The Silk Road: A New History (43 page)

A letter from their escorts explains how each of the animals was lost.
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The ruler who did not allow the princes to continue their journey saw the princes’ purpose as quite different from that of the monks traveling with them. Monks sometimes traveled as pilgrims and sometimes as members of official delegations. Rulers received monks because they believed that hosting a powerful monk could bring immediate benefits, whether in the form of miracles or the enhanced prestige accruing to Buddhist patrons. When the princes’ delegation fell apart, the monks left the group, took some of the gifts intended for the Chinese, and settled down with wives. This is hardly what we might expect of Buddhists who had taken vows of celibacy, but entirely in keeping with what excavated materials reveal about other Buddhists, whether in Niya or Dunhuang.

The princes could not go on toward Ganzhou because of the unrest; the Dunhuang ruler feared that the Chinese court would hold him personally responsible if the gifts from Khotan did not arrive in the capital.
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Yet he allowed three monks to proceed—once they had drawn their finger marks on a formal document absolving him of responsibility—because he thought that clerics who did not carry gifts were in less danger.

Two members of the delegation explained how some of the participants reacted to the collapse of the delegation. In each case, the individual in question absconded with the tribute sent by the Khotanese king intended for the Chinese.
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Of the eight men, only two went to China: one slave who hoped to obtain his freedom and a trader who planned to give “one hundred blankets to the Royal Court.”
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Everyone else returned to Khotan with the pilfered goods.

At various points, the members of the delegation bartered away the gifts to cover their own travel expenses. After delivering a letter to the three monks who had gone on ahead, two men departed from Ganzhou, headed for Dunhuang “to do trade.”
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They were subsequently robbed in Guazhou. During the difficult trip during which so many of the princes’ animals died, two of the party “lost their merchandise,” and a Sogdian trader could not locate either his pack animals or the “merchandise he had hidden in the mountains.”
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Clearly traders accompanied the unfortunate envoys and encountered some of the same difficulties they did.

The princes engaged in trade as well. One Khotanese prince named Capastaka gave 40 pounds (18 kg) of jade to the Dunhuang authorities in exchange for one hundred fifty bolts of silk, nominally a gift for the Khotanese court, and fifty for his Chinese mother, Lady (Furen) Khi-vyaina. When his brother Wang Pa-kyau wrote to his mother to complain that Capastaka had cheated him, he asked that she send him jade as well: “When the envoys go there do you deign to send a little ira [jade] stone?”
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It certainly sounds as if he, like his brother, planned to trade jade for silk, which he could use to cover his expenses on the road.

Bolts of silk were the main currency used by travelers, according to a list of expenses incurred by a different group of Khotanese travelers. They spent bolts of silk to buy barley, a camel, and horses, to make payments to a guide, and to give to “forty compatriot merchants.” The silk did not always function as money; the travelers also made a garment from one bolt. In addition to paying expenses with silk, the group traded live sheep and antelope skins, an indication that in the Silk Road economy of the tenth century, people accepted goods in kind.
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A leading scholar of Khotanese, Professor Hiroshi Kumamoto of Tokyo University, explains why this list of expenditures is unusual: “This is one of the few Khotanese commercial documents found in Dunhuang. They are noteworthy in that the local Chinese documents in the ninth and tenth centuries only mention Khotanese envoys and priests, but hardly ever Khotanese merchants.”
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Kumamoto is absolutely right: few sources from the tenth century mention merchants specifically as a group.

While the Silk Road has long been viewed as a highway for a procession of camels led by a merchant in business for himself, the documentary record challenges this impression. The Khotanese-language documents about the seven princes mention different participants in the delegation: envoys of higher and lower rank, the princes, monks, and lay people.
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The lines dividing these groups were permeable and became even more so in difficult times. Even the princes resorted to selling jade to obtain silk for travel expenses. In such a situation, anyone and everyone had to engage in trade, but the trade consisted of impromptu exchanges of locally produced and locally obtained goods. If someone needed a particular item, he might pay for it with a bolt of silk, if available, but he might also trade a sheep or even an antelope skin. In such unsettled times few people ventured on the road. Those who did often attached themselves to official delegations, which were entitled to special treatment—even if they did not always receive it.

The Khotanese-language materials from the Dunhuang library cave focus almost entirely on Khotan’s relations with its neighbors to the east: Dunhuang, the Uighur kaghanates, the Tang dynasty and its successors in China. Yet the changes taking place to the west transformed Khotan.

The Kirghiz defeat of the Uighurs in 840 prompted the mass migration of the core Uighur populations out of Mongolia south to Turfan and Ganzhou, where they formed smaller successor states called the Uighur Kaghanates. In the aftermath of 840 another tribal confederacy formed: contemporary documents refer to them as “khans” or “kaghans,” and modern scholars call them the Karakhanids to distinguish them from other Turkic peoples. Sometime before 955 their leader Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam, and his son continued both his military campaigns and the effort to convert the Turkic peoples to Islam. In 960 Muslim chronicles record that “200,000 tents of the Turks” converted to Islam.
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The chronicles do not specify which Turks they mean or where exactly they were based, but modern scholars assume this passage refers to the Karakhanids, based in Kashgar, 350 miles (500 km) west of Khotan. After the Karakhanid conversion, they ordered their armies to destroy any existing non-Muslim religious structures, including Buddhist temples.

Living on the far eastern edge of the Islamic world, far from the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, the Karakhanid rulers probably converted in order to associate themselves with the great prestige of the Islamic powers. Several contemporary leaders, including those of the Khazars, the Kievan Rus’, and the Hungarians, weighed the advantages of each of the medieval world’s great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and then chose one. The Karakhanid conversion to Islam was similar.
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The Khotanese initially defeated the Karakhanid army in 970 and won control of Kashgar. The king of Khotan, Visa Sura (reigned 967–77), the son of Visa Sambhava, sent a royal edict (see
page 198
) to his uncle, the ruler of Dunhuang, who was the brother of his mother who had married into the Cao family of Dunhuang.

The letter explains why the Khotanese are late in sending tribute to Dunhuang and to the Chinese. The Khotanese king exults in what “wonderful things, wives and sons, elephant and thoroughbred valuable horse and the like” they have obtained in Kashgar—but complains a little, too: “As to what is the work of occupying an alien territory and maintaining the government, that is great and difficult. And as an alien we do not secure control.” He amplifies the theme of his government being stretched thin: “The money increases, and the corn, and the transport animals, and men, and troops, but there are many conflicts and men are dying.” Although the Khotanese armies have won, the Karakhanid forces lie just outside Kashgar. The victory is not conclusive.

The king’s letter closes with a list of gifts for his uncle. From Khotan the king sends the usual items: three lumps of jade (the weight specified for each), a piece of leather armor, some tools and vessels. From the goods captured from the Karakhanids, he has chosen a cup with a silver case and a steel tool, also with a cover.
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The capture of Kashgar was clearly a major victory for Khotan, and Chinese-language sources record that the Khotanese king wrote to the Chinese asking permission to send them a “dancing elephant” captured from Kashgar, which the Chinese government duly granted.
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The Khotanese and the Karakhanids continued to fight after 970, but the sources give no details about the progression of the war. We know only that in 1006 the leader of the Karakhanids, Yusuf Qadir Khan, launched a major military campaign toward the west. Accordingly, scholars assume that he had successfully conquered Khotan before 1006 but not too much before.
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Mahmud al-Kashgari (d. 1102) wrote a famous poem about the conquest of Khotan:

We came down on them like a flood,
We went out among their cities,
We tore down the idol-temples,
We shat on the Buddha’s head!
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Waves of panic spread eastward. Cave 17 in Dunhuang does not record the fall of Khotan, possibly because, as Professor Rong Xinjiang of Peking University speculates, the news of the destruction of the Buddhist buildings in Khotan prompted the sealing of the library cave, which included its rich Khotanese-language holdings.
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Overnight, Khotan stopped being Buddhist. The historical record is painfully scanty. We know that soon after Khotan’s fall the Kitan ruler of the Liao dynasty gave a gift to the Dunhuang ruler of horses and “beautiful jade” that could only have come from the vanquished Khotan.
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The next mention of Khotan is in Chinese records, which record a tribute mission from the Karakhanid-controlled Khotan in 1009.
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The sources, largely chronicles focusing on rulers, reveal very little about the impact of Islam on the new Karakhanid subjects. One exception is some documents in Arabic and Uighur that were “discovered under a tree in a garden outside Yarkand in 1911.” Yarkand is about 100 miles (160 km) to the west of Khotan. These materials, like so many other documents found in the region, were sent for safekeeping to the British consul George Macartney. The group includes three contracts in Uighur and twelve in Arabic, five of which are written using the Uighur alphabet. Reflecting the transition from the Uighur to the Arabic alphabet, these materials date to the period between 1080 and 1135, about one hundred years after the Karakhanid conquest.

The contracts all concern the sale of land; the three legal judgments treat the appointment of a guardian, inheritance division, and land rights. The Karakhanid state, at least by 1100 and at least in Yarkand, implemented the rudiments of Islamic law. Legal officials knew enough Arabic to draft simple legal documents in Arabic and then to translate them into Uighur for the parties involved and the witnesses, some of whom signed in Arabic, some in Uighur.
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Three of the Arabic documents explicitly state that the document was translated into a language known to the participants and read aloud to them. At the minimum, the legal officials of the Karakhanid state were familiar with Islamic law, but the effects of the state’s conversion to Islam on ordinary people are still little known.
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While the Karakhanids may have converted to Islam, the other oasis kingdoms in the Western Regions did not. The Uighur rulers of Kucha and Turfan supported both Manichaeism and Buddhism in different periods; the Xixia, who controlled Ganzhou, Dunhuang, and the southern Silk Route east of Khotan, were also Buddhist.
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This three-way division of Xinjiang continued in the twelfth-century, a period when Xinjiang nominally came under the rule of the Western Liao, a successor state to the Liao dynasty (907–1125) of north China. Under them, the Church of the East increased its influence throughout Xinjiang, particularly among the Kereit and Naiman tribes of the Mongols.
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Then in 1211 a Naiman leader named Küchlük took over the Western Liao. Originally an adherent of the Church of the East, Küchlük converted to Buddhism and became a ferocious opponent of Islam. He attacked both Kashgar and Khotan, forcing the inhabitants of both cities to renounce Islam and adopt either Christianity or Buddhism. But Küchlük was the last ruler in the region to ban Islam. In 1218 he was defeated by Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan is the transliteration of the Persian spelling), who had unified the Mongols in 1206 and launched a series of stunning conquests. Chinggis rescinded Küchlük’s religious policies.
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The Mongol conquests continued after Chinggis’s death in 1227; by 1241 the Mongols had conquered much of Eurasia, creating the largest contiguous empire in world history. They pursued a policy of general religious tolerance, giving support to all holy men while privileging their own shamanistic traditions. During the period of Mongol unification, sometimes called Pax Mongolica, it became possible—for the first time in world history—to travel all the way from Europe to China, on the easternmost edge of the Mongol Empire. Many people made the trip, and some left records of their travels. Most travelers began at the Crimean Peninsula and crossed the vast ocean of unbroken grasslands all the way from Eurasia to modern Mongolia. They did not use the traditional Silk Road routes around the Taklamakan.