Abstract
The International Convention of Asia Scholars has recently recognised Valerie Hansen’s latest book as the one that can best be used in the teaching of the humanities. That is no small praise, and I could not readily agree more. Indeed, for anyone who teaches the Silk Road—or Asian or world history—this book is an absolute boon. Not only because it is beautifully written and cogently offers up a magisterial overview of Inner Asian history during the first millennium, but, more importantly, it also weaves into its narrative the excitement of discovery and intellectual exploration that lies at the heart of the humanities. And as such, it should be no surprise that one fundamental premise of the book is to overturn some of the conventional and popular misconceptualisations about the Silk Road.
To this end Hansen begins the book by dismantling some of the major canards, such as there ever existing a Rome-to-China super highway, or that there was ever any direct trade between the two. Indeed, this absence of direct trade—or long-distance trade of any kind—is one of the two main arguments that shape the book’s narrative arc. Thus, contrary to how Silk Road trade is often imagined—as camel caravans plodding through the desert carrying glorious commodities—Hansen argues instead that trade in Inner Asia was largely local, carried out by ‘peddlers’, who sold products of local production. And tied into this revisionist intervention about long-distance trade is Hansen’s second argument, which posits that the Chinese state was actually the largest player in the Inner Asian economy.
Each chapter thus meticulously surveys the extant archaeological, artistic and textual evidence of one city-state in order to prove again and again these two main arguments. The first chapter, which focuses on Kroraina, thus highlights what the more than 1000 Kharosti documents tell us about Silk Road trade in this particular kingdom; which is that ‘the indigenous subsistence economy occasionally supplied the Chinese garrison with locally produced commodities’ and that ‘the documents do not mention any profit-seeking activities’ (p. 43). Moreover, the fact that ‘merchant’ is used only once in these 1000+ documents—as well as the limited evidence of coins (trade was done largely by barter, or with silk as money)—leads Hansen to argue ‘that the Silk Road trade of the third and fourth centuries CE in this area was indeed minimal’ (p. 50). In fact, according to Hansen, if it were not for the Chinese garrison the economy of Kroraina would apparently have barely gone beyond a local subsistence level.
Chapter 2, which focuses on the Kuchean documents, makes the same argument:
rather than a long-distance trade initiated and staffed by private merchants, these materials indicate that the Chinese military contributed significantly to the Silk Road economy. When Chinese armies were stationed in Central Asia, money—in the form of coins, grain, and cloth—flowed into the region. When the Chinese troops withdrew, small-scale trade resumed, largely maintained by local travelers and peddlers. (p. 82)
Chapter 3 makes the same argument based on the more than 2000 documents unearthed at the Astana graveyard near Turfan. In particular, Hansen highlights a collection of scale-fee tax receipts from one government station in the year 600 to argue that not only was the trade small-scale (highest volume was 800 lbs) and local (between Kucha, Hami and Turfan), but also of less than remarkable goods (that is, brass, medicine, copper, turmeric, raw sugar, gold, silver, silk thread and ammonium chloride). In contrast to which Hansen notes that in the 730s and 740s the Tang ‘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’ (p. 107). Or, in other words, ‘Silk Road trade was largely the byproduct of Chinese government spending—not long-distance commerce conducted by private merchants, as is so often thought’ (p. 111).
The same argument is made in the same manner in Chapters 4 through 7. In the fourth chapter, on Samarkand and the Sogdian letters from China and the Mt. Mugh documents from Tajikistan, Hansen notes again that they make ‘it clear that Silk Road commerce was largely local trade, conducted over small distances by peddlers’ (p. 139). A point made further in the following chapter on Chang’an, which highlights the Sogdian Zoroastrian tombs recently discovered in Xi’an and the famous East–West aesthetics of the artefacts found at Hejiacun. However, rather than taking these trading networks and the Hejiacun artefacts as conventional signs of Silk Road long-distance trade and East–West fusion, Hansen argues counter-intuitively that these actually prove the opposite. Since ‘the existence of a stereotype’, like rich Sogdians, ‘does not make it true’ (p. 159); moreover, the ‘composition of the [Hejiacun] hoard, with few imported items and many more locally made vessels, fit the overall pattern of Silk Road trade. Relatively few goods traveled long distances overland’ (p. 156).
In Chapter 6, Hansen makes the same argument based on the wide array of texts discovered at Dunhuang: ‘all the documents this book has examined—with the exception of the government documents listing massive payments to troops stationed in the northwest—point to a small-scale, local trade, rather than a thriving long-distance trade’. An argument that reaches its crescendo in the final chapter on Khotan, where in the tenth century no Khotanese documents—as those of fourth-century Kroraina—mention merchants; which, according to Hansen, means there was no long-distance trade. And this state of affairs is juxtaposed to that of the early eighth century and the height of Tang power when not only grain taxes were recorded in bilingual registers, but the local economy was monetised. All of which invariably fell apart as did the Tang. Thus by the end of the eighth century Khotan was back to ‘a subsistence economy in which textiles and grain in measured amounts served as money’ (p. 215).
The book thus clearly has a consistent two-fold argument, and much of it is based on the sound scholarship of others. Indeed, in most cases where these arguments are laid out Hansen admirably recognises the work of others—such as Ito Toshio, Éric Trombert and Hiroshi Kumamoto—who have drawn the same conclusions based on the documents under discussion: that trade was local and largely fuelled by the Chinese state. Though, since all of them work on one corpus of texts none of them have made the bold, big-picture argument that Hansen does herein concerning the nature of Silk Road trade in its entirety. And, in this regard, I wonder if she has not over-played her hand. Though not regarding the impact of the Chinese state in developing and driving the Inner Asian economy, which builds on Erik Zürcher’s work on the early impact of the tuntian system, and I believe is fully supported by the evidence. Rather, I am not so sure about her revisionist assault on the existence, or lack thereof, of long-distance trade. Indeed, there is simply too much evidence—written and unwritten—outside of the sources that Hansen marshals to make her argument that point in the other direction. Yet, in saying so, I also know that it now also has to be proven. And that oddly enough is why this is such a great book. It will not only teach anyone who reads it—be they neophyte or expert—a great deal about the Silk Road, but it will also force all of us to really think again about what the Silk Road was actually all about.