Moving on to their next destination, from Niya, it was only a matter of going back to the "highway"-- yes, I use the term loosely! As I wrote about in Part 3, nowadays there actually is a highway. That is because oil and gas reserves were found beneath this great ocean of sand. Hence, an asphalt road was built across the Taklamakan to transport the gas and petrol to the people! You can see pictures and read here about one American's (well, he's from New Jersey!) trip down the cross-desert highway from his base in Korla all the way to our team's next destination of Hotan.
It's interesting to see what a major difference an asphalt road makes. For 30 years ago, all there was was an ephemeral track cutting through the shifting sands.
And I keep meaning to mention this, but the NHK team is relying heavily on the detailed maps made by Stein 65 years ago. However-- and even more interesting-- Stein's own maps were made relying very closely on those made by the Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang of a 1000 years ago! As you can see, not many people venture into the desert.
For this segment, however, there really wasn't much need of maps as the NHK team just followed the caravan trail through the swirling, hissing sands and arrived at Hotan rather painlessly. While Hotan is its modern-day Chinese name, the NHK team refers to it by its ancient name of Khotan.
Of all the "Pearls of the Taklamakan," Khotan was one of the earliest oasis kingdoms of the desert. Some think it was peopled by Persians while others say it was populated by exiles from the great Indian kingdoms to the south. Whoever they were they were Mahayana Buddhists who were both devout in religion and expert at trade.
This is from Bernstein's book:
Khotan to me was the very emblem of remote, the edge of the edge of beyond, and that gives it several meanings. For those for whom the prosody of ordinary life is unbearable and who yearn to be away, to expel themselves from their own time, Khotan is the Platonic away. Look at a map and see it, a small dot surrounded by the vastness of the desert and the jagged heights of the uncrossable mountains to the south and west. This is a place where you can experience all the gratification and dislocation of life spent avoiding attachment.
[See what I mean about him? He continues:]
But for a Buddhist monk like Xuanzang whose heart thrilled at the site of Buddhsit monuments, Khotan was a refuge. There are no Buddhist monuments there anymore, only the already excavated ruins of the temples and stupas that the monk saw. But Khotan was the first place in modern China to be reached by the Law, by the Good News from India. This is because it was one of the first places to become important on the Silk Road. It was in that sense astonishing-- a vast commercial and religious emporium in a place of no intrinsic or organic existence of its own. It was the seventh-century equivalent of a space station, a place that lived vibrantly and brilliantly because it connected points that did not mesh organically, those points being nothing less than the east and the west, China and Rome, the Celestial Empire and India.
Khotan was the first Buddhist kingdom in the desert, and it was also the first place to be excavated by Stein. There, digging around in the icy sand with his frozen mustache, Stein was astonished by what would later come to be called Gandharan art.
Gandhara was an ancient Indian Kingdom (located in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan), and is known for its astonishing amalgamation of ancient Greek culture with Indian Buddhism. A vast and flourishing kingdom, some scholars believe that the oasis kingdoms of the Taklamakan were direct offshoots of Gandhara. They think this because the people were clearly Indo-Europeans by race and by language. The art found also points to this common heritage.
The art, by the way, is remarkable. Just weeks before I left Madison, the University's Elvehjem Museum of Art had an exhibition of Gandharan art that was pretty unforgettable. The Museum, which has been re-named apparently since I left, has a small, but excellent collection of Gandharan sculpture in its permanent collection. I got to view the pieces of the collection many, many times and felt that I got to somehow know the statues while I was there. There is much that fascinates about this cross between classical Greek and Indian sculpture and for me, getting to spend so much time in the museum looking at the statues was one of the highlights of my time in Madison.
Known broadly as Greco-Buddhist art, the style originated in what were the Greek colonies of Alexander the Great-- isn't that amazing?
And because prior to Gandharan art, Buddhism-- like Islam-- was iconoclastic, it was forbidden to create images of the Buddha-- so there existed no Buddhist sculpture prior to Greco-Buddhist art. In Gandhara, what with that Greek tradition (it was probably in their blood), the first Buddhist statues were created-- and surprise, surprise, the Buddha looked like ancient Apollo, Adonis and Hercules! Wearing graceful togas, Asian sculpture was never before or never after to see such classical realism.
As the first real Buddhist sculpture, it was to define the canon of Buddhist art for centuries to come. And, this sculptural tradition would have tremendous impact as faraway as Japan (by way of the oasis kingdoms in the desert).
All the famous travelers of Chinese Turkestan-- from Han dynasty Faxian to Tang dynasty Xuanzang to Yuan dynasty Marco Polo-- passed through this great city. And, they all remarked on the fervent faith of the people as well as the famed products of the city: carpet, silk and jade.
The carpets of Khotan are still famed. Created in wool, silk and felt, there are both Persian-style carpets and Turkish-style kilims. The town's silk products are also highly sought after and there is a famous legend surrounding them. China guarded the secret of silk as its most important national treasure. The Byzantines, for example, till quite late times believed silk to be made from a type of tree growth. It was only a matter of time before someone outside China learned the secret, though, and it was the Kingdom of Khotan which was believed to have gotten it before any others.
Given a Chinese princess in marriage, the King of Khotan urged her to bring the secret of silk with her or she wouldn't have anything pretty to wear ever again-- and such is a lady's heart! For she smuggled some silkworm eggs and mulberry tree seeds in her headdress across the desert. The NHK team showed the glorious mulberry groves that surround the green oasis and there was a dance performed where three young girls swirled around on felt carpets holding bamboo baskets full of white cocoons.
One of the murals that Stein uncovered (I think it was somewhere else in the desert) was of a princess with a large headdress. Standing next to her was a man who was pointing at the headdress with a long, thin finger-- wagging it at the headdress as if to say: "the bugs were in here!"
As silk moved west, a very famous product from Khotan was to move east-- as it still does today. That is jade.
Valued above gold and diamonds, this aesthetic preference- unique to China-- is one of the most central and oldest elements in Chinese art and cultural history, going well back at least 5,000 years . Tools were fashioned from jade in early Neolithic times, but already by the late Neolithic to early Shang Dynasty (1500-1050 B.C.), jade had moved from being a utilitarian resource to something precious to be used in burial, worship and ritual.
According to the Shuowen jiezi, a dictionary compiled in the late Han Period (206BC-AD220), there were over 170 different characters which included the jade radical. The dictionary describes the beauty of jade as having the following five virtues: benevolence (in its warmth and luster); justice (in not hiding its flaws); wisdom (in its clarity which when struck rings clearer from a distance then right up close), bravery (which though it can be broken, can never be bent) and graciousness (with sharp sides that never injure).
In addition to the ostentation and social rank surrounding the possession of jade, we can see from the above that from very early times jade has been closely associated with virtue, moral authority and wisdom-- precisely those attributes any ruler was expected to possess and display. Jade seals were historically used by Chinese rulers “as emblems of imperial power.” Being connected with the Heavens through their spiritual properties and great antiquity, Emperors had long surrounded themselves with ancient pieces of jade, believing the jade helped them to better mediate the will of Heaven.
So, in very much the same way as we saw with China's desire to possess a "pipeline" to the finest stallions of Ferghana, so too did Chinese rulers desire to possess the place where jade came from. And, no where was more famous for its jade than the jade found in Khotan's River of Black Jade and River of White Jade.
Very few cultures share this preference for jade. I can only think of the Mayans and maybe the ancient Persians. So, while those to the West desired Chinese silk, the Chinese above all desired horses and jade. It is very interesting to me that for all their heavy borrowing from the continent, the Japanese never took to either fine horses or jade. While these were central themes running through 2000 years of Chinese history, both are conspicuously absent from Japanese history.
I have to qualify this, of course, as Japan's Imperial Regalia, known as the Three Treasures, are in fact a sword (valor), a bronze mirror (wisdom) and a jade jewel (benevolence). Known as magatama 勾玉 these curved jade pendants are an ancient symbol of the Japanese emperor and were in very ancient times entombed with dead kings. Found as early as 1000 BC, most Japanese do not see a Chinese origin to their sacred imperial treasure and megatama are found in various stones-- not just jade. In any case, the point I am trying to make is that concepts surrounding horses and jade were not imported into Japan, which is quite surprising considering that so many Chinese cultural practices were adopted en masse during the Nara Period (Tang dynasty).
For our story-- that of the Shosoin-- it is Buddhism and Buddhist art, as well as music and textiles that were to play the largest role. But as is typical of the Japanese, their almost obsessive antiquarianism was selective and adapted to their own tastes.
So, why ceramics, tea, incense, and the calendar but not horses and jade? I wish I knew the answer.
**
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