Desert winds

Central Asian camel paths blended cultures

Mingqi (tomb figurines) of a male and female equestrians made in East Asia/China during the 1st half of the 8th c. They are 14 to 15 inches tall and are “(m)olded, reddish buff earthenware with cold-painted pigments over white ground.” (Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Anthony M. Solomon)

This Medium article is based on an essay the author submitted today, 9 December 2020, to ChinaX, HarvardX’s series of free open-learning courses on edX for a deeper understanding of China. In Part 3, Cosmopolitan Tang: Aristocratic Culture in China, Prof. Peter K. Bol interviews independent expert Dr. Daniel C. Waugh on the cross-cultural interactions that took place along Central Asian silk roads during the Tang (618–907 AD) as well as later Chinese dynasties. Afterwards, learners were asked to reflect on the peoples, objects, religions and ideas that moved along these webs of travel and trading- not straight paved roads, but winding paths that domesticated camels and horses often trod- as well as remnants of these exchanges that can be seen today.

Mirroring the theme of ancient cross-cultural exchange in Prof. Bol’s interview with Central Asian silk roads expert Dr. Dan Waugh, Shadow of the Silk Road’s author Colin Thubron writes,

In the more rigorous early histories, the Yellow Emperor [Huangdi, the emperor whose traditional reign dates are between 2,697 and 2,598 BC] was himself the forerunner of these [later conquering foreign “barbarians,” the Huns, Turks, and Mongols]: a clan leader who invaded from the north-west and unified the people in his path… As if to still this nomad flood into controllable history, sages as long ago as the eleventh century BC slotted the conqueror into time as their ancestor. His colour changed to the yellow soil of inner China, where the wind-blown loess from the northern deserts settles into fertile fields. The notional shade of barbarian soils was black or red, and white the tint of death and of the West. But yellow was the colour in the world’s heart…

The father of China was not Chinese at all.

Moreover, Thubron writes that silk, remembered in Chinese legends as the invention of Huangdi’s wife Lei-tzu, the Lady of the Silk Worms, may well have originated in the “barbarian” West at a much earlier time:

The cultivation of silk had spread along the Chinese rivers long before her. More than six thousand years ago somebody in a Neolithic village carved a silkworm on an ivory cup, and archaeologists unearthed an artificially broken cocoon. Silk from the third millennium BC turned up in a ruined city of Turkmenistan, and early sites have yielded spinning tools and even red-dyed silk ribbons.

Artifacts of passage

According to Prof. Bol and Dr. Waugh, the peoples working, trading or traveling and had left artifacts of their passing in Asia include:

— Chinese
— Indians
— Persians
— Sasanians
— Arabs
— Sogdians
— Japanese
— Koreans
— Khagan Turks
— Mongols
— Tibetans/Himalayan peoples
— Uyghurs
— Liaos
— Khitans
— Xia
— Tanguts
— Jurtens and
— Southeast Asian peoples like the Vietnamese.

The latest research on the Belitung, Indonesia, shipwreck with Persian, Arabian, and Tang cargoes, currently on exhibit in Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) in Singapore and their partner institution in Shanghai, shows that Eastern Africans and other peoples living along coasts embracing the Indo-Pacific oceans were part of these fluid cosmopolitan networks as well.

In this 2020 webinar of a series organized by ACM, Dr. Tansen Sen describes the fluid identities and cultural interactions on boats and in Indo-Pacific port-polities at the time when a boat made in Oman using wood from Africa sank with Persian, Arabian and Tang cargoes near Belitung, Indonesia. While ships made by Southeast Asians in 1st millennium AD have likewise been found and studied by archaeologists, none made in China during that early period has been found.

Among the objects that archaeologists, art historians and other experts have identified as having been transported around and across the silk roads and given rise to innovations include:

— artworks, such as paintings and pieces of sculpture
— silk, such as painted banners
— glass bowls
— ceramics in the form of bowls and storage vessels
— metal objects
— collections of Buddhist sutras and
— contracts and other documents.

Religions that have left their mark in mainland and archipelagic Asia through the movement of monks, nuns and other believers include:

— Buddhism
— Nestorian Christianity (later followed by Catholic Christianity)
— Zoroastrianism
— Manichaeism and
— Islam.

Finally, ideas that were exchanged, adopted and transformed along the ancient travel routes of Asia include:

— systems and forms of writing, such as Uyghur and Syrian cursive scripts
— technologies such as those used for weaving
— art and fashion styles, patterns and decorations
— languages
— ethical, moral and religious beliefs
— wall painting methods such as those applied to decorate monastic caves
— sculpture, such as those carved in stone like the lost Bamiyan Buddhas
— dances
— music
— funeral customs
— military technologies & strategies and
— political systems.

The remains of these ancient cross-cultural interactions are still being manifested today.

Apart from books on the fluid cosmopolitanisms of ancient peoples around the Indo-Pacific, such as Thubron’s book above, remarkable documentaries on the peoples living along the historically drawn Silk Roads were produced and broadcast by NHK and CCTV in the 1980s:

1st of 12 documentaries on the Silk Road made by NHK (Japan) and CCTV (China) in the 1980s

Recently, DW produced and broadcast documentaries on the New Silk Roads:

1st of a two-part documentary made by DW on the 21st c. “Silk Road”

Moreover, as explained by experts in the ACM webinar series linked above, as well as shown in the latter DW documentary, the term “Silk Road,” coined by Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofe, a 19th c. German traveler and geographer, has also been promoted by the Chinese government from the late 20th up to the present for political, economic and strategic reasons. The use of the Silk Roads discourse to promote certain interests has potential and actual impacts on the lives of peoples, like Tibetans and Uyghurs, as well as the economies and security of nation-states and maritime spaces today.

On a lighter note, even if the ancient pilgrims, traders, and communities - before the identification of “civilizations” and rule of nation-states - did not yet have a concept of a Silk Roads network, their interactions have become an enjoyable and intellectually enriching subject of study by scholars and even ordinary people, such as learners in ChinaX. The artifacts of their existence and passage allow us today to develop new insights into our own multiple and fluid identities and interactions in a world grown increasingly — at times uncomfortably — interconnected.

The author Voltaire Veneracion is an attorney-at-law from the Philippines who during the COVID-19 pandemic has been nurturing a passion for Southeast Asian Studies, as well as Zen and Aikido. Email him at voltaireremo@yahoo.com.