It’s perhaps best to start by noting that the title of Xin Wen’s new study, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road, is considerably more expansive than the book itself, which restricts itself to the late first millennium (ca 850-1000 CE) and is centered on Dunhuang; Khotan is as far as west as it goes. The book’s tight focus is however fortuitous, for it allows Xin Wen to go into illuminating—and very readable—detail.
Xin Wen makes a case for Dunhuang—it “sits at the intersection of three main roads in the Eastern half of the Eurasian continent”—but more immediately, perhaps, it’s where the documents are (or were). The 60,000 manuscripts in the so-called “library cave” included a large number of secular documents: reports, guides, lists, letters, contracts, many (perhaps most) of which only exist because they were recycled as waste paper to strengthen bindings or coverings of religious texts.
Xin Wen makes the now somewhat contrarian argument that the “Silk Road” really was about silk.
It’s hard to know who will get more out of The King’s Road: those with a grounding in the subject matter and thus able to understand the nuance Xin Wen brings to the period or those (of which, objectively, I am one) with only a cursory background and hence few preconceptions for Xin Wen to correct. But there are a few questions that are perhaps recognizable to both groups.
First, Xin Wen makes the now somewhat contrarian argument that the “Silk Road” really was about silk, that this 19th-century neologism had in fact some concrete reality and was not merely a clever metaphor. He starts by quoting a song from one of the manuscripts which references “the eastern road”, the road “west all the way until Khotan” and the “large jin-silks … damasks, gauze, plain silk, colored silk.”
People in Dunhuang, of course, did not not exactly call the road that connected them with their neighbors the “Silk Road.” Nevertheless, had they been asked about it, they likely would have found the phrase entirely intelligible, even meaningful.
Xin Wen also notes also that much of the travel on the Silk Road was not commercial but “diplomatic”, conducted by official envoys; hence the subtitle of the book. He writes that there is little direct evidence of strictly commercial traffic. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it may also be that diplomacy and commerce were joined at the hip—being an envoy could, as Xin Wen documents, be very profitable indeed. He tellingly notes that on his journey out to China, Marco Polo went as a merchant; on the way back, he traveled as an envoy.
Silk was immensely valuable: quite small amounts could set someone up for life.
The period covered by the book (a choice also driven by the source material) is one of, he writes, of intense political regionalism. The region had been dominated by China’s Tang dynasty until the mid-eighth century, after which the Tibetan empire took control of the region, conquering Dunhuang in 781, an advance challenged, however, by the Uyghur empire. “Then, in the middle of the ninth century, all three imperial powers simultaneously went into decline.” This was the period of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” and early Song in China, and Dunhuang ended up at least de facto independent for almost two centuries, as did Khotan and Turfan. This was a time of “kings” (there were quite a few of them) rather than emperors (although some of the kings styled themselves as “emperor”). Xin Wen’s Dunhuang-centric study, he writes, “challenges our understanding of what was and was not ‘China’.”
As a corollary, Xin Wen takes aim at the idea that the Silk Road required political centralization for its operation. His analysis of the documentation indicates that it was working just fine regardless of the lack of overarching authority.
In another contrarian section, Xin Wen argues that the lingua franca at the time was neither Chinese nor Sogdian, but more likely the Tibetan of the empire that had been dominant in the region a few decades earlier.
Even if historians do not find this level of detail useful, writers of historical fiction surely will.
Particularly fascinating is the all too brief section on economics. Coins, which had been prevalent in the centuries before, had largely disappeared from circulation. But although the Dunhuang and regional economies seem to have been largely run on a non-monetary basis (wth taxes for example paid in kind), there seem to have been pretty fixed and well-known rates of exchange between, for example, grain and silk which served as media of exchange. Xin Wen documents that a hired laborer earned 3 times in grain what he needed to consume, while a house and yard (at about 27 square meters, it sounds more like a shack) sold for two times a hired laborer’s salary.
Silk, on the other hand, was—measured in grain—immensely valuable: quite small amounts could set someone up for life. Being an envoy was a position much in demand, so much so that people would borrow against expected returns in order to secure a commission. The business of diplomacy was not however quite “commerce”: gifts were sent and (hopefully) more valuable and larger gifts received in return; the envoy’s compensation came from what was a really sort of gratuity from the potentate at the destination. Efficiency aside, the volume of such transactions seems to have been sufficient to keep goods moving and economies functioning.
The Silk Road is common shorthand for communications, commercial and otherwise, between the empires at either end, a configuration that several authors (notably Peter Frankopan) have taken increasing exception to in the last decade. The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road, by focusing on the dynamics of an intermediate slice in the which the empire at the eastern terminus is just one player of several and the empires at the western end don’t appear at all, reinforces the impression of the Silk Road as a process of inter-connected parts.
It is probably for specialists to discuss how much conventional wisdom Xin Wen has overturned or even what conventional wisdom in fact was. But his granular study of the documents is fascinating for its own sake. What emerges, first and foremost, is a group of individuals from all walks of life from farmers to monks and ministers, many communicating in their own voices. Most of these are just glimpses, but far more than just names: the documents include details on how they lived, the loans they took out, what they ate, the languages they spoke and those they wrote in, how they self-identified, what was important to them, the many trials and successes in their lives. Even if historians do not find this level of detail useful, writers of historical fiction surely will.