The Silk Road: A New History (7 page)

Stein was certain that the migrants from India who traveled to the Kroraina in the second and third centuries crossed the mountains along the same routes—following the Indus, Gilgit, and Hunza rivers—that he had followed. At the end of the Hunza River, they had a choice of several routes leading into Xinjiang.
¹⁴
Jason Neelis, an expert on the inscriptions, refers to these as “capillary routes,” to convey the complex network of main roads, like veins and arteries, and the many side paths, like capillaries, that led through the mountains to Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, travelers usually entered China at the Mintaka Pass, as Stein did, but nowadays they follow the Karakorum Highway, which crosses into China at the Khunjerab Pass to the southeast.

The surviving inscriptions do not reveal why the migrants left Gandhara. At the time, the Kushan Empire was in its waning years. The Kushans ruled much of north India (including modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan) in 40–260
CE
, and peaked in the early second century
CE
during the reign of the great ruler Kanishka (ca. 120–46).
¹⁵
The official history of the Later Han dynasty, written by the Chinese in the mid-fifth century, records that the Kushan Empire sent troops into Xinjiang several times.
¹⁶
In 90
CE
, it reports, the Kushan ruler dispatched seventy thousand soldiers to the Western Region. Although these huge numbers cannot be taken at face value, the Kushan dynasty was clearly powerful enough to send troops to western Xinjiang.

Most Chinese records say little about these migrations from India, but one biography of Zhi Qian, a Buddhist teacher of Indian descent, explains: “He came from the Great Yuezhi Kingdom (viz. the Kushan empire). Led by his grandfather Fadu, hundreds of his countrymen immigrated into China during the reign of Emperor Ling Di [ca. 168–189
CE
] and Fadu was offered an official post.”
¹⁷

This conclusion—that the Gandhari-speaking residents of Niya came from Pakistan and Afghanistan—consciously rejects the account in the Chinese official histories that the Kushans (Yuezhi in Chinese) originally lived in Gansu Province, near Dunhuang, but that the rise of the Xiongnu around 175
BCE
forced them to abandon their Chinese homeland and move west. According to the official histories, the Greater Yuezhi were one of the five nomadic groups who subsequently formed the Kushan Empire around 23
CE.
¹⁸
There are several good reasons to doubt the account of the Yuezhi migration out of Gansu as given in the dynastic histories. The compilers of the histories, writing many generations later, recorded received wisdom and legends about non-Chinese peoples. They almost always ascribed Chinese homelands to foreign peoples, including the Xiongnu, the Japanese, and, most implausibly of all, the residents of Da Qin, the mythical empire on the western edge of the known world. Finally, and most convincingly, no archeological evidence for such a migration exists.
¹⁹

The most plausible explanation is the simplest: multiple nomadic groups moved across vast stretches of territory in the third and second centuries
BCE
, but we cannot trust Chinese observers writing three centuries later to give an accurate account of these migrations. Although the Chinese ascribed a Chinese homeland to the Yuezhi, we can only be certain that the Yuezhi were in Bactria (the lands between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus River in north central Afghanistan, with its capital at Balkh) in 138
BCE
, because that is where Zhang Qian encountered them. Any claims about their earlier movements must remain speculative.

Following the same arduous route through the mountains that the ancient migrants had taken, Stein finally entered Xinjiang. He visited a series of oasis towns—Yarkand, Khotan, Keriya, Niya—strung along the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert like beads on a necklace. Most were a day’s travel apart; travelers had to prepare enough water and supplies for those legs of the journey that were longer. In Keriya, a “respectable old” farmer named Abdullah told Stein about seeing old ruins in the desert. The Niya ruins were 75 miles (120 km) north of the modern town of Niya, now called Minfeng, which lies on today’s Khotan-Minfeng highway. When Stein arrived in Minfeng, his camel driver met an “enterprising young villager” named Ibrahim who tried to sell him the wooden tablet with Kharoshthi writing shown in the photo at the beginning of the chapter.

Stein immediately hired Ibrahim to guide Stein’s work crew north along the Niya river to the last inhabited village, the site of an active shrine to a revered Muslim teacher, Imam Jafar Sadik. There the river ended. Stein and his men followed the dry riverbed north for another 24 miles (39 km) to the ancient site of Niya. The site consisted of the ruins of many wooden houses lying in the sand and a Buddhist brick tower, or stupa, shown in color plate 6.

Characteristically, Stein recorded his first impressions of the site in great detail:

Shrivelled trunks of ancient fruit-trees appeared rising from the low sand. Moving on northward for less than two miles I soon sighted the first two “old houses,” standing on what looked at first sight like small elevated plateaus, but which closer observation proved to be merely portions of the original loess soil that had escaped the erosion proceeding all round.…

Marching about two miles further north, across broad swelling dunes, I arrived at the ruined structure of sun-dried bricks of which Abdullah had already spoken at Keriya.… It proved, as I expected, to be the remains of a small Stupa, buried for the most part under the slope of a high conical sandhill.…

As I retired to my first night’s rest among these silent witnesses of ancient habitations my main thought was how many of the precious documents on wood, which Ibrahim declared he had left behind at the ruin “explored” by him a year before, were still waiting to be recovered.

Drawn by the direct evidence of connections among civilizations, Stein visited ancient Niya four times—for fifteen days in 1901, eleven in 1906, five in 1916, and a week in 1931. Each time he unearthed new houses, Buddhist remains, and documents on wood.

The Fourth Expedition did not go as smoothly as the first three.
²⁰
By the 1930s, the Chinese authorities had passed laws stipulating that only excavations jointly conducted by foreigners with Chinese collaborators could remove artifacts from the country. Working closely with British authorities, Stein thought that he had obtained permission to excavate in Xinjiang, but when he arrived in Kashgar, the local authorities assigned guards to make sure that he did not take anything. At Niya, Stein wandered around the site trying to distract his keepers, while his assistant, Abdul Ghafar, looked surreptitiously for documents. When they returned to Kashgar, Stein had somehow managed to collect 159 packets of materials.

Yet his expedition failed: the Chinese authorities did not allow Stein to ship anything out of the country, and the artifacts have since disappeared. All that remain from that expedition are Stein’s meticulous notes and photographs. From Kashgar, a disconsolate Stein wrote to his friend Percy Stafford Allen: “I said farewell for the last time to that favorite ancient site where I could live more than anywhere else in touch with a dead past.”
²¹

Even before he arrived at the site for the first time, Stein realized that he had to identify the ancient Chinese name of the site before he could tap the extensive geographical information in the Chinese official histories.
The History of the Han Dynasty
and its sequel,
The History of the Later Han,
give capsule descriptions of all the different kingdoms of the northwest: their distance from the capital, their population (total number of households, individuals, and “those who could bear arms”), and an overview of their history. Established around 60
BCE
and dismantled in 16
CE
, the office of the protector general, the Han-dynasty official in charge of the Western Regions, provided this information to the history office in the central government.
²²

A century later, the staff of the history office drew on this information to describe the various oasis states of the northwest.
²³
They wrote that the Shanshan Kingdom (using the Chinese name for Kroraina) was located 6,100
li
(approximately 1,550 miles, or 2,500 km) from the Han-dynasty capital of Chang’an.
²⁴
(The actual distance from Loulan to Chang’an is 1,120 miles, or 1,793 km). The distances given in the official histories were probably calculated by approximating how far an animal could travel in a day and then multiplying that rate by the number
of days it took to reach the destination. These distances are not exact, but they do indicate the positions of the different oasis kingdoms in relation to each other.

In 1901, Stein found a wooden seal with four characters that said “edict of the king of Shanshan,” which the Han dynasty, or a later dynasty, had bestowed on the local ruler with whom they had diplomatic relations.
²⁵
Stein believed that Niya was too small to have been the capital of Shanshan. He uncovered only about fifty dwellings at the site. (According to Stein’s numbering system, “N.xiv.i.1” referred to “N” for Niya, the 14th house he discovered, room 1, and the first item discovered in room 1, whether an artifact or document.) Since then archeologists have unearthed one hundred more structures, far too few for the 14,100 people living in 1,570 households mentioned in the official history. In
Serindia,
published in 1921, Stein identified the ancient site of Niya as the seat of the Jingjue Kingdom, which reportedly had 480 households and 3,360 individuals.
²⁶
Even these figures are too large for the site. Some say that more houses lie still undiscovered under the sand, but it is also possible that the Han-dynasty population figures for the distant kingdoms of the northwest were not accurate.

While most scholars accept Stein’s identification of Niya as Jingjue, his view that the archeological site of Loulan was the capital of the Shanshan Kingdom remains controversial. Like Niya, the site of Loulan has a single brick stupa, the wooden remains of houses, and a few wooden carvings in Gandharan style. Loulan was the Chinese transliteration of “Kroraina,” which denoted both the name of the kingdom and its capital in the Kharoshthi documents.
²⁷

Since 108
BCE
,
The History of the Han
records, the Han dynasty had occasionally sent armies to attack Loulan but had never conquered the city, which was the capital of a small kingdom, also called Loulan. For several decades, the ruler of Loulan had tried to maintain amicable relations with the two rival states of the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu peoples living in modern-day Mongolia by sending princes as royal hostages to each of these empires.

The strategy failed in 77
BCE
, when the brother of the reigning Loulan king informed the Han officials that the king favored the Xiongnu. The Chinese sent an emissary who first feigned friendship, then invited the king to his tent and killed him. Han armies then invaded Loulan, and the Chinese renamed the kingdom Shanshan. The Han dynasty established a new capital for Shanshan at Endere (modern Ruoqiang), and stationed the official charged with overseeing all Han-dynasty activities in the Western Regions in Loulan.
²⁸

The histories report that Loulan was occupied for more than five centuries, starting in 77
BCE
, but few finds suggest such a long period of occupation. The most direct evidence of Chinese presence is newly minted coins, most likely from a Chinese garrison, outside of Loulan. Stein discovered 211 round bronze coins with square holes, distributed evenly over an area some 30 yards (27 m) long and 3–4 feet (ca. 1 m) wide.
²⁹
The coins, apparently freshly minted, were of the
wuzhu
(literally “five-grain,” a measure of weight) type and dated from 86
BCE
to 1
BCE.
³⁰
Stein explained:

It was clear that all these coins had dropped from a caravan moving in the very direction in which I had supposed the ancient route to lie. They must have got loose from the string which tied them and gradually dropped out unobserved through an opening in their bag or case. The swaying movement of the camel or cart in which this receptacle was carried sufficiently explains why the line marked by the scattered coins had the width above indicated.
³¹

About 50 yards (ca. 45 m) away from the last coin, one of Stein’s workmen found a pile of unused arrowheads, surely part of the same shipment of military supplies as the
wuzhu
coins. The coincidence of coins and arrowheads suggests that in Han China, payments to soldiers constituted a major source of fresh coins in a given region.
³²

A small number of Chinese documents from Niya, and probably dating to this early period, suggest a nonmilitary Chinese presence during the Han dynasty as well. House 14 had two rooms in addition to a large hall measuring 56 feet (17 m) by 41 feet (12.5 m).
³³