiang. The newly discovered documents from Dandan Uiliq make it possible to know which oases fell to the Tibetans or to the Uighurs in precisely which years.

Mazar Tagh was a military fortress on a strategically important route between Kucha and Khotan, which lay 90 miles (150 km) to the south of the fort. It also happened to be in an uninhabited part of the desert; Khotanese cooks and guards served there on fixed rotations.
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With the conquest of Khotan, the Tibetans gained control of the outpost, which had originally housed Chinese soldiers. One document dated 798 urges the official receiving the document to evacuate the men and cattle in the fortress to a nearby town. The document does not name the enemy, but it is probably the Uighur Kaghanate, which had occupied Kucha around 800.
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The Tibetans left much of the previous administration in place; several named individuals continued in office before and after the imposition of Tibetan rule. They issued orders in both Khotanese and Chinese, an indication of how deeply Chinese bureaucratic practices had influenced the Khotanese and then the Tibetans.
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A few officials continued to use individual Chinese characters as their signatures. Scribes drafted contracts that translated multiple Chinese phrases literally into Tibetan. Those contracts, although never used within Tibet, established models for Tibetan-language contracts at Dunhuang.
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The Tibetans ruled Khotan indirectly; whenever they needed anything, the top official, the commissioner, made a request to his Khotanese counterpart, who then issued the order to the appropriate local officials.
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As rich as they are, the tax materials from Dandan Uiliq do not reveal who was traveling along the Silk Road and why. One of the most illuminating documents about cultural contact on the Silk Road surfaced because Stein’s men continued to dig on their own even when he did not pay them. After excavating Dandan Uiliq for seventeen days (from December 18, 1900, to January 4, 1901) Stein dismissed some of the crew and took the remaining men to a nearby site, some 7 miles (11 km) away.

When Stein returned to his camp on the first evening, he was startled to see some of the dismissed workers waiting for him. He was even more surprised when they presented him with their finds: near the corner of Dandan Uiliq Structure 13, they had uncovered a crumpled document with Hebrew letters on it. Stein explains why he believed his men had found it where they said they had; the paper was genuinely old (eighth century), and making and planting a forgery would have required a great deal of preparation.
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Stein was particularly leery of fakes because he had just exposed the fraud of Islam Akhun, the man whose skillfully forged documents tricked Hoernle into thinking that yet another new language had been discovered.
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While at Dandan Uiliq, Stein had cleared the sand from Structure 13, where Turdi reported finding multiple silver ingots worth two hundred rupees, or thirteen pounds British sterling (with a rough value of perhaps one thousand pounds today) in his youth.
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Even though the structure was big, measuring 60 feet (18 m) on one side, with one room 22 by 18 feet (6.7 by 5.5 m), Stein decided not to excavate when his crew found nothing but a fireplace and a wooden frame.
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After Stein departed, the dismissed workers dug through a pile of waste, left near the ruin by earlier looters, and recovered the document written in Hebrew letters.

The letter was in New Persian, the language that replaced Middle Persian in Iran during the ninth century. A handful of Jewish-Persian documents have been found at various locations around the world, near Herat, Afghanistan, the Malabar Coast of south India, and Baghdad. The Dandan Uiliq document is not the oldest such example—the oldest dates to the 750s—but it is among oldest Jewish-Persian documents surviving today.
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The fragmentary letter is difficult to make out because only the center of the page remains; the words at the beginning and end of each line are gone. The author writes to a business associate, apparently his superior, about different transactions involving sheep, clothing, spikenard (a plant used in medicine and scents), a saddle, stirrups, and straps. Most likely a merchant, he mentions wanting to know his “profit and loss.” We do not know why he left Iran, but we can speculate that he (or his ancestors) moved east to escape the Islamic conquest, and he ended up in the Khotan region during a particularly turbulent time.

The letter provides direct testimony that at least one Persian-speaking Jew was in Dandan Uiliq in the late eighth century, but the fragmentary state of the letter makes it difficult to say more. More than a hundred years after the initial find, the utterly unexpected occurred: a second Jewish-Persian letter, almost undamaged, appeared for sale, and the National Library of China purchased it. Zhang Zhan, a graduate student who earned his master’s degree at Peking University and who is working on his doctorate at Harvard, published a full transcription and translation into Chinese in 2008; he plans to bring out the English translation in the near future.
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The similarities with the old letter are so great that Zhang Zhan is confident that the two letters were written at the same time, in the same place, and by the same person: in the opening years of the ninth century in Khotan. His dating hinges on a sentence in the letter reporting the latest news from Kashgar: “The Tibetans have all been killed.”
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If, as comparison to several Khotanese letters also found at Dandan Uiliq suggests, the letter refers to the Uighur defeat of the Tibetans, then the letter dates to 802, when the Uighurs took Kashgar and expelled the Tibetans.