tang dynasty times

NHK (Part 3) "Looking for Loulan" 楼蘭王国を掘る

"The Chinese complain, and the foreigner cannot well deny it," writes Sir Eric Teichman in his Journey to Turkestan that, "caravan-loads of priceless treasures from the temples, tombs and ruins of Chinese Turkestan have been carried off to foreign museums and are forever lost to China." Indeed, China still burns with rage about the loss of so many of its important antiquities in what was really a by-product of the 19th century Great Game.

You remember the Great Game: the British, in their colony in India saw the 2000 miles that existed between the end of their empire and the start of Russia as up for grabs. Sure it was a no-man land of burning deserts and towering, impossibly high mountains, but they weren't picky-- for to them, it was strategically tempting to start aggressively moving north from their northernmost bases in Kashmir and Ladakh. The Russians-- seeing the British encroachments into Central Asia as an obvious threat, began their own encroachments-- south.   

With more and more eyes focused on this huge no-man's land, scholars, art-historians and adventurers also turned their attention to Central Asia in a manner which can only be described as extremely competitive. These scholars and adventurers came, discovered and hauled back vast amounts of loot-- which are, in fact, national treasures that probably really should belong to the places where they were found.

Those doing the looting, in their own defense said, "we were saving them from being destroyed" (isn't that what the US army said when it destroyed a village in Vietnam? Something like, they were destroying the village to save it from the Vietcong?) Not to mention that most of the treasures had been preserved for 2000 years just fine before the Europeans got there...!

But, it is true, many, many treasures have been destroyed by iconoclast Muslims (just think of modern day Bamiyan). The ancient Muslims, while they didn't use dynamite, did hack off heads or deface sculpture which they considered an affront to their religion. Still, the Chinese would counter that more art was destroyed-- forever lost to history-- during one night of bombing during WWII than all the Muslims and Chinese tomb raiders in history. That is, when all the "removed" Central Asian art housed in Berlin was wiped out during a nighttime of Allied bombing. Another huge collection of masterpieces also went missing during WWII when Count Otani's looted artifacts disappeared, and Japanese scholars still cannot trace what happened to the collection.

You get the picture-- there were Russians, British, Swedes, Americans, Japanese and French scholars and adventurers who were combing Central Asia for new discoveries in a rivalry that made Egyptian artifact-hunting look friendly. While the Chinese have their problems with them for a myriad other reasons, in this story, the Russians end up looking pretty good.

Our main antagonists, according to Hopkirk (whose book you will remember I am presently re-reading) were (in order of infamy I presume): Sven Hedin of Sweden, Sir Aurel Stein of Britain, Albert von Le Coc of Germany, Paul Pelliot of France, Langdon Warner of the US and the mysterious Count Otani of Japan. (Hedin and Stein are superstars, Pelliot is of the famous museum in Paris, and Warner was the model for-- who else?-- Indiana Jones).

More on the characters, though, later.... as I want to talk about the setting.

I like to call it the desert of death. Have you ever heard anyone say anything good about the Taklamakan? The name itself comes from the Uighur language meaning, "if you go in, you won't come out," and that is just what people have been saying for 2000 years. That while water and food is truly abundant by comparison in the deserts of Arabia or even in the Gobi, in Taklamakan there is nothing. No water and no life.

And, don't forget the infamous sandstorms of the Taklamakan, which are so severe that they have been known to wipe out, not just entire camel caravans of hundreds of people and animals, but of entire cities as well. It's not just the east-west blowing wind either, but being right smack in the center of the continent, not far from Siberia, the extreme cold temperatures truly make this one of the most hazardous places on earth.

No matter how many pictures you see if the desert, you can only think one thing: "this is the kind of place a country dumps its toxic stuff." And, surprise, surprise, this is where China tests its nuclear bombs and long-range missiles (and I have heard some right out in the open.) Sounds like Nevada? Well, yes. The Taklamakan desert is a complete wasteland. However, below the surface (again, surprise surprise) are vast fields of oil and natural gas.

In order to transport this petrol from the new petrol fields back to civilization, China has recently built a huge highway down the length of the Taklamakan! Not only that, but to keep the infamous blowing sands of the desert from covering up the highway (which probably would have happened even before the highway was completed) they had to plant a huge corridor of trees and shrubs-- called the greenbelt-- along the entire stretch of the highway. That, of course, meant that they had to also construct a vast irrigation system to keep the trees alive! Unfortunately this highway was built after our NHK team passed through, but then again it also cuts north to south so wouldn't have been much use to our team anyhow-- as they were headed due West (toward Persia and Rome).

Back on the road with NHK

After their jaunt to Kharakoto, the NHK team had returned back the way they had already traveled-- back to Dunhuang, and from there, they had started traveling west again. After leaving the Jade Gate Pass, they enter the desert proper-- and even after all my reading, still the images of the desert actually stun me. As I watch the desert unfold before my eyes on my television, I recall how the ancient Chinese monk described it. They had, there is nothing soaring above and nothing moving on land below. That is, it is a wasteland.

Our team is now traveling in a caravan of 9 jeeps. It is 18 days of roughing it. Sleeping in canvas People's Liberation Army tents, the winds rips the army tents right off from the stakes. The main reporter-- still in his hat-- says it was 18 days of not brushing their teeth or washing their faces (presumably because there wasn't any water). To be sure, all the men are covered in a layer of white sand-- sand, which their jeeps continually get stuck in. That is on the days when they aren't passing through rocks so jagged they rip open the tires on the jeeps. Watching, all I can think is: If I ever finally get to Western China, I think I will skip the Taklamakan.

Soldiers from the Chinese People's Liberation Army had joined the team for this part of leg and had to generate signals in Morris Code to some Chinese Army Post every night. China was already testing its missiles at that time, so I am assuming this is why. Even today, my guidebook tells me that to visit the region, you will need to get the permission and be escorted by someone from the army. I think the entire area is full of gulags, nuclear waste and other toxic waste. I personally wouldn't go near the place, but our team had a mission: they were trying to locate the famed Lop Nor Lake-- which is another mystery. You always see it on the map-- a huge lake some 10 times the size of Lake Biwa, and yet-- I don't think it really exists anymore.

Of course, the Taklamakan swallows up and devours all the rivers running into it.

Surrounded on three side by the tallest mountains on earth-- just arriving at the desert of doom was incredibly perilous in itself. Can you imagine those ancient travelers had hiked over the Heavenly Mountains, or the Karakorum Mountains or the Kunlun Mountains-- which are the highest mountains on earth. But that was the easy part-- it was skirting the desert that posed the problem.

The mountains, of course, are part of the story (aren't they always?) For the mountains had huge glaciers which fed the deserts with snow runoff that generated several large rivers. Along these rivers were the famed oases of the desert (which I call the Pearls of the Takmalakan).

In fact, 2000 years ago, the rivers were large and numerous an these rivers gave life to a string of great Kingdoms, which flourished along the rivers. However, with climate change, the glaciers have shrunk and the desert basically took back everything into its deathly gripe. Now, there is nothing but sand. But buried beneath these sands are Lost Cities-- many full of treasure (well, by treasure I mean relics of staggering historical worth).

So, there you have it. The Great Race for antiquities.

The Lop Nor Lake was a huge inland salty lake, and located along its shores was the legendary Oasis Kingdom of Loulan.

The man who discovered the ruins of Loulan in 1899 was a certain Swede named Sven Hedin. Like the NHK team, Hedin had actually set out to find out how and why the waters of the Lop Nor kept shifting. It seems that most brilliant men have extreme characters, and Hedin was no different. He was accused of being Pro-Nazi. He was also a genius. Fluent in seven languages, he went about to uncover buried cities in the most hazardous desert on earth as sort of a side-line to his main job: the making of accurate maps. His maps are so accurate that satellite photographs have only just shown how precisely on target they really were. All made when he was still in his twenties too.

Isn't this the stuff of Indiana Jones:

"Over there, on the verge of the horizon, were the noble, rounded forms of sand-dunes which I never grew tired of watching... Beyond them, amid the grave-like silence, stretched the unknown...the land that I was going to be the first to dread."

This romantic vision is the midst of seeing one of his men lose BOTH feet to frostbite in the desert can be the only way to explain what made men like Sven Hedin keep going. But keep going he did. In what is another priceless image, he had a wooden boat built and sailed through the desert along the Keriya (Tarim?) River-- as far as the river would take him. From there, he traveled further east (yes east again) to the very edge of the desert on foot.

And there, he stumbled on the wooden carvings that so distinguish the Lost City of Loulan. A myriad of minutiae from daily life in Loulan was uncovered, first by Hedin and then by Stein-- who after uncovering a trash heap which would give all kinds of clues to what life in the ancient city was like, then carted vast quantities back with him to Britain. In what was a 2000 year old town, they found houses, government offices, post offices (!) and gardens, which had once been full of apricot, apple and poplar trees. Oh, and of course, pagodas and temples-- for this too had been a thriving Buddhist civilization.

Beautifully colored felt carpets and cartloads of documents-- written on small wooden planks or on leather were uncovered, as well as silk and glass. There were textiles with ancient Greek patterns and coins from northern India. How was it that this once prosperous and cosmopolitan trading town got swallowed up by shifting sands? The Chinese call Loulan the Vesuvius of the East...

Since we know the changing environment most probably was what caused its ruin, it gives pause, doesn't it? A researcher in China, who has devoted her entire life to Loulan studies, remarked that, "All the research achievements of Loulan have touched the inner fears of modern people, because it was the common aspiration of mankind to avoid a recurrence of the Loulan tragedy."  Yes, we are talking about the environment.

People, when they talk about Loulan, don't talk as much about its ruin as about its glories. In fact, most people mainly talk about two things: the wooden carvings (which decorated homes and offices in what is quite reminiscent of what can be seen in Nepal)-- and the mummies.

Yes, mummies-- well not really, but that is what they are called. Most people are probably aware that very, very ancient mummies of Caucasians have been found in Western China. It is hard to track down all the facts since the Chinese didn't really advertise that they had found Caucasians mummies in Western China. An American scholar stumbled upon them in the famous museum in Urumqi and with that, the secret was out.

These mummies, first of all are not really mummies-- but get ready for this: many are over a 1000 years older than those in Egypt. The Takmalakan Desert is located in the great Tarim basin which is one of the lowest places on earth. Extremely dry and extremely salty, the bodies were basically preserved in the dry saline of the sand. They are phenomenal (and I will devote an entire post to them later) but they are most famous for their textiles . Not only are the colors and textures pristine but it was these textiles which first placed these people as Caucasians.

When the NHK team pulled the mummy of a perfectly preserved woman out of the ground (you could see her eyelashes!), She was dressed in colorful robes and had a felt hat on. Buried beside her was a beautifully woven basket with barley grains inside, and she was lovingly draped in a camel skin blanket-- to keep warm. The team said, "she must have been a queen or an aristocratic lady." Even at almost 4000 years old, she was beautiful.

Here is an artist rendition of what she might have looked like-- our beauty of Loulan. Many of the mummies had blue eyes and blonde or red hair. It is their clothes, however, that attracts the most attention, for they are woolens like you don't see anywhere but in Europe: we are talking of stripped leggings in 1960s colors and very tailored looking pants, with conical felt hats and capes. The "beauty of Loulan," such was her fate that she has been held up a banner for everything from the Uighur separatist movement to modern Aryan-type movements in Germany. She is most likely of Russian or Ukrainian stock-- though the American scholar who found the first mummy in the museum in Urumqi believes them to hail further west yet-- in Germany or Austria.

Poking around on the Internet last night for interesting information on the Tarim mummies, I became increasingly disappointed at the racial slant. To me, I would have been equally fascinated if they had been Japanese or Africa for, like Hattori, what is fascinating truly is all the connections and interactions that happened between humans at what was a remarkably early period of history.

This is an interesting read from a Japanese Silk Road project site.

Pearls of the Taklamakan

 The almond groves of Samarqand,
Bokhara, where red lilies blow.
And Oxus, by whose yellow sand
The grave white-turbaned merchants go --Oscar Wilde

Samarkand and Bukhara-- the names still evoke images of the great silk road. Part of the vast Persian empire, it was the Central Asian people of Sogdiana who monopolized these ancient trade routes connecting the East with the West. Known in Latin as "Transoxiana," or "land beyond the Oxus River," the place was made famous during Alexander the Great Times, during his great exploits East. During Alexander's times in 4th century BC, Transoxiana was the northeastern-most point of Hellenistic culture. Populated by Iranian peoples, it was incorporated into the Persian Empire first during the Achaemenid Empire. A colonial outpost of the Persian Empire during later Sassanid times, it became known as Sogdiana.

With their "contemplative green eyes flashing" and their "purple beards flying in the wind," the hardy Sogdian traders of Samarkand and Bukhara led caravans on camel-back and horseback over the treacherous mountain passes of the Roof of the World and across the endless stretches of sand of the Taklamakan Desert toward China. And, it was their language, Sogdian, which was the lingua franca of the East during Tang dynasty times.

I can well imagine what the fine citizens of ancient Sogdiana were like having spent time in Kashmir. Another Central Asian Persian people, trade is in their blood. With its teeming markets and colorful bazaars, Alexis kept mumbling, "We're in Central Asia. Finally, Central Asia." Sultan kept repeating, "To make a sale is to make a friend." Talking over unending cups of Kashmiri chai-- cinnamon and cardamom, and a dash of milk-- it was always how business was going, or talk about some purchase--buying a new silk carpet or a Pashima shawl-- that dominated conversation. This is how I imagine the Sogdians.      

Starting at the eastern edge of the Persian empire, the Kingdom of Sogdiana reached almost to Kashgar. There, the Silk Road split into two routes: one north and one south of the desert of death. With a name which means "if you go in, you'll never come back out," the Taklamakan Desert is one of the largest sandy deserts on earth. With virtually no available water, it was extremely hazardous to try and cross the desert, and so the Silk Road split into two routes. And, it was along these two routes skirting the northern and southern edges of the Desert that a string of Buddhist Kingdoms dotted the oases.

 On the Southern Route, there was the Kingdom of Khotan--famous for its exquisite jade and felt carpets; and Kashgar-- which has always been a city of legend. Of course, the world's most famous Silk Road site, Dunhuang, was also located just west of where the Northern and Southern Routes met back up again. Famous for its library, Dunhuang is also the location of the Mogao Caves of A Thousand Buddhas. Located just West of the Jade Gate, Dunhuang was just West of China proper.

 Along the Northern Route were the oasis cities of Gaochang, Turfan, Urumqi, and of course, Kucha. Gaochang was perhaps the most important Buddhist Kingdom. Built at the foot of the Flaming Mountains, the Bezeklik Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, located close to the ancient city, are renown for their dazzling murals. With paintings of Uighur princesses and Western traders, the place during Tang times was a magnet for people from the four corners of the civilized world.

To me, while I can imagine Sogdiana in all its Persian glory-- that there existed flourishing Buddhist Kingdoms which were centers of great scholarship in this inhospitable desert-- well, it actually boggles my mind. But, the cities located along the desert were, in fact, places of learning where the greatest minds of the Buddhist world gathered to discuss Buddhist doctrine. These cultural exchanges were conducted in the languages of scholarship of the day--Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese and various Prakrit. One of the most famous translators of Buddhism, Kumarjiva, was from Kucha (his mother was a Kuchan princess while his father was Kashmiri). So brilliant some legends have it that he was carried off by the Chinese. Dragged back to the capital he was made to translate the important Buddhist treatises of the time. Others say he went willingly. Whatever the case were it not for Kumarjiva, China and Japan would probably not have quite the same cast of Buddhism it has today-- such was his influence.

The great problem of the time: how to translate abstract philosophical terms from Sanskrit (a language with an extraordinarily rich philosophical lexicon that perhaps more then any language extinct or extant could express abstract concepts with specific vocabulary) into Chinese (a language poor in abstract vocabulary). Words had to be invented.

It was a huge linguistic gap that had to be overcome. Herculean. Kumarjiva, to get the closest Chinese approximation of the Sanskrit possible would engage in long discussions with a hundred students to try and fit a Sanskrit word to the Chinese mind before trying to come up with a new combination of characters.

Something very similar went on when China opened up to the west in more modern times. Both the Chinese and the Japanese had to think quick to come up with new vocabulary to express Western concepts of democracy or freedom (an entire lexicon, had to be come up with for terms used in discussing the fine arts before Japan could participate in one of the legendary World Exhibitions, for example).

They call him the world's greatest translator. A proponent of i-yaku 意訳 (meaning-oriented translation) over that of choku-yaku 直訳 (direct or literal translations), Kumarjiva is not only known for the tremendous breadth of his translations but also for the beautiful flowing smoothness of the language-- which is to say it reads beautifully. And, it needs to be stated again that is is all the more of an achievement because of the fact that he was working in what is the most obtuse area of Buddhist philosophy.

Born a Theravada Buddhist, Kumarjiva converted to Mahayana Buddhism during his student days in Kashgar and spent much time working on advancing the ideas contained in the great Indian philosopher Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka theory.

"Form is void, void is form" -- Heart Sutra

The philosophy is way too complicated for me to even attempt to think about, and due to its slippery slope vocabulary that attempts to explain a state of existence where "nothing comes into being independently" (got that?), the nature of the Chinese language just could not cope. Kumarjiva devoted the later years of his life with the task of translating this body of work, but many gnawing questions remained.

It was to this task that our hero, Xuanzang, the Tang period Buddhist monk who made his historic "Journey to the West" devoted his entire life. If you don't know who he is-- you should. In East Asia, he is a household name-- and even in India, most educated people know of the great travels of Xuanzang.

Passing through the Jade Gate, Xuanzang traveled through all the Buddhist Kingdoms along the Northern and Southern Route before turning south to India. He almost didn't make it to India, though, so intent was the devout Buddhist King of the Kingdom of Gaochang to keep the pilgrim there that the King tried to hold him there hostage. Rather than from any ill-will, the King quite simply could not bear to let such a stimulating conversationalist and brilliant debater leave his realm.

You can hardly blame him, actually.

Some people consider Xuanzang to be the greatest traveler of all time. Marco Polo perhaps traveled further in terms of distance-- but well, that was about 450 years later (and things were more comfortable then). More importantly, though, while Polo traveled for personal reasons of wealth and fame, our man from Chang-an traveled to find the Truth-- to understand the nature of reality, not just for himself but for the sake of all sentient beings. His great journey took him first across the desert Kingdoms and then to Kashmir, which was a great center of Buddhist learning at the time. He continued South where he ended up at Nalanda University. There he studied Buddhist philosophy, logic and Sanskrit. Returning to China, he hauled a library of books back wit him and spent the remainder of his days teaching and translating.

**

 About five years ago, New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein wrote a book, called the Ultimate Journey, about his travels re-tracing the path taken by Xuanzang. While very interested in the both the monk's and the New Yorker's travels across the lands of Central Asia and India, this book remained impossible for me. The author just engaged in far too much self-psychoanalysis. It quite simply kept getting on my nerves.

The beginning, for example, was devoted to a long explanation of why, he a Jew from New York would be undertaking this trip. No, he explains, this was not a mid-life crisis (which of course it was) and he goes into pretty excruciating detail of how it was between taking this trip, or retreating to a farm in upstate New York to spend a year making Quaker furniture. I never did quite get how the trip won out over the furniture but this is followed by long passages of his inability to commit (he does not want to be alone, it seems, and yet has had trouble committing). Then there are long passages about his ambiguity toward both Buddhism as well as Judaism-- and then finally by India, he turns cranky. And that is where I finally just had to put the book down-- three times, in fact!

 Well, I guess India does that to people. He described seeing a little boy so crippled that he was crawling in the dirt with his legs twisted up behind his neck like a scorpion. I saw a little boy just like that. I must have pushed it back into some dark corner of my mind, but well-- this time, I finished the book...And, I can finally say-- I actually recommend it!

Which is perhaps only to say that maybe I am more sympathetic to mid-life crises! :(

Here he is in all his glory:

I was experiencing a kind of quarrel with bourgeois life, bathed in its ease and pleasures but aware too of its smallness and ordinariness-- its lack of excitement. Most of us middle-aged men are among that species of routinized, rationalized beings that Max Weber called "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart." We start out idealists and we end up creatures of habit, more concerned about the state of the lawn than of the spirit.

Get the picture? And yet so fascinated with this monk who believed that "An escape from suffering lay not in worldly pleasure, in sex, wealth or power, but in the quiet cultivation of one's own mind" that he picked up and traveled half-way around the world to follow in the monk's footsteps is pretty impressive. It is very rough territory. And, he is not a young man either.

My original frustrations remained-- not many people travel in that part of the world, so rather than descriptions of personal angst, "Will I ever commit?" I would have preferred more descriptions of the places he was passing through. At the same time, perhaps I am finally at a point in my life to really appreciate someone grappling with this kind of existentialist ambiguity-- our outer life versus the life of the spirit; or the feeling of being atheist by default as this is perhaps the author's main theme? For he does not feel at home in his own religion (Judaism) any more than that of the exotic Asian one. It is a question of authenticity.

Finally, I gotta hand it to him-- he remained the ever pragmatist right till the end. For someone prone to long bouts of self-psychoanalysis, he goes on to be surprisingly pragmatic in the face of what is sometimes extreme poverty, visiting orphanages and donating money, offering to buy an old woman a slice of watermelon when he hears her complaining how expensive it is.  I think there is a lesson in there somewhere too-- I am just not sure what!!!

And now for something really entertaining-- where fact is more unbeliable than fiction: The Pickle King of Islamistan (It's the best thing I've read in at least a week!)

 The almond groves of Samarqand,
Bokhara, where red lilies blow.
And Oxus, by whose yellow sand
The grave white-turbaned merchants go --Oscar Wilde

Samarkand and Bukhara-- the names still evoke images of the great silk road. Part of the vast Persian empire, it was the Central Asian people of Sogdiana who monopolized these ancient trade routes connecting the East with the West. Known in Latin as "Transoxiana," or "land beyond the Oxus River," the place was made famous during Alexander the Great Times, during his great exploits East. During Alexander's times in 4th century BC, Transoxiana was the northeastern-most point of Hellenistic culture. Populated by Iranian peoples, it was incorporated into the Persian Empire first during the Achaemenid Empire. A colonial outpost of the Persian Empire during later Sassanid times, it became known as Sogdiana.

With their "contemplative green eyes flashing" and their "purple beards flying in the wind," the hardy Sogdian traders of Samarkand and Bukhara led caravans on camel-back and horseback over the treacherous mountain passes of the Roof of the World and across the endless stretches of sand of the Taklamakan Desert toward China. And, it was their language, Sogdian, which was the lingua franca of the East during Tang dynasty times.

I can well imagine what the fine citizens of ancient Sogdiana were like having spent time in Kashmir. Another Central Asian Persian people, trade is in their blood. With its teeming markets and colorful bazaars, Alexis kept mumbling, "We're in Central Asia. Finally, Central Asia." Sultan kept repeating, "To make a sale is to make a friend." Talking over unending cups of Kashmiri chai-- cinnamon and cardamom, and a dash of milk-- it was always how business was going, or talk about some purchase--buying a new silk carpet or a Pashima shawl-- that dominated conversation. This is how I imagine the Sogdians.      

Starting at the eastern edge of the Persian empire, the Kingdom of Sogdiana reached almost to Kashgar. There, the Silk Road split into two routes: one north and one south of the desert of death. With a name which means "if you go in, you'll never come back out," the Taklamakan Desert is one of the largest sandy deserts on earth. With virtually no available water, it was extremely hazardous to try and cross the desert, and so the Silk Road split into two routes. And, it was along these two routes skirting the northern and southern edges of the Desert that a string of Buddhist Kingdoms dotted the oases.

 On the Southern Route, there was the Kingdom of Khotan--famous for its exquisite jade and felt carpets; and Kashgar-- which has always been a city of legend. Of course, the world's most famous Silk Road site, Dunhuang, was also located just west of where the Northern and Southern Routes met back up again. Famous for its library, Dunhuang is also the location of the Mogao Caves of A Thousand Buddhas. Located just West of the Jade Gate, Dunhuang was just West of China proper.

 Along the Northern Route were the oasis cities of Gaochang, Turfan, Urumqi, and of course, Kucha. Gaochang was perhaps the most important Buddhist Kingdom. Built at the foot of the Flaming Mountains, the Bezeklik Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, located close to the ancient city, are renown for their dazzling murals. With paintings of Uighur princesses and Western traders, the place during Tang times was a magnet for people from the four corners of the civilized world.

To me, while I can imagine Sogdiana in all its Persian glory-- that there existed flourishing Buddhist Kingdoms which were centers of great scholarship in this inhospitable desert-- well, it actually boggles my mind. But, the cities located along the desert were, in fact, places of learning where the greatest minds of the Buddhist world gathered to discuss Buddhist doctrine. These cultural exchanges were conducted in the languages of scholarship of the day--Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese and various Prakrit. One of the most famous translators of Buddhism, Kumarjiva, was from Kucha (his mother was a Kuchan princess while his father was Kashmiri). So brilliant some legends have it that he was carried off by the Chinese. Dragged back to the capital he was made to translate the important Buddhist treatises of the time. Others say he went willingly. Whatever the case were it not for Kumarjiva, China and Japan would probably not have quite the same cast of Buddhism it has today-- such was his influence.

The great problem of the time: how to translate abstract philosophical terms from Sanskrit (a language with an extraordinarily rich philosophical lexicon that perhaps more then any language extinct or extant could express abstract concepts with specific vocabulary) into Chinese (a language poor in abstract vocabulary). Words had to be invented.

It was a huge linguistic gap that had to be overcome. Herculean. Kumarjiva, to get the closest Chinese approximation of the Sanskrit possible would engage in long discussions with a hundred students to try and fit a Sanskrit word to the Chinese mind before trying to come up with a new combination of characters.

Something very similar went on when China opened up to the west in more modern times. Both the Chinese and the Japanese had to think quick to come up with new vocabulary to express Western concepts of democracy or freedom (an entire lexicon, had to be come up with for terms used in discussing the fine arts before Japan could participate in one of the legendary World Exhibitions, for example).

They call him the world's greatest translator. A proponent of i-yaku 意訳 (meaning-oriented translation) over that of choku-yaku 直訳 (direct or literal translations), Kumarjiva is not only known for the tremendous breadth of his translations but also for the beautiful flowing smoothness of the language-- which is to say it reads beautifully. And, it needs to be stated again that is is all the more of an achievement because of the fact that he was working in what is the most obtuse area of Buddhist philosophy.

Born a Theravada Buddhist, Kumarjiva converted to Mahayana Buddhism during his student days in Kashgar and spent much time working on advancing the ideas contained in the great Indian philosopher Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka theory.

"Form is void, void is form" -- Heart Sutra

The philosophy is way too complicated for me to even attempt to think about, and due to its slippery slope vocabulary that attempts to explain a state of existence where "nothing comes into being independently" (got that?), the nature of the Chinese language just could not cope. Kumarjiva devoted the later years of his life with the task of translating this body of work, but many gnawing questions remained.

It was to this task that our hero, Xuanzang, the Tang period Buddhist monk who made his historic "Journey to the West" devoted his entire life. If you don't know who he is-- you should. In East Asia, he is a household name-- and even in India, most educated people know of the great travels of Xuanzang.

Passing through the Jade Gate, Xuanzang traveled through all the Buddhist Kingdoms along the Northern and Southern Route before turning south to India. He almost didn't make it to India, though, so intent was the devout Buddhist King of the Kingdom of Gaochang to keep the pilgrim there that the King tried to hold him there hostage. Rather than from any ill-will, the King quite simply could not bear to let such a stimulating conversationalist and brilliant debater leave his realm.

You can hardly blame him, actually.

Some people consider Xuanzang to be the greatest traveler of all time. Marco Polo perhaps traveled further in terms of distance-- but well, that was about 450 years later (and things were more comfortable then). More importantly, though, while Polo traveled for personal reasons of wealth and fame, our man from Chang-an traveled to find the Truth-- to understand the nature of reality, not just for himself but for the sake of all sentient beings. His great journey took him first across the desert Kingdoms and then to Kashmir, which was a great center of Buddhist learning at the time. He continued South where he ended up at Nalanda University. There he studied Buddhist philosophy, logic and Sanskrit. Returning to China, he hauled a library of books back wit him and spent the remainder of his days teaching and translating.

**

 About five years ago, New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein wrote a book, called the Ultimate Journey, about his travels re-tracing the path taken by Xuanzang. While very interested in the both the monk's and the New Yorker's travels across the lands of Central Asia and India, this book remained impossible for me. The author just engaged in far too much self-psychoanalysis. It quite simply kept getting on my nerves.

The beginning, for example, was devoted to a long explanation of why, he a Jew from New York would be undertaking this trip. No, he explains, this was not a mid-life crisis (which of course it was) and he goes into pretty excruciating detail of how it was between taking this trip, or retreating to a farm in upstate New York to spend a year making Quaker furniture. I never did quite get how the trip won out over the furniture but this is followed by long passages of his inability to commit (he does not want to be alone, it seems, and yet has had trouble committing). Then there are long passages about his ambiguity toward both Buddhism as well as Judaism-- and then finally by India, he turns cranky. And that is where I finally just had to put the book down-- three times, in fact!

 Well, I guess India does that to people. He described seeing a little boy so crippled that he was crawling in the dirt with his legs twisted up behind his neck like a scorpion. I saw a little boy just like that. I must have pushed it back into some dark corner of my mind, but well-- this time, I finished the book...And, I can finally say-- I actually recommend it!

Which is perhaps only to say that maybe I am more sympathetic to mid-life crises! :(

Here he is in all his glory:

I was experiencing a kind of quarrel with bourgeois life, bathed in its ease and pleasures but aware too of its smallness and ordinariness-- its lack of excitement. Most of us middle-aged men are among that species of routinized, rationalized beings that Max Weber called "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart." We start out idealists and we end up creatures of habit, more concerned about the state of the lawn than of the spirit.

Get the picture? And yet so fascinated with this monk who believed that "An escape from suffering lay not in worldly pleasure, in sex, wealth or power, but in the quiet cultivation of one's own mind" that he picked up and traveled half-way around the world to follow in the monk's footsteps is pretty impressive. It is very rough territory. And, he is not a young man either.

My original frustrations remained-- not many people travel in that part of the world, so rather than descriptions of personal angst, "Will I ever commit?" I would have preferred more descriptions of the places he was passing through. At the same time, perhaps I am finally at a point in my life to really appreciate someone grappling with this kind of existentialist ambiguity-- our outer life versus the life of the spirit; or the feeling of being atheist by default as this is perhaps the author's main theme? For he does not feel at home in his own religion (Judaism) any more than that of the exotic Asian one. It is a question of authenticity.

Finally, I gotta hand it to him-- he remained the ever pragmatist right till the end. For someone prone to long bouts of self-psychoanalysis, he goes on to be surprisingly pragmatic in the face of what is sometimes extreme poverty, visiting orphanages and donating money, offering to buy an old woman a slice of watermelon when he hears her complaining how expensive it is.  I think there is a lesson in there somewhere too-- I am just not sure what!!!

And now for something really entertaining-- where fact is more unbeliable than fiction: The Pickle King of Islamistan (It's the best thing I've read in at least a week!)

Kuchean Dancers and the Sogdian Whirl

There is a rumor that circulates in India that Jesus-- rather than finishing out his days on the cross--  spent his later years journeying through Kashmir; or even that he made it all the way to Japan where he spent his last years as a rice farmer in a small village in Aomori. Indeed, grave hunters spend their fine careers visiting the various "graves of Jesus" that dot remote areas of the East.

Well, there is a similar rumor about our Persian Prince Pirooz. And that is that Prince Pirooz, actually traveled even further East-- to Japan. And there, he is said to have spent many years influencing the elegant Iranification of that land.

Japan is, of course, one of the world's great civilizations-- but, alas, it was a late bloomer. During Tang times, it was still more or less an illiterate, rather unsophisticated society. Therefore, most Japan-scholars will acknowledge that Japan must have got a lot of help from "foreign advisors" during this period. For the most part, the Koreans are credited for the direction of the great surge in artistic and intellectual productivity of the Asuka and Nara periods. There are those, too, who say Iranians had a large (if indirect) part to play-- and even that our Prince Pirooz came to lend a hand. Marrying a Japanese lady, the legend has it that he left her and their children behind when he returned to China in his later years. And so his legacy lives on in the Land of the Rising Sun as well.

Even if he himself did not come-- which he most probably did not-- Persian musicians and dancers did. And, so did beautiful objects of art. Glassware was one of the miraculous items brought to Japan from the West. Unlike the Chinese, Persian royalty and aristocrats, preferred glass and metalware to ceramics and their glassware was particularly exquisite. There is one particularly stunning piece of cobalt blue cut glass in the Shosoin Collection. A goblet, 22 cobalt color glass rings are fused to the outer walls of the glass, which has a beautiful etched silver stem and base. Carried on the backs of horses and camels across the deserts of Central Asia, Japanese emissaries to the Tang Court brought them back to Japan from China where they stole the hearts of the Japanese. Of extremely high quality, these objects were treasured in Japan and most of the finest remaining examples of this early glass are preserved there today.

It is one of the peculiar tendencies of the Japanese to treasure and preserve what is fine, and this almost obsessive antiquarianism is one of the traits that sets the Japanese apart. For while "Roman," or Sassanian Glass objects are found here and there from Damascus to the markets of Tehran, the glass is usually milky or silvery from exposure. Those pieces preserved in Japanese collections, however have retained their original sparkling transparency in a way that is stunning.

Perhaps even more phenomenal is what happened with music and dance.

Have you ever heard of the Sogdian Whirl?

A rigorous, twirling dance, the Sogdian Whirl was usually performed on a colorful felt carpet. The dance took the Tang capital by storm. Not only the emperor, but his favorite concubine, the infamous Yang Guifei-- along with her "favorite," the 400 pound Sogdian-Turk An Lushan could perform this exotic dance, snacking on Lychees from Canton and sipping grape wine out of Roman cut glass goblets, all night long. There were Sogdian dances danced to Persian melodies, played on Persian lutes and harps, Indian dances and music and those from the Northern steppes and Korea. Without a doubt, most famous of all the Tang dances was the music and dance of Kucha.

As is well known, at Kashgar the Silk Road, in order to skirt the desert of death, splits into two routes, the northern and southern. Here, where now there is nothing but dusty, long forgotten outposts (oasis sounds too charming) in the desert, there once thrived a great Buddhist civilization. Among the first Buddhist Kingdoms on earth, the cities on both sides of the desert were not only bustling trading centers of goods from both east and west, but they were great centers of Buddhist scholarship. Of all the Kingdoms from Khotan to Dunhuang, Kucha was the largest. And Kucha was famous-- very famous-- for its dances, music and instruments.

Located on the Northern Route, not far from present-day Aksu, it was a place where Theravada Buddhism reigned. The King was particularly devout and it was said the city was full of temples, monks and music. The palace was made of gold, as the kingdom was wealthy from its rich mineral deposits of gold, copper and iron. Another highly cosmopolitan Silk Road garrison city-state, a dozen languages could be heard in the marketplaces, including Chinese, Tibetan, Persian and Kuchean (which was itself an Indo-Euopean language).

Susan Whitfield in her wondrous, Life Along the Silkroad, desribes Kuchean dance as being "not unlike Indian dance, with its emphasis on hip movements, changes of gesture and expressive eyes, but it also adapted dance forms taken from other places, such as the famous Sogdian 'whirling dance,' performed by both men and women."

"Music, song and dance," says Whitfield, "were Silk Road commodities, bought and sold like silver and jade. Itinerent dance troops from India, Burma, Cambodia and Sogdiana performed at both the royal court and the public marketplace in every silk road town." We have Tang period pottery of "Western" dancers and musicians on camelback. These statutes still fascinate and are proudly preserved in museum collectons in many places from Shanghai and Tokyo to Paris.   

The dances of the Silk Road were taken up by the Tang Court and there they were performed with native and other foreign elements to be transformed into the music and dance that today is known as ancient Tang music. And, what is perhaps the most fascinating part of the entire story, this music and these dances were then "borrowed"-- in what is often referred to as the "great borrowing of continental culture"-- by the ancient Japanese of the Nara period.

When we speak of ancient Tang music, the influence from Kucha cannot be overstated. The Tang court music itself was based, explains Whitfield, on the tuning of the Kuchean lute and most of the Tang emperors were proficient at playing the Kuchean drum, as well. Like golf among the wealthy today, the Kuchean drum was "de rigueur among emperors and noblemen of China." Emperor Xuanzong had some 30,000 musicians and dancers housed within the walls of the Palace, and many of those performed in the Kuchean style, playing orchestral pieces, as well as performing great dance dramas perhaps similar to those still performed in South India and in Java today.

Don't you wish you could hear it? Of course, the great civilizations of the desert are long since gone. Covered in sand, if it weren't for the murals of Dunhuang and the Tang chronicles, we would hardly even know of their existence. Not only the civilizations, but the languages too are long since dead. Kuchean, Sogdian, Khotanese, they are nothing but echoes in the desert. In China, too, we only have the written record.

Believe it or not though, these Persian and Central Asian melodies and dances still exist in Japan much as they were 1500 years ago. Just like the perfectly preserved roman glass goblets, the Japanese Imperial Household has preserved this music for a millenium. Japanese Imperial Court Music and Dance, called Gagaku (or "elegant music"), is made up of three bodies: Saibara (native Shinto), Komagaku (Korean and Manchurian) and Togaku (Tang Music). Amazingly, you can still see these dances and listen to this music today in Japan; performed either by the Imperial Household Department of Music (which performs both Western classical music as well as all forms of gagaku) or by groups formed by former members of the Imperial Household Department of Music who form their own groups (most famous has to be Hideki Togi, who performs to sold-out concert halls in Japan and Europe. Read about this gorgeous superstar here).   

"Like whale song, a haunting blend of flutes rising up from the deep, accompanied by the strumming of silk strings and the rumble of drums." Says National Geographic.

"The group was officially designated as “maintainers of a significant cultural asset,” a kind of Japanese National Treasure. They were playing gagaku, literally “gracious music,” which the Japanese claim as the oldest surviving orchestral music in the world. It is ancient music, which came to Japan by way of Korea and China well over a thousand years ago and still survives as the official music of the Japanese Imperial Court.

That venerable legacy stretches back to the beginnings of Japan’s imperial family, which is thought to be the longest running monarchy in the world. The music exists today because of the Emperor’s patronage, which supports the carefully chosen, rigorously trained court musicians who perform at official palace functions, garden parties, religious occasions, and public concerts.

Whale songs with a deep drumbeat.... Well, at first listen, it certainly does sound pretty bizarre. The more you listen, however, the more the music intrigues. Especially the range of various instruments. Other-worldly best sums it up, I think.

You can listen to a sample here.

As National Geographic hints, yes, without the unique antiquarianism of the Japanese and the loyal patronage of 100 or so generations of Japanese emperors, this music certainly would have been long lost. For it remains the oldest, pre-composed music for large orchestras on earth, and inside the Imperial Household, the music is accompanied by 1500 year old dances with costumes and masks reminiscent of their ancient Central Asian originals-- actually, some masks are originals.

As other wiser men have noted before me, Persian music bears little resemblance to Arab or Ottoman music. It is another tradition altogether. The Persian Sassanian Empire was to make waves that floated all the way to the Eastern shores of the earth-- all the way to Japan, where they were prized and then preserved by 100 generations of Japanese emperors.

As one friend paints it

Now think about it, a civilization dead these 1500 years has left us a legacy in the form of the most ephemeral of all art, music, in places as distant from each other as Japan and Persia. The past, though passed, is still with us in mysterious ways and the dead musicians of the Taklamakan continue to whisper in the conchlea of our ear.

It boggles the mind. A cup of fossil tea anyone?

I'd love a cup, actually.

Finally, as BBC's Melvyn Bragg took pain to stress in his newsletter of last week, compared with other great empires of the past, less is known about the Sassanids. This is because the language is dead and there is a huge paucity of written records.  They were-- like Bragg-- devoted to the oral tradition. The ancient Persians were Zoroastrians, who as a religion stressed prayer, chanting and the oral tradition (having less faith in the written word, which they thought could be corrupted). So, little actually remains from their great empire. And, yet the cultural triumphs of the dynasty still informs Iranian identity.

**

There is one more legend about Prince Pirooz that bears repeating. After his death in China, Prince Pirooz's life story came to be melded into the Zooroastrian myth of "Shah Bahram  Varjavand." Like the Moshiach of the Jews, Shah Baham Varjavand is the Coming Messiah of the Zooroastrian religion. People believed that it would be Shah Bahram Varjavand who would rise in the East to come and avenge Iran's occupation by the Arabs and restore the glory of the empire.

Another more modern persona considered to be the "Shah Bahram Varjavand," is-- of course--  Baha'u'llah, founder of the Bahai faith.

Born in Iran, the Bahai faith is perhaps the most spread out religion on earth. And, of the some 5 million adherents, 2.5 are in India. For the life of me, I cannot recall know how I ended up touring the famous Bahai Lotus Temple in New Delhi, but the place has vividly stuck in my mind for twenty years. It is as if I was there yesterday.

Like Zen, the Bahai faith appeals to Westerners in search of something they can believe in-- and all over Kashmir and in Northern India, I met American and European Bahai faithful. Perhaps, it was having met so many British and Americans talking about "the Bab" and Baha'u'llah that led me to want to see the famed temple for myself. Whatever the reason, it truly was as close to an ideal image of a temple as I can imagine. I couldn't find any good images online, but what really struck me was the lack of ornamentation inside the great temple. There was no altar or statues or candles-- just a simple wooden lectern, pews and beautiful Persian carpets.

More than anything, it was the quiet of the place that struck me. I don't know how to describe it, but it was perfectly, beautifully quiet, and I remember thinking what great possibilities quiet like that could have.

It has been some twenty years since I really thought about the Bahai movement. I suppose what is so resonent for Westerners is its stress on unity (one God with all religions being different expressions of God's message) and peace. The religion is also strongly rooted in social service and community (discouraging asceticism and monasticism in any form). The Bahai is one of the only religions I know of that has not acrimoniously split into factions either. Because of their commitment to unity (unity with God and unity in humankind) they are vehemently opposed to war. 

It was so hot and dusty as trudging up the path toward the temple. The simple beauty and deep quiet of the inside of the temple, though, was cool and refreshing as a glass of water. The founder of the Bahai faith, Baha'u'llah, was believed to be Shah Bahram Varjavand, the Messiah. He is also asserted to be a descendent of  Yazdgerd III, the last monarch of the Sassanian Dynasty  (See, Prince Pirooz).

There is a rumor that circulates in India that Jesus-- rather than finishing out his days on the cross--  spent his later years journeying through Kashmir; or even that he made it all the way to Japan where he spent his last years as a rice farmer in a small village in Aomori. Indeed, grave hunters spend their fine careers visiting the various "graves of Jesus" that dot remote areas of the East.

Well, there is a similar rumor about our Persian Prince Pirooz. And that is that Prince Pirooz, actually traveled even further East-- to Japan. And there, he is said to have spent many years influencing the elegant Iranification of that land.

Japan is, of course, one of the world's great civilizations-- but, alas, it was a late bloomer. During Tang times, it was still more or less an illiterate, rather unsophisticated society. Therefore, most Japan-scholars will acknowledge that Japan must have got a lot of help from "foreign advisors" during this period. For the most part, the Koreans are credited for the direction of the great surge in artistic and intellectual productivity of the Asuka and Nara periods. There are those, too, who say Iranians had a large (if indirect) part to play-- and even that our Prince Pirooz came to lend a hand. Marrying a Japanese lady, the legend has it that he left her and their children behind when he returned to China in his later years. And so his legacy lives on in the Land of the Rising Sun as well.

Even if he himself did not come-- which he most probably did not-- Persian musicians and dancers did. And, so did beautiful objects of art. Glassware was one of the miraculous items brought to Japan from the West. Unlike the Chinese, Persian royalty and aristocrats, preferred glass and metalware to ceramics and their glassware was particularly exquisite. There is one particularly stunning piece of cobalt blue cut glass in the Shosoin Collection. A goblet, 22 cobalt color glass rings are fused to the outer walls of the glass, which has a beautiful etched silver stem and base. Carried on the backs of horses and camels across the deserts of Central Asia, Japanese emissaries to the Tang Court brought them back to Japan from China where they stole the hearts of the Japanese. Of extremely high quality, these objects were treasured in Japan and most of the finest remaining examples of this early glass are preserved there today.

It is one of the peculiar tendencies of the Japanese to treasure and preserve what is fine, and this almost obsessive antiquarianism is one of the traits that sets the Japanese apart. For while "Roman," or Sassanian Glass objects are found here and there from Damascus to the markets of Tehran, the glass is usually milky or silvery from exposure. Those pieces preserved in Japanese collections, however have retained their original sparkling transparency in a way that is stunning.

Perhaps even more phenomenal is what happened with music and dance.

Have you ever heard of the Sogdian Whirl?

A rigorous, twirling dance, the Sogdian Whirl was usually performed on a colorful felt carpet. The dance took the Tang capital by storm. Not only the emperor, but his favorite concubine, the infamous Yang Guifei-- along with her "favorite," the 400 pound Sogdian-Turk An Lushan could perform this exotic dance, snacking on Lychees from Canton and sipping grape wine out of Roman cut glass goblets, all night long. There were Sogdian dances danced to Persian melodies, played on Persian lutes and harps, Indian dances and music and those from the Northern steppes and Korea. Without a doubt, most famous of all the Tang dances was the music and dance of Kucha.

As is well known, at Kashgar the Silk Road, in order to skirt the desert of death, splits into two routes, the northern and southern. Here, where now there is nothing but dusty, long forgotten outposts (oasis sounds too charming) in the desert, there once thrived a great Buddhist civilization. Among the first Buddhist Kingdoms on earth, the cities on both sides of the desert were not only bustling trading centers of goods from both east and west, but they were great centers of Buddhist scholarship. Of all the Kingdoms from Khotan to Dunhuang, Kucha was the largest. And Kucha was famous-- very famous-- for its dances, music and instruments.

Located on the Northern Route, not far from present-day Aksu, it was a place where Theravada Buddhism reigned. The King was particularly devout and it was said the city was full of temples, monks and music. The palace was made of gold, as the kingdom was wealthy from its rich mineral deposits of gold, copper and iron. Another highly cosmopolitan Silk Road garrison city-state, a dozen languages could be heard in the marketplaces, including Chinese, Tibetan, Persian and Kuchean (which was itself an Indo-Euopean language).

Susan Whitfield in her wondrous, Life Along the Silkroad, desribes Kuchean dance as being "not unlike Indian dance, with its emphasis on hip movements, changes of gesture and expressive eyes, but it also adapted dance forms taken from other places, such as the famous Sogdian 'whirling dance,' performed by both men and women."

"Music, song and dance," says Whitfield, "were Silk Road commodities, bought and sold like silver and jade. Itinerent dance troops from India, Burma, Cambodia and Sogdiana performed at both the royal court and the public marketplace in every silk road town." We have Tang period pottery of "Western" dancers and musicians on camelback. These statutes still fascinate and are proudly preserved in museum collectons in many places from Shanghai and Tokyo to Paris.   

The dances of the Silk Road were taken up by the Tang Court and there they were performed with native and other foreign elements to be transformed into the music and dance that today is known as ancient Tang music. And, what is perhaps the most fascinating part of the entire story, this music and these dances were then "borrowed"-- in what is often referred to as the "great borrowing of continental culture"-- by the ancient Japanese of the Nara period.

When we speak of ancient Tang music, the influence from Kucha cannot be overstated. The Tang court music itself was based, explains Whitfield, on the tuning of the Kuchean lute and most of the Tang emperors were proficient at playing the Kuchean drum, as well. Like golf among the wealthy today, the Kuchean drum was "de rigueur among emperors and noblemen of China." Emperor Xuanzong had some 30,000 musicians and dancers housed within the walls of the Palace, and many of those performed in the Kuchean style, playing orchestral pieces, as well as performing great dance dramas perhaps similar to those still performed in South India and in Java today.

Don't you wish you could hear it? Of course, the great civilizations of the desert are long since gone. Covered in sand, if it weren't for the murals of Dunhuang and the Tang chronicles, we would hardly even know of their existence. Not only the civilizations, but the languages too are long since dead. Kuchean, Sogdian, Khotanese, they are nothing but echoes in the desert. In China, too, we only have the written record.

Believe it or not though, these Persian and Central Asian melodies and dances still exist in Japan much as they were 1500 years ago. Just like the perfectly preserved roman glass goblets, the Japanese Imperial Household has preserved this music for a millenium. Japanese Imperial Court Music and Dance, called Gagaku (or "elegant music"), is made up of three bodies: Saibara (native Shinto), Komagaku (Korean and Manchurian) and Togaku (Tang Music). Amazingly, you can still see these dances and listen to this music today in Japan; performed either by the Imperial Household Department of Music (which performs both Western classical music as well as all forms of gagaku) or by groups formed by former members of the Imperial Household Department of Music who form their own groups (most famous has to be Hideki Togi, who performs to sold-out concert halls in Japan and Europe. Read about this gorgeous superstar here).   

"Like whale song, a haunting blend of flutes rising up from the deep, accompanied by the strumming of silk strings and the rumble of drums." Says National Geographic.

"The group was officially designated as “maintainers of a significant cultural asset,” a kind of Japanese National Treasure. They were playing gagaku, literally “gracious music,” which the Japanese claim as the oldest surviving orchestral music in the world. It is ancient music, which came to Japan by way of Korea and China well over a thousand years ago and still survives as the official music of the Japanese Imperial Court.

That venerable legacy stretches back to the beginnings of Japan’s imperial family, which is thought to be the longest running monarchy in the world. The music exists today because of the Emperor’s patronage, which supports the carefully chosen, rigorously trained court musicians who perform at official palace functions, garden parties, religious occasions, and public concerts.

Whale songs with a deep drumbeat.... Well, at first listen, it certainly does sound pretty bizarre. The more you listen, however, the more the music intrigues. Especially the range of various instruments. Other-worldly best sums it up, I think.

You can listen to a sample here.

As National Geographic hints, yes, without the unique antiquarianism of the Japanese and the loyal patronage of 100 or so generations of Japanese emperors, this music certainly would have been long lost. For it remains the oldest, pre-composed music for large orchestras on earth, and inside the Imperial Household, the music is accompanied by 1500 year old dances with costumes and masks reminiscent of their ancient Central Asian originals-- actually, some masks are originals.

As other wiser men have noted before me, Persian music bears little resemblance to Arab or Ottoman music. It is another tradition altogether. The Persian Sassanian Empire was to make waves that floated all the way to the Eastern shores of the earth-- all the way to Japan, where they were prized and then preserved by 100 generations of Japanese emperors.

As one friend paints it

Now think about it, a civilization dead these 1500 years has left us a legacy in the form of the most ephemeral of all art, music, in places as distant from each other as Japan and Persia. The past, though passed, is still with us in mysterious ways and the dead musicians of the Taklamakan continue to whisper in the conchlea of our ear.

It boggles the mind. A cup of fossil tea anyone?

I'd love a cup, actually.

Finally, as BBC's Melvyn Bragg took pain to stress in his newsletter of last week, compared with other great empires of the past, less is known about the Sassanids. This is because the language is dead and there is a huge paucity of written records.  They were-- like Bragg-- devoted to the oral tradition. The ancient Persians were Zoroastrians, who as a religion stressed prayer, chanting and the oral tradition (having less faith in the written word, which they thought could be corrupted). So, little actually remains from their great empire. And, yet the cultural triumphs of the dynasty still informs Iranian identity.

**

There is one more legend about Prince Pirooz that bears repeating. After his death in China, Prince Pirooz's life story came to be melded into the Zooroastrian myth of "Shah Bahram  Varjavand." Like the Moshiach of the Jews, Shah Baham Varjavand is the Coming Messiah of the Zooroastrian religion. People believed that it would be Shah Bahram Varjavand who would rise in the East to come and avenge Iran's occupation by the Arabs and restore the glory of the empire.

Another more modern persona considered to be the "Shah Bahram Varjavand," is-- of course--  Baha'u'llah, founder of the Bahai faith.

Born in Iran, the Bahai faith is perhaps the most spread out religion on earth. And, of the some 5 million adherents, 2.5 are in India. For the life of me, I cannot recall know how I ended up touring the famous Bahai Lotus Temple in New Delhi, but the place has vividly stuck in my mind for twenty years. It is as if I was there yesterday.

Like Zen, the Bahai faith appeals to Westerners in search of something they can believe in-- and all over Kashmir and in Northern India, I met American and European Bahai faithful. Perhaps, it was having met so many British and Americans talking about "the Bab" and Baha'u'llah that led me to want to see the famed temple for myself. Whatever the reason, it truly was as close to an ideal image of a temple as I can imagine. I couldn't find any good images online, but what really struck me was the lack of ornamentation inside the great temple. There was no altar or statues or candles-- just a simple wooden lectern, pews and beautiful Persian carpets.

More than anything, it was the quiet of the place that struck me. I don't know how to describe it, but it was perfectly, beautifully quiet, and I remember thinking what great possibilities quiet like that could have.

It has been some twenty years since I really thought about the Bahai movement. I suppose what is so resonent for Westerners is its stress on unity (one God with all religions being different expressions of God's message) and peace. The religion is also strongly rooted in social service and community (discouraging asceticism and monasticism in any form). The Bahai is one of the only religions I know of that has not acrimoniously split into factions either. Because of their commitment to unity (unity with God and unity in humankind) they are vehemently opposed to war. 

It was so hot and dusty as trudging up the path toward the temple. The simple beauty and deep quiet of the inside of the temple, though, was cool and refreshing as a glass of water. The founder of the Bahai faith, Baha'u'llah, was believed to be Shah Bahram Varjavand, the Messiah. He is also asserted to be a descendent of  Yazdgerd III, the last monarch of the Sassanian Dynasty  (See, Prince Pirooz).

The Otani Mission 大谷隊

As the Great Race for antiquities heated up-- and as if the Europeans weren't having enought trouble with each other-- a mysterious Japanese team appeared on center stage.

It was not the first time, of course, that the Japanese played a part in the events along the Great Road. Indeed, perhaps of all the peoples who have played a part in the history of the Silk Road, it is the Japanese who played one of the most significant roles of all. While not traders or missionaries-- in fact, the Japanese were not even among the active participants in the unfolding of Great Events along the Road; and yet, their service in preserving the riches of the Road, cannot be over overstated. For without the Japanese, there is so much that would have been lost forever.

Their almost obsessive antiquainarism began during Tang dynasty times, and, indeed it continues right down to today. For example there are dances and musical compositions, which while have completely vanished in Central Asia and China, are preserved and even performed as part of the Imperial Calendar events within the Japanese Imperial Household today (see this post for the music and dance preserved in Japan).

The Japanese were quietly there practically from the beginning-- and this participation in events was in no manner diminished during the period of intense rivalry for antiquties that ocurred at the start of the 20th century. Yes, the Great Game.

From the perspective of stunning triumphs, the Japanese came home in 3rd place with the 3rd greatest haul of loot. In terms of scholarship, no country has played a greater role than Japan (and from London's point of view its too bad all the scholarship is being done in Japanese).

Peter Hopkirk paints an almost comical picture of the role of the Meiji Period Otani Mission, describing how the British had them tailed for a year, believing them to be spies sent by the Mikado. Hopkirk sets the stage:

In the autumn of 1908, around the time when Pelliot was shipping his treasures home from Central Asia, British intelligence chiefs in Simla began to take an interest in the movements of two young Japanese archaelogists who had turned up on the Silk Road. Although unaware of it themselves, the men had been observed from the moment they entered Chinese Turkestan overland from Peking. In true KIM fashion they were shadowed for over a year by a succession of Moslem traders, native servants and others on the payroll of the Indian {British} government

The two men were ostensibly Buddhist monks, but they didn't act very Buddhist (reportedly being cruel to the natives everywhere along the way). In addition, they kept drawing things (which is something, of course, archaelogists actually do!) It was the Otani Mission, in fact, that first discovered what is one of the most important artistic discoveries of that period: the splendor of the Kizil Gottoes. Not only are these cave murals the oldest cave grottoes in China, but they are considered to be by many people the most beautiful.

Located not far from Kucha, the Japanese team was tremendously lucky to find them. However, that luck turned on them when a very powerful earthquake ocurred which caused them to have to leave the site empty-handed. In the chaos of the disaster they even lost their notes and photographs, and this was all the window of time necessary which allowed the Germans (who were right on their tail) to move in and take the glory.

The German team was led by Albert von Le Coq (who was independently wealthy and served as assistent to the Director of what was Berlin's famous Ethnology Museum). Hopkirk paints a picture of tension that existed between Le Coq and the Director, who had a more conservative approach to Le Coq's "penchent for wholesale removal." Le Coq was not on the losing side of the argument as the German team hauled back three hundreds of crates (360 kilograms) of art during their three expeditions at Kizil.

You are probably wondering just how does one cut out paintings which have been painted on to thick rock inside caves 1500 years ago? Well, they used very sharp knives to cut around the paintings and then jimmed in pickaxes to create the space necessary to get their saws in. After huge chunks of rock had been removed, the paintings were further cut down for transport.

Le Coq's published catalog Alt-Kutscha can be seen in very high definition on this Japanese site. Note the saw marks on the murals-- which one has to admit were carefully done given the environment of the caves.

It is apparent from Le Coq's writings that he remained deeply impressed by what he found in the caves. His first impression was of the astounding beauty of the blue pigment used in the paintings decorating the cave walls.

“…the extravagant use of a brilliant blue – the well-known ultramarine which, in the time of Benvenuto Cellini was frequently employed by the Italian painters, and was bought at double its weight in gold."

As Le Coq explains, this ultramarine pigment was the same blue so beloved of the Renaissance painters, which was actually made from ground up lapis luzli. Victoria Finlay, in her breathtaking book, Color: A Natural History of the Palatte, begins her chapter on blue with these words:

One Day many years ago somebody told me that all the true ultramarine paint in the world came from one mine in the heart of Asia.

It's true all the ultramarine paint in the world was painstakingly derived from the lapis luzli rocks mined from one place in northeast Afghanistan. Located not far from Bamiyan, from there, donkeys transported the expensive pigment in rough scaks over mountain ranges East to Central Asia and beyond, and West to Venice and beyond.

In Europe, the precious pigment was so expensive that it was worth more than gold, and the legnedary painters of the Renaissance were forced to wait till their patrons provided them the pigment before they could apply the heavenly blue to Mary's robes-- for this ultramarine pigment was Mary's. Finlay says in today's money, a pound would cost about $3000. The color is truly heavenly-- just look at the Wilton Diptych-- shown left. That is all lapis luzli from the Sar-e-sang mine in Afganistan.

Le Coq was with good reason stunned to see the precise same shade being used in the cave paintings of Kizil-- the famed ultramarine of the Renaissance. More precious than gold, Le Coq was surprsied not only by it being present this far East, but also by the abundant use of the extremely costly pigment.

He was even more taken aback by the content of the paintings and wrote that “there was … not the slightest sign in the paintings of any East Asiatic influences.” That is to say that "despite its geographic proximity to China, the Buddhist art there did not show any Chinese elements, but more Indian and Persian (Iranian) influence."

The people depicted in the paintings surprised him as well, for red haired light eyed peoples dominated the pictures. He thought their looks and their swords were highly reminiscent of his own Frankish culture and was one of the earlier proponents of a Caucasian Buddhist culture in Central Asia. He wrote:

Such more striking are representations of red-haired, blue-eyed men with faces of a pronounced European type. We connect these people with the Aryan language found in these parts in so many manuscripts.. These red haired people wear suspenders from their belts.. a remarkable ethnological peculiarity!

**

So, what of our supposed Japanese spies? Well, while they missed the boat at Kizil, they managed to come away with the third largest collection of Central Asia art-- only beaten by the British and Germans. The Otani team got its name from a certain Count Otani Kozui (picture at top). It is hard to say whether they were spies or not since many secrets remain secrets in Japan.

Otani himself had a fascinating life.

The son of the 21st Abbot of one of Japanese Buddhism's most important sects, Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land Buddhism) Otani was actually sent away for a Western-style education in London as a young man. There he met several of the adventurers and scholars whom I have been writing so much about like Marc Aurel Stein (of Dunhuang infamy) and Sven Hedin of Sweden. It is not at all had to imagine the young man coming under their spell-- for these adventurers were the toast of London. You can well imagine how, more interested in adventure than Buddhism-- he vowed that one day he too would make his name through discovery and adventure.

Hopkirk doesn't discuss this aspect at all, but I think it's also relavent to also keep in mind that an essential aspect of East Asian Buddhism is grappling with the problem of translation. Buddhism was so much harder to translate into various langauges than the Bible or the Koran, for example, and truly huge problems had to be overcome. First, of all, the written tradition does not depend on a bible or book of revelation, but rather is a highly sophisticated system of philosophy and is therefore not easily understood in its original language.

But the early languages used to write down the Buddhist texts, particularly Sanskrit, had tremendously rich vocabularies for expressing philosophical content. Sooil used to tell me about Sanskrit's unparalled vocabularly. He said that English still does not have all the finely nuanced philosophical vocabulary as Sanskrit. Even worse than English were Chinese and Japanese-- both of which quite simply did not have the native words necessary to express the obscure concepts. So from the very earliest days of Buddhism, there were really large issues concerning viable translations, and monks and scholars would seek to find the answers by traveling back to the source of the religion.

Indians like to say that "all roads lead back to Ajanta." Well, they at least lead back to Dunhuang.

For that reason alone, I wouldn't find it odd that Otani would have sunk a vast fortune of his own money into these expeditions which brought back Buddhist sculpture, documents in several of languages, countless artifacts and several 2000 year-old mummies. As a Buddhist, I do not think it ought that he would be in Central Asia as he had more of a reason, perhaps, than any of the Westerners out there digging in the sands.

The Russians remained absolutely convinced they were up to no good and maybe they had their reasons. In the end, though, Otani's project caused he, his family and his temple grave financial hardships. He lost his post as Abbot of the Temple and had to sell off vast holdings-- including his beloved villa full of two-thirds of his art collection.   

The part of the colection that Otani kept hold of, eventually was scattered here and there into various collections in Japan. The Japanese government during the 1960's sought to track down as many of the pieces as it could and finally gathered a substantial amount of Otani's personal hoarde together where they were brought together and are now kept at the Tokyo National Museum. More remains out of the Tokyo collection as in it, and to try and see the Otani Collection in its entirity you would have to travel to more than a dozen museums in three countries. Many pieces remain unaccounted for as well.

After his financial difficulties, Otani shifted his base to China-- closer to the Lost Cities he still dreamed of. He took a large part of his collection with him to Shanghai and Lushun. These pieces mostly ended up in museums in China (History Museum in Beijing and the Lushun Museum).

Of those pieces left in his Villa in Kobe? Well, an industrialist was the person who bought Otani's villa along with all its contents-- including the art, and this clever businessman (?) sought to barter the precious treasures for mining rights in Korea. It was in this way that another third of the collection ended up in Seoul, where it still sits, I believe in storage boxes in the National Museum there.

French Medievalist (wouldn't you love to be called a French Medivalist?) Michel Pastoureau wrote a book called Blue: the History of a Color in 2001 that I really liked-- reading it twice in a row in fact! While the Japanese have had a love affair with the color blue right from the very start-- having died in indigo for centuries. In Europe, blue had a much rougher start. In fact, in antiquity it wasn't even acknowledged as a color at all. It wasn't until the middle Middle Ages (around the 12th century) that blue rose to fame, becoming associated with the Virgin Mary. I tend to prefer French scholarship as it greatly resembles Japanese scholarship's preference toward lyrical narative over logical argument. It also does great service to the art of studying minituae-- Pastoureau's book is highly recommended.

Letters from the Silk Road

 The sun has risen over the Borobudur. My thoughts turn to the outward-looking spirit of the eighth century. There were no cultural boundaries then. Peoples absorbed each other's cultures like travellers slacking their thirst together. Have those far off times gone forever? I cannot believe that they have. Down in the water lotuses communicate with each other through their roots. Dewdrops on petals reflect the same moon that shines down on white flowers thousands of miles apart. And the sun that shines on Mount Merapi once shone on pilgrims' faces at a time when beauty was the splendor of truth -- Eiji Hattori

--For Khourosh

Reading history-- of course-- engages the mind. But, nothing demands us to really think like philosophy. Stuck for so long in Tang and Song dynasty histories, I have not had the chance to read much philosophy lately. However, I just finished a book of essays by a Japanese thinker, Eiji Hattori, which-- while not philosophy-- still gave me great pleasure in reading-- and in thinking.

With two doctorates (one from Kyoto University and the other from the Sorbonne), Hattori has an impressive academic background. And yet, rather then entering academia, he chose instead to join UNESCO at their Paris headquarters, where he served for 21 years as a director of the cultural events section. He is perhaps best known at UNESCO for his work on the "Silk Roads-- Roads of Dialogue" Project (which I believe he started and headed).

Here is yet another case of a contemporary thinker holding up the ancient Silk Road as a symbol for an alternative the "Globalization as Americanization," "Clash of Empires" scenerios  of the past decade. Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project is one example of this. I have been seeing-- not just in scholarship concerning the arts but in other fields as well, this type of dialog concerning the Silk Road and have become interested in learning more about the line of thinking involved in trying to connect what was an ancient trade route to future paradigms of internationalization and cross-cultural dialog.

Why the silk road? I wondered.

In my last post, in fact, I went to great lengths describing the historic Silk Road Battle of Talas. In my mom's words, "there has always been warfare," and that was no different during the 8th-11th century. But then again, Andre Malraux (you gotta love him) once commented that "the 21st century must become the century of global culture." Why? Because the 20th had been one of war. Many philosophers agree that in no time in history has war been as deadly nor practiced on such a wide-scale as this past one. As a possible trend, this is-- for the obvious reasons-- disturbing.

A truly global culture would at least (in theory) make war over ideology obsolete since if we truly had a global culture these problems of differing ideology would become far less threatening. That is because when we cease to find other cultural (or socio-economic, or religious) practices threatening to our way of life, there will no longer be a "clash of civilizations."

In any case, this is not what intrigued me to buy this book. My personal question was concerned with learning in what way the Silk Road is being viewed as an inspiration for an alternative style of global interaction. Because of course, there was war and battles occurring up and down the silk road for its entire history. I couldn't help but wonder whether all these people knew something about the silk road that I didn't!

Susan Whitfield in her Life Along the Silk Road tells us that territory during these times was sought and won, not only through battles, but more often through marriage alliances and trade. As this almost exclusively took place along the Silk Road, in this sense, the road itself served as a conduit for inter-cultural dialog. Indeed, in no time in history, she writes, has the spread of ideas been so tightly interwoven with the practice and commitment to maintaining international trade. In addition, even during such early times as the 8th century, the towns and cities of the Silk Road were characterized by their stunning cosmopolitanism. For even in the smallest, most isolated towns, we know that dozens of languages could be heard from people of many different races who interacted with each other to a surprising degree considering the early time period. This interaction took various forms, from extensive international trade to international marriage and cultural borrowings.

I myself have spent much of the past 7 years ensconced happily in the Song dynasty. At night, though, it tends to be the Tang dynasty I dream about. When I think about why that is-- perhaps one reason is the phenomenal cosmopolitanism of the Silk Road cities during the Tang that appeals to my sense of adventure and imagination. The exotics listed in Edward Schafer's Peaches of Samarkand and even more his Vermilion Bird have delighted me-- like so many others-- for years. And, it is true, in the markets of Chang'an, you could hear two dozen languages all being spoken by peoples from such such far-flung lands as Syria, the Levant, the Arabian peninsula, India, Champa and Korea. Many of the languages and many of the countries themselves no longer exist. But, we know these people interacted in a way much different then people of differing countries do today.

In contrast to the modern "melting pot" of pluralistic societies we see today, people during silk road times interacted with each from standpoints of their own unique cultures. Modern-day Penang immediately comes to mind. I really fell in love with Penang, and one of the most striking things to me about the island was the way in which the Chinese, South Indians and Malays-- rather then coming together to form a new melting pot culture-- instead live there amongst each other speaking their native languages, cooking their native foods, wearing their native clothes and living lives pretty much as they would have back in their respective countries. I felt it was a very different model to the pluralistic modern one that we see in Western countries (and of course very different from what we find in ostensibly mono-racial places like Japan or Korea).

You could say that there is much less interaction between the various cultures under such a system, but I am not sure that is so. I would really need to live there or in Singapore to give an opinion. It did strike me at the time, however, as being interesting and different from what I was used to, which in Los Angeles, is really a melting of all cultures into one dominant one-- and sure, the dominant one is influenced by the various minority cultures, but this is too a much lesser degree (and to the degree that it suits the dominant culture) than as presented by Tang dynasty times. In Penang, it felt very appealing.

Khourosh-- of course-- does not agree and finds that in theory at least, the modern idea of one melting pot where we are "all brothers" above race or culture to be the more enlightened model. And, he is correct in the sense that Silk Road cosmopolitanism in a great respect could be described as widescale extraterritorialism (as groups of people lived in segreated areas which were governed by the respective laws and customs of their own native countries).

Regarding this "silk road style" multi-culturalism, Hattori's main point is that during silk road times, dialogs between cultures were two way. That is, it was not a power relationship dominated by one side talking but rather a two way street based on trade. He writes:

*Travellers went searching, not selling (their object was precious goods, even ideas)
*They knew sharing not monopoly
*Trade was an international accomplishment achieved by people from many nations; it was not done by one nation alone.

From his vantage point in Paris (not to mention his extensive travel to pretty much every corner of the planet), Hattori perhaps more than most people knows what people are thinking around the world. I too am doing more and more translations by Japanese business executives who are complaining loudly that they wish the Americans would remember that their form of capitalism is but *one way* of doing business. They seem to want to remind us that "American style capitalism" is not the only form of capitalism. And, from the government here as well, we read much about their wish to reject American food practices from hormones in American beef to fast food. The slow food movement is gaining momentum here as well as in Europe. Indeed, Japan is naturally drifting ever-closer to Europe. 

Along these lines, two weeks ago, Khourosh from Paris remarked that while people in Europe know what we in America are thinking, do we know what the rest of the world is thinking? This is something repeated again and again from Europe to Asia to Africa. My Jordanian friend Ghaleb used to express heart-felt frustration about this wish to be seen/wish to be understood.

Going back to Hattori's ideas, though-- traffic on the Silk Road was two way traffic. This is perhaps his main point (or rather his main lament). No one economic system nor historical perspective reigned supreme above all the rest during the Tang dynasty. And, people interacted with each other from the framework of their own various cultures. This is the famous cosmopolitanism of the Tang. And when you think that what was arguably the greatest of all empires of the time, the Tang actually built mosques and churches in their capital city to welcome the many traders who came from afar-- well, it cannot help but impress. A mosque already stood in Canton during the Prophet's lifetime.

And while it is next to impossible imagining President Bush playing the sitar, in fact, at the court in Chang'an, being proficient at the Kuchean drum became "de rigueur among emperors and noblemen," and of the 30,000 (!) musicians housed within the walls of the imperial palace, a great majority of them were from foreign countries, such as Persia, Kucha and India. The emperors' advisors of the time were composed of various nationalities as well. And, this great internationalism was as evident in Baghdad as it was at Chang'an.

All along the silk roads, countries, kingdoms and empires sought to build ties with each other through diplomatic missions, gifts and international marriage. When I think about that, I cannot come up with one world leader of a powerful country today with a foreign spouse. In today's world a foreign spouse would most probably be a grave liability. I wonder why that is? Hattori also holds up the caravan-sarai as another example of the Tang period "living together" of different cultures. The lords of all silk road cities erected inns where traders and travelers could stay for up to 3 days free of charge. The passing of the caravan, brought riches and wisdom and was something which most leaders hoped to support. 

Hattori again and again brings up colonialism as the opposite of the kind of dialog he idealizes-- for colonialism only brought one-way conversation ("conservation" being of course a euphemism). And this one-way conversation is still wrecking havoc in our post-colonialist world where one still does not see much of a spirit of "learning, giving and sharing" as equal partners in our multi-cultural conversations.

In his extensive travels, he finds over and over again, historical instances of cross-cultural sharing and links between different lands located oftentimes extremely far from one another. Examples abound of from architectural borrowings seen at the Borobudur and Japan to cultural borrowings seen in places as far away from each other as Tana Toraja and Madagascar (his essay on Tana Toraja was my favorite in the entire book, and it is one to which I want to devote an entire post). 

Hattori's recent research is turning increasingly to what he calls "the Significance of Islam in the Dialogue among Civilizations: Correcting Distorted Images," as he feels strongly that to neglect the absolutely pivotal role that Islamic civilizations have had on that of the West is what is fostering the current "Clash of Civilizations" (or as he calls it, "The Clash of Ignorance"). This is a theme that is gaining real currency among scholars. In fact, the Muslim body of knowledge during the middle ages and its role in European history is something we are hearing an overwhelmingly lot about lately. Toward the end of the book, Hattori urges that "Once Central Asia was the center of history... and by neglecting Central Asia, the European West and the Far East cannot meet each other now as they once did so gloriously in the past." Yes, the Centrality of Central Asia.

Finally, in true Japanese logic, Hattori takes his point concerning the symbiotic nature of cultures and civilizations throughout history and infers the same relationship between that of humans and the environment. Therefore the last two essays are devoted to environmental destruction in Africa and in Central Asia. In particular, the environmental disaster of Lake Aral is something I knew nothing about. How can that be? (Another case of disaster in the name of ideology. See, for example: here or the wiki article).

**

An interesting read about other ways-- right or wrong-- of thinking about things

Eiji Hattori's Unesco Speech: Civilations Never Clash--Ignorance Does Clash is here

All the Peonies of Chang'an

I am re-reading for the third of forth time Yasushi Inoue's Tun-Huang. Inoue has long been one of my favorite Japanese writers and this is my all-time favorite of his books. As the translator of his other great one, Roof Tile of Tempyo, writes: "Although his works are considered as being historical novels in Japan, artistic historical narrative would be a better description." I think so too, and no where is this more true than for Tun-Huang.

The story opens faraway from the legendary desert city of the title, instead beginning in the center of the world: at the Sung capital of Kaifeng. Our hero, Chao Hsing-te, has arrived in the city of dreams to sit for the Palace Examination.

Yes, he is the son of a scholar. But not all those sitting for the exam were of his background as the imperial examination was open to all males in Chinese society regardless of their social class (with the notable exception of actors, slaves, policemen and the children of prostitutes). This open education system, while it can be traced back all the way to Tang times, really came into functionality during the Song dynasty. This happened right from the start, in fact, with the First Song Emperor Taizu and his systematic subordination of the military. And from that time onward, the scholar-officials saw their numbers and power at Court dramatically increase-- something which continued right down till the end of the imperial system in modern times.

You may say, "Well, I am not much impressed by meritocracies." Well, what was so revolutionary about all this was not just that the system was based on merit (though this was stunningly unique in and of itself as Europe wouldn't see anything similar until well into modern times), but rather that education and individual artistic cultivation came to be given the highest priority-- above political power, money or commerce. To be educated and artistically cultivated were characteristics that money could not buy. And this focus on education was something that came straight from the top!

To impress upon his subjects the importance of education, the narrator in the novel explains that the third Song Emperor Zhenzong personally composed the following poem:

No need to acquire rich lands to increase the family's wealth
For in books are a thousand measure of millet.
No need to build mansions in which to dwell in peace
For in books are abodes of gold
You who would realize your aspirations,
Use the light from your window and recite the Six Classics.

There were three distinct levels to the Song imperial examination system. The first level was the qualifying exam, given throughout the provinces in the major cities every three years. Success at this level brought a great amount of social distinction, including the privilege of being allowed to wear special student robes and having one’s family exempted from paying taxes. Holders of the first-level degree, called the “cultivated talent” degree, were then permitted to sit for the second level, also held once every three years at the imperial capital by the Ministry of Rites. There the “cultivated talents” spent several days packed in large halls (and in later times crammed into individual cells) with only their writing brushes, ink and inkstones. The examinees faced rigorous tests of their knowledge of the Confucian classics, as well as on essay and poetry composition. At this stage, the competition was fierce with only a small percentage of those examinees passing. Those who did pass were granted the degree known as “recommended man.” They could then go on that following autumn to take the final exam at the Palace itself.

Tun-Huang opens up the day before our hero, Chao Hsing-te, is about to face this last exam. He had arrived at the capital from his hometown in Hunan province in the spring of 1026 and had done brilliantly. Out of 33,000 candidates, only 500 were chosen to go on to the final top exam, and he had been one of them. His future looked very bright and he had every reason to be on top of the world.

During Song times, this last exam was supervised directly by the Emperor. Those few who passed became known as “presented scholars” (or jinshi). This degree was similar to having obtained a doctorate in the West, but in effect was far more prestigious. Indeed, in the long history of this examination system, there is many a story of a poor man’s son and his stunning rise to stardom after having obtained this degree, for the holders of the jinshi degree became the luminous elite of their day.

First feted at the Palace, those with the top scores-- the season’s cream of the crop-- were posted at Court, either to assist at the Hanlin Academy or to serve as advisors to the Emperor, with the rest of the candidates being scattered at different posts throughout the empire. Because education was given such an esteemed place in Chinese society, these scholars were held in tremendous awe. Rising to the top level of this rigorous examination system required literally half a lifetime, and the scholars who were able to graduate at the top were assured brillinat futures. In a land where literacy was a rarity to say the least, that these men could not only read and write, but could compose letters and poems of such impossible elegance and beauty as to be valued as works of fine art led them to be seen as viewed as larger than life by the general population-- much like the Hollywood movie stars of America today.

Chao is aware of all of this and has very high hopes-- as well as high aspirations. On the day of the final exam-- the most important day of his life-- he waits outside the Examination Hall along with several dozen other final candidates. It was a warm, early fall day and as he waits for his name to be called, the unthinkable happens. He falls asleep. Dreaming that he is giving his final oral examination in the presence of the Emperor, he is given the question of arguing on Ho Liang's Frontier Security Proposal for dealing with the barbarians along China's western border. 

The Hsi-hsia (or Xixia 西夏) were a Tibetan peoples who formed a large military threat along China's western edges. As this was the corridor that ran along the silk road into Central Asia, it was very strategically important that China contain control over their frontier garrisons there. The Xixia were becoming more and more of a threat as they raided Chinese-occupied towns and  forts in the gray areas, and China was becoming increasingly more concerned. Ho Liang's proposal had taken a hard line, and in his dream, Chao Hsing-te gave an impassioned-- and yet brilliant-- oral argument for why Ho Liang's approach remained the only logical strategy.

Unfortunately rather then ending in accolades, Chao Hsing-te awoke to find himself laying face-down under the great huai tree in the courtyard of the examination hall. His future was over before it had even begun. Rejected, he leaves the courtyard, thinking of a famous poem by Meng Chiao:

Elated by the spring breeze
My horse quickens its pace
In but one short day
Do I view all the peonies of Chang'an

Meng Chiao (or Meng Jiao of Pink Floyd fame) had composed the poem in celebration of finally passing the Palace Examination at the age of 50. With that passing result, all in the blink of an eye had changed for Meng. For Chao Hsing-te, everything had changed as well. The narrator of the story remarks that, "For Hsing-te there would be no peonies." Indeed, all his high aspirations "had been reduced to the ashes of a dream."

But then something amazing happens. Walking home in a daze, Chao finds himself in the marketplace outside the city walls. The alleys are lined with shops selling hot noodles and dumplings and the smell of oil makes him realize he is hungry. At that moment he catches sight of a woman who is being sold in the marketplace. The man who is selling her announces that he plans to sell her piecemeal-- and to add impact to his words proceeds to cut off two of her fingers. Chao is amazed that the beautiful woman does not cry out in any way. Without thinking, he shouts that he will buy her, and handing over the money walks away, saying, "you are free." We know understand that our hero is perhaps not the complete fool we may have thought he was slumbering away in the Emperor's courtyard!

Rushing after him, she hands him a piece of paper and says, "This is all I have, take it." Looking at the writing on the paper, he realized that it is not a language he has ever seen before so he demands to know what it says. She explains that, since she cannot read she doesn't know for sure but she thinks it may state her name and place of birth. With that, she turns and disappears in the teeming crowd of the dark marketplace.

This is how it always is, is it not? One's fate. There is no rythmn nor reason. It is all passion and it happens in the blink of an eye.

Gone 100% out of his mind is the exam, which had been up till now the most important thing in his life. Now, only one thought occupies him-- that piece of paper. He takes it to the Minister of Rites and begs to be told what language it is. The Minister is stumped. The characters are, he says, "worthless imitations of our Chinese characters." And, he mutters after asking Chao how he came to possess the scrap of paper that who would have known such barbarians actually had their own script.

Not much was known of the Xixia people and their language, but Chao resolves to find out everythibng there is to know, and henceforth immediately sets out for the border of the empire. Tun-huang is the story of one man's fate. It is also the story of the great Buddhist kingdom of Dunhuang (Tun-huang). More than anything, however, it is a story -- like all Inoue's novels-- that expresses the profound pathos caused over the realization that often our lives make no real impact at all.

Just like the Japanese monk Gogyo who spends his entire life translating all the great sutras of China into Japanese only to see the countless volumes of his life work wash overboard during a storm at sea, Chao too lives to realize that the great task he has set himself-- his life's work-- amounted to "nothing but an eddy in the broad flow of time."

And yet, while that was Chao's fate-- and no matter how many times I read the novel, I am always left with the feeling that Chao's was a happy one. For inconsequential or not, both Chao and Gogyo never waivered. They knew what their hearts were telling them and followed that regardless of whatever that path would bring.

Of the great scholar-official that was his anti-fate-- or his fate not to be? In an instant this path was closed to Chao. But in the blink of an eye, another path opened up. Of the other path? Well, in many ways, those highly educated men were over-qualified for any kind of work, and with abundant time on their hands, many turned to the arts-- especially to the arts of calligraphy, ink painting, poetry and music-- arts at which they truly excelled. And so it came to be that in China, the civil service, scholarship and the arts of painting and calligraphy became inextricably linked in a very unique way. For not only did our scholar-officials create most of the greatest masterpieces for which China is now famous, but they also participated in art scholarship, connoisseurship, and collecting-- and when we talk of art history in China, until very recent times, it was these same scholar-officials who wrote most of the books.

++

*Dunhuang Project Newsletter (always interesting): http://idp.bl.uk/archives/news_current/news_current.a4d
*The best book so far on the dramatic rise and significance of the shi during the Song dynasty:
Peter Bol’s “This Culture of Our’s”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992)
*All details regarding the examination system are from F.W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800 (Harvard U.P., 1999) For more details: Ichisada Miyazaki’s China’s Examination Hell. Trans. by Conrad Schirokauer (Yale Univ Press, 1976)

I am re-reading for the third of forth time Yasushi Inoue's Tun-Huang. Inoue has long been one of my favorite Japanese writers and this is my all-time favorite of his books. As the translator of his other great one, Roof Tile of Tempyo, writes: "Although his works are considered as being historical novels in Japan, artistic historical narrative would be a better description." I think so too, and no where is this more true than for Tun-Huang.

The story opens faraway from the legendary desert city of the title, instead beginning in the center of the world: at the Sung capital of Kaifeng. Our hero, Chao Hsing-te, has arrived in the city of dreams to sit for the Palace Examination.

Yes, he is the son of a scholar. But not all those sitting for the exam were of his background as the imperial examination was open to all males in Chinese society regardless of their social class (with the notable exception of actors, slaves, policemen and the children of prostitutes). This open education system, while it can be traced back all the way to Tang times, really came into functionality during the Song dynasty. This happened right from the start, in fact, with the First Song Emperor Taizu and his systematic subordination of the military. And from that time onward, the scholar-officials saw their numbers and power at Court dramatically increase-- something which continued right down till the end of the imperial system in modern times.

You may say, "Well, I am not much impressed by meritocracies." Well, what was so revolutionary about all this was not just that the system was based on merit (though this was stunningly unique in and of itself as Europe wouldn't see anything similar until well into modern times), but rather that education and individual artistic cultivation came to be given the highest priority-- above political power, money or commerce. To be educated and artistically cultivated were characteristics that money could not buy. And this focus on education was something that came straight from the top!

To impress upon his subjects the importance of education, the narrator in the novel explains that the third Song Emperor Zhenzong personally composed the following poem:

No need to acquire rich lands to increase the family's wealth
For in books are a thousand measure of millet.
No need to build mansions in which to dwell in peace
For in books are abodes of gold
You who would realize your aspirations,
Use the light from your window and recite the Six Classics.

There were three distinct levels to the Song imperial examination system. The first level was the qualifying exam, given throughout the provinces in the major cities every three years. Success at this level brought a great amount of social distinction, including the privilege of being allowed to wear special student robes and having one’s family exempted from paying taxes. Holders of the first-level degree, called the “cultivated talent” degree, were then permitted to sit for the second level, also held once every three years at the imperial capital by the Ministry of Rites. There the “cultivated talents” spent several days packed in large halls (and in later times crammed into individual cells) with only their writing brushes, ink and inkstones. The examinees faced rigorous tests of their knowledge of the Confucian classics, as well as on essay and poetry composition. At this stage, the competition was fierce with only a small percentage of those examinees passing. Those who did pass were granted the degree known as “recommended man.” They could then go on that following autumn to take the final exam at the Palace itself.

Tun-Huang opens up the day before our hero, Chao Hsing-te, is about to face this last exam. He had arrived at the capital from his hometown in Hunan province in the spring of 1026 and had done brilliantly. Out of 33,000 candidates, only 500 were chosen to go on to the final top exam, and he had been one of them. His future looked very bright and he had every reason to be on top of the world.

During Song times, this last exam was supervised directly by the Emperor. Those few who passed became known as “presented scholars” (or jinshi). This degree was similar to having obtained a doctorate in the West, but in effect was far more prestigious. Indeed, in the long history of this examination system, there is many a story of a poor man’s son and his stunning rise to stardom after having obtained this degree, for the holders of the jinshi degree became the luminous elite of their day.

First feted at the Palace, those with the top scores-- the season’s cream of the crop-- were posted at Court, either to assist at the Hanlin Academy or to serve as advisors to the Emperor, with the rest of the candidates being scattered at different posts throughout the empire. Because education was given such an esteemed place in Chinese society, these scholars were held in tremendous awe. Rising to the top level of this rigorous examination system required literally half a lifetime, and the scholars who were able to graduate at the top were assured brillinat futures. In a land where literacy was a rarity to say the least, that these men could not only read and write, but could compose letters and poems of such impossible elegance and beauty as to be valued as works of fine art led them to be seen as viewed as larger than life by the general population-- much like the Hollywood movie stars of America today.

Chao is aware of all of this and has very high hopes-- as well as high aspirations. On the day of the final exam-- the most important day of his life-- he waits outside the Examination Hall along with several dozen other final candidates. It was a warm, early fall day and as he waits for his name to be called, the unthinkable happens. He falls asleep. Dreaming that he is giving his final oral examination in the presence of the Emperor, he is given the question of arguing on Ho Liang's Frontier Security Proposal for dealing with the barbarians along China's western border. 

The Hsi-hsia (or Xixia 西夏) were a Tibetan peoples who formed a large military threat along China's western edges. As this was the corridor that ran along the silk road into Central Asia, it was very strategically important that China contain control over their frontier garrisons there. The Xixia were becoming more and more of a threat as they raided Chinese-occupied towns and  forts in the gray areas, and China was becoming increasingly more concerned. Ho Liang's proposal had taken a hard line, and in his dream, Chao Hsing-te gave an impassioned-- and yet brilliant-- oral argument for why Ho Liang's approach remained the only logical strategy.

Unfortunately rather then ending in accolades, Chao Hsing-te awoke to find himself laying face-down under the great huai tree in the courtyard of the examination hall. His future was over before it had even begun. Rejected, he leaves the courtyard, thinking of a famous poem by Meng Chiao:

Elated by the spring breeze
My horse quickens its pace
In but one short day
Do I view all the peonies of Chang'an

Meng Chiao (or Meng Jiao of Pink Floyd fame) had composed the poem in celebration of finally passing the Palace Examination at the age of 50. With that passing result, all in the blink of an eye had changed for Meng. For Chao Hsing-te, everything had changed as well. The narrator of the story remarks that, "For Hsing-te there would be no peonies." Indeed, all his high aspirations "had been reduced to the ashes of a dream."

But then something amazing happens. Walking home in a daze, Chao finds himself in the marketplace outside the city walls. The alleys are lined with shops selling hot noodles and dumplings and the smell of oil makes him realize he is hungry. At that moment he catches sight of a woman who is being sold in the marketplace. The man who is selling her announces that he plans to sell her piecemeal-- and to add impact to his words proceeds to cut off two of her fingers. Chao is amazed that the beautiful woman does not cry out in any way. Without thinking, he shouts that he will buy her, and handing over the money walks away, saying, "you are free." We know understand that our hero is perhaps not the complete fool we may have thought he was slumbering away in the Emperor's courtyard!

Rushing after him, she hands him a piece of paper and says, "This is all I have, take it." Looking at the writing on the paper, he realized that it is not a language he has ever seen before so he demands to know what it says. She explains that, since she cannot read she doesn't know for sure but she thinks it may state her name and place of birth. With that, she turns and disappears in the teeming crowd of the dark marketplace.

This is how it always is, is it not? One's fate. There is no rythmn nor reason. It is all passion and it happens in the blink of an eye.

Gone 100% out of his mind is the exam, which had been up till now the most important thing in his life. Now, only one thought occupies him-- that piece of paper. He takes it to the Minister of Rites and begs to be told what language it is. The Minister is stumped. The characters are, he says, "worthless imitations of our Chinese characters." And, he mutters after asking Chao how he came to possess the scrap of paper that who would have known such barbarians actually had their own script.

Not much was known of the Xixia people and their language, but Chao resolves to find out everythibng there is to know, and henceforth immediately sets out for the border of the empire. Tun-huang is the story of one man's fate. It is also the story of the great Buddhist kingdom of Dunhuang (Tun-huang). More than anything, however, it is a story -- like all Inoue's novels-- that expresses the profound pathos caused over the realization that often our lives make no real impact at all.

Just like the Japanese monk Gogyo who spends his entire life translating all the great sutras of China into Japanese only to see the countless volumes of his life work wash overboard during a storm at sea, Chao too lives to realize that the great task he has set himself-- his life's work-- amounted to "nothing but an eddy in the broad flow of time."

And yet, while that was Chao's fate-- and no matter how many times I read the novel, I am always left with the feeling that Chao's was a happy one. For inconsequential or not, both Chao and Gogyo never waivered. They knew what their hearts were telling them and followed that regardless of whatever that path would bring.

Of the great scholar-official that was his anti-fate-- or his fate not to be? In an instant this path was closed to Chao. But in the blink of an eye, another path opened up. Of the other path? Well, in many ways, those highly educated men were over-qualified for any kind of work, and with abundant time on their hands, many turned to the arts-- especially to the arts of calligraphy, ink painting, poetry and music-- arts at which they truly excelled. And so it came to be that in China, the civil service, scholarship and the arts of painting and calligraphy became inextricably linked in a very unique way. For not only did our scholar-officials create most of the greatest masterpieces for which China is now famous, but they also participated in art scholarship, connoisseurship, and collecting-- and when we talk of art history in China, until very recent times, it was these same scholar-officials who wrote most of the books.

++

*Dunhuang Project Newsletter (always interesting): http://idp.bl.uk/archives/news_current/news_current.a4d
*The best book so far on the dramatic rise and significance of the shi during the Song dynasty:
Peter Bol’s “This Culture of Our’s”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992)
*All details regarding the examination system are from F.W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800 (Harvard U.P., 1999) For more details: Ichisada Miyazaki’s China’s Examination Hell. Trans. by Conrad Schirokauer (Yale Univ Press, 1976)

NHK (Part2): Kharakhoto 幻の黒水城

From a distance, it is like the most exquisite mirage you could image. Shimmering in the shifting sands of the Gobi Desert, a towering Tibetan stupa rises up. You can just make out the edges of the crumbling city wall but the sand of the desert hisses like a great slithering snake-- as if to warn you: stay away!

And, you cannot help but think-- how did it come to this? How did this great city on the crossroads end up crumbling in the sands of the desert? And, will this be our fate as well? Will someday people stumble through the ruins of Tokyo or Los Angeles and say, "how beautiful it must have been?"

**

Yes, we are back on the road with NHK (see Part 1). After having been shown around the famed sites of Dunhuang by none other than my favorite novelist Inoue Yasushi), the team hit the road again. But this time they were traveling backwards-- that is, back in the same direction from which they had already traveled-- motoring East back toward China!

Back within the embrace of the Great Wall, they arrive in Jiuquan (closest city to China's main rocket launch center). After gathering up the necessary supplies, the team once again boards their jeeps to head due northeast on what was once called the Old Gobi Trail. A dusty trail that cuts straight through the Gobi Dowser;, half-way to their destination, their cars gave out and so they had to exchange cars for camels for the last leg. The Chinese-Japanese team was now joined by a group of Mongolians who were there to guide the way and help manage the camels. They still had 60 kilometers to travel, which on the back of a camel is a day and a half.

That night, setting up camp in the desert, the Mongolians show the Chinese and Japanese how to erect a traditional felt yurt. Compact and very warm, the yurts, they say, make the best tents for camping in the freezing desert. Exhausted the men sit around the camp fire drinking black tea and smoking cigarettes. Before long, talk turns to their destination-- the legendary city of Kharakhoto.

Kara signifies "black" in Altaic languages like Japanese, Manchurian and Turkish-- and Khoto means city or fortress, so Kharakhoto literally means the "Black City." In English, "black city" doesn't perhaps conjure up the most promising images. However, as Hattori in his book Letters of the Silk Road reminds us, black (kara) does not have the same associations in the East as it does in the West. The Black Sea is no more black-- and no more "dark"-- than the Red Sea is red. In the East, black signifies North (with red being south, white being west and blue being east).

Closely associated with China's theory of the five elements, from the earliest of times four celestial beasts 四獣 have been associated with each of the cardinal directions: the tortoise (black warrior of the north): the white tiger of the west; the red phoenix of the south and the blue dragon of the east. These concepts (along with so many others) traveled East to Japan and west as faraway as Turkey. According to this cosmology, the Black Sea really just means the "northern sea" and the Red Sea the "southern sea." In Turkish, the Mediterranean is known as the White Sea (that is, the Western Sea).

The "black city" of Kharakhoto, then, is the "northern city;" which makes sense since the city is located to the north of the Silk Road. It should also be noted (though I don't think it's particularly relevant here) that also according to this ancient system, black was the position of authority. The Imperial Palaces of China were always positioned in the north-- facing south.They sat, in fact, beneath the Northern Pole Star, which was associated with the color purple and abode of the Celestial Emperor. For this reason the Imperial Cities 紫禁城 of Peking and Hue are called in Chinese "Forbidden Purple Cities" (that is, located in the place of authority-- the north-- under the Northern Pole Star). You have to admit there is something very Chinese about imagining the Emperor sitting in a place literally beneath where the heavenly emperor sits in sky above.

In Japanese "kara" (using a different character) is has for 2000 years been used to refer to China, but the concept (kara→black→north→authority) is actually believed to have been of Mongolian or Turkish origin (which is why it perhaps spread so far West into Turkey).

In any case, the city of Kharakhoto probably got its named from the waters of the Heihe (Black River) which flowed just outside the city gates, and indeed, the Chinese called the city: Heishuicheng (黒水城　"black water city")

Getting back to our team in the desert, though, as everyone was sitting around the campfire smoking cigarettes and drinking black tea, the elder member of the Mongolian contingent took out a traditional Mongolian stringed instrument and as he played a melodious tune began to speak of the famous legend of the last King of Tanguts who perished within the walls of his great capital city of Kharakhoto.

The Tanguts, as I mentioned before, were the people most dreaded by the Chinese of the Song dynasty. Their empire-- the Xixia Empire-- had caused nothing but trouble. Try as they might, though, the Chinese were unable to crush them. Ethnically Tibetan, the Tanguts were devout Buddhists of the Tibetan school. In fact, as the team finally approaches the ruins of the city, huge towering stupas rise up from the sands. It must have been a city full of Buddhist temples and monasteries, the narrator tells us (still in his hat).

Like all the Buddhist kingdoms and cities of the desert, Kharakhoto was a huge fortress city with city walls 9 meters high. During the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, the city served to link Karakorum to the west with the Mongol capital of Xanadu to the east along a far northernly route. During this time, the city flourished  not only as a place of Buddhist scholarship but as a market town as well. Just outside the walls (which were believed to be Chinese-style walls of colorfully glazed tiles) there was a Muslim mosque (pictured at left). The Japanese archaeologist (along for this segment of the show) was delighted to find pieces of Chinese silk, wooden combs and fabric shoes just lying scattered in the sand.

Again: How did it come to this?

Well, it seems that the King of the city had angered the Emperor of China (Who happened to be none other than Genghis Khan). The Mongol warrior sent a great Chinese army to destroy the Black City of the Gobi Desert. After engaging in several battles, the Chinese army had the Tanguts cornered in their capital city. But it was really a stalemate as the Chinese could not breach the 9 meter-tall walls. The Chinese growing tired of waiting (for how long could an army really wait in the blisteringly hot desert?), decided to cut off their water supply. Filling thousand of bags full of sand, they built a dam to divert the river (which served as the city's sole water supply) off to the west-- away from the thirsty city.

Digging desperately for water, it became clear that the Chinese plan had worked and there was nothing to do but face the enemy. The ruler of the Tanguts, put his massive collection of treasures down the well along with that of the bodies of his two wives and their sons (who he had killed to keep them away from Chinese hands). He then cast a spell over the well to keep it hidden from his enemies.

Charging out to face the Chinese army, he along with his entire army were decimated and their glorious city reduced to ruins. The Chinese, it is said, desperately tried to find the Tangut King's treasures. Said to be the angry spirit of the dead king, all they found, though, were red and green snakes which slithered all over the city.

It was this city (and its treasure) that so captivated the Russian Colonel Petr Koslov, who led the infamous Russian expedition to the site in 1908. Since I am now re-reading Peter Hopkirk's Foreign Devil's of the Silk Road, I will be writing more about the topic of the Great Game in Part 3 of this series. For now, suffice it to say, that as a "foreign devil" in East Asia myself, while I don't much like the term, it is probably well-deserved when it comes to the Russians, Americans and Brits (and Japanese) of the story.

For Colonel Koslov, Kharakhoto was the lost city of his dreams; he said: "Ever since reading about the ruins in the explorer Potanin's book Khara-Khoto has been constantly on my mind." Me too.

They were in a very remote part of the Gobi desert and were needless-to-say stunned to stumble upon it: "The walls of the town," he reported, "are covered in sand, in some places so deeply that it is possible to walk up the slope and enter the fortress." The Chinese will never forgive what took place during the early part of the 20th century when Western explorers waltzed into Western China and literally lugged off tons of important paintings and ancient documents (many being ruined in the process). The Russians, actually come off looking better than the others. It was really only at Kharakhoto that they carted away vast amounts of important relics, treasures and documents.

While they were unable to find the legendary treasure of the last tangut King, they did uncover enough books, coins and documents to launch an entire new field of study: Tangut Culture and Xixia Language Studies. His discoveries were all sent back to St Petersburg where they remain today in a special wing of the Hermitage. 

The Persian Prince Pirooz (1)

--For Guita-jahn

Sometime around 670, the son of the last Sassanid King-- still a young boy-- arrived in the Tang capital to ask for protection against the Arab invaders who now ocuppied his country. Exhausted and covered in dust from the journey, the young prince was led into the Great Hall. It had taken him the best part of a decade to arrive; in fact, he never believed he would actually make it; imagining instead being murdered or dying from cold and exhaustion in the great mountains and deserts through which he had passed on his way East. Somehow, though, he had made it, and arriving at dusk, just before the gates of the great city were secured shut for the night, a regiment of guards from the Chinese Emperor's Palace were there to escort him through the city.

The City. When he was a child, his father had told him much about the great capital to the East-- larger and richer than even Rome or Byzantium. Rome, of course, had been sacked two centuries before, and Byzantium was itself in decline. And then there was his empire-- it still brought tears to his eyes just thinking of it. The Sassanid Empire had been the greatest empire on earth-- rivaled only by Byzantium to the West and China to the East, but it now lay in ruins. His family all dead, his heritage scattered like the sands of the desert blown here and there in the wind. Gone forever.

When the Arabs had invaded, he and his family-- along with a great entourage of supporters-- had fled eastward. Born in 226 a.d. the ancient Persian Sassanid Empire had stretched from the Levant and Constantinople in the West to the Indian subcontinent in the East and had encompassed all of present-day Iraq, Armenia and Afghanistan; as well as much of Turkey, Syria, Arabia and Pakistan. These lands-- as well as the Persian colonies in Central Asia-- were all part of the Persian sphere of influence; whose emperors were held as equals by both the Roman emperors and the Chinese emperors.

For 400 years, they had been called Shahanshah-- or, the "King of Kings." And, theirs was the last great Persian empire prior to the invasion of the Arabs and the influx of Islam. Zoorastrians by religion, it was a Kingdom ruled by a federation of aristocratic families whose splendid cultural achievements would be taken up by their Arab conquerers with gusto. In fact, much of what later came to be known as Islamic culture-- from calligraphy and poetry to garden design and architecture-- was borrowed largely from the Sassanian empire.

When the Arab conquerers stormed the Persian capital of Ctesiphon in 637, such were their numbers that his Father's only choice had been to flee. From Ctesiphon, located on the Tigris, just a bit downstream from Baghdad (founded about 150 years later), on horseback they had raced East in the hope of gathering support for their cause. None of the great families, however, had agreed to help them mount an army to oust the Arab invaders, and by the time they had reached Merv, on the Eastern edge of their empire, they were spent.

It was there that the greatest tragedy of all happened. His Father had been murdered-- right in front of his own eyes. And what had been perhaps the greatest blow of all was that he had been murdered by a commoner. Robbed and murdered for his purse, the great Shahanshah, Yazdgerd III, had been killed by a miller. It was 651, and they had been in flight for some 14 years. 

So, that had been that. With their cause now dead, the aristocratic and ruling families who had followed them East decided to stay and put down roots in Merv, as well as in the nearby Persian areas of Sogdiana, Tashkent and Khotan. Our young Prince, however, would always live with a price on his head. He, therefore, required protection. He thought and thought, but there seemed nowhere to turn-- until he remembered his sister. Before he was born, she had already been married off to the great Tang Emperor to the East. And, so he had set out East--to China.

It was the heyday of the Silk Road, so he had just followed the well-worn path of other Persians before him. First into Sogdiana and then crossing the Pamirs, he had had to make it across the unending stretch of sand of the deserts of inner Asia. Skirting the southern edges of the Taklamakan Desert, first he traveled to Kashgar; then on to Yarkand, Khotan, and all the way to Dunhuang. From there, it had just been a matter of descending down off the plateau and heading East, toward the capital.   

Persian peoples dominated the entire route. The great middle men of the Silk Road, Persian communities (and most notably the Sogdians) had greeted him in every town he passed through along the way. From Merv to Changan, whenever he stopped, he had stayed in Persian inns, eaten Persian foods and had spoken in the refined Persian of the Court-- and he was, for the most part-- understood.

He would be further stunned to see of his country's influence in China proper as well. It gave him heart. Yes, theirs had been the greatest civilization of the world-- for even the Chinese thought so.

The Chinese capital, though, he had to admit, had surpassed even the Persian capital during its height. As French scholar Michel Beurdeley has noted, “the title of Middle Kingdom was richly deserved by China during the Tang dynasty,” as the high civilization and celebrated cosmopolitanism of the Tang dynasty truly had no precedent anywhere on earth prior to that time-- not even Byzantium saw such a rich display of goods and peoples.

While the Tang capital of Changan was the largest, most international city in the world of the time, the Second Capital of Loyang was no less impressive. Both cities were inhabited by traders, entertainers and religious teachers and students from places as far-flung as Syria, Oman, Iran, Khotan, Sogdiana, Turkestan, Tibet, India, Champa, Funan, Korea, and Japan, just to name a few. There were Mosques, Jewish, Manichean and Zoroastrian temples, Nestorian churches, as well as Buddhist monasteries of all sects, some of which were great centers of scholarship. Most surprising (considering the inward turn China would take in the coming centuries) was how stunningly exotic and open the city was.

It was a city where fine ladies adorned their cheeks with crimson laq from Vietnam and anointed their bodies with perfumed oils of Cambodia; where aristocrats kept falcons from Korea, parrots from the jungles of Java and lapdogs from Samarkand. Sleeping in Turkish felt tents was the latest fashion as were the dance moves from Sogdiana. And, the music. The capital saw glorious performances by dancers from Central Asia and India showing dances of such beauty that the famed Tang poets of the time composed poem after poem about them. Grape wine had also come into fashion and was served in glass ewers from Persia. There were lychees from Canton and those oh-so famous peaches of Samarkand.

Of all the foreign fashions, the influence of Iran was without a doubt most significant of all. During the Tang, anything Persian-- from music and dancing, to clothes, hairstyles and the game of Polo-- enjoyed huge popularity at Court and among the aristocracy-- indeed, they were considered to be the very height of fashion. This surprising turn in history came about as part of the Tang Dynasty’s political and military incursions further and further West, into Central Asia (to the land of their prized “blood sweating” stallions and jade) as well as into the Middle East (where beautiful glass and the mineral cobalt was secured).

It was the Iranian Sogdian peoples who held the greatest influence. They were the great merchants, traders and entertainers of the legendary silk road. Known in Chinese as hu jen 胡人, their cultural influence among the Chinese aristocrats was remarkable. It is written in the Tang histories that “the food of the aristocrats was hu food, their music hu music, and their women clothed in the most exotic hu robes that money could buy.” Indeed, in the words of one Japanese scholar, the Tang capital of Chang-an was “painted entirely in the colors of hu.”      

And so our Persian Prince was pleasantly surprised. Such was the Chinese Emperor's great appreciation of the accomplishments of the Persian civilization that upon their first meeting they declared themselves brothers. Following the Palace Guards down long and wide halls, the Prince could just make out the sound of music. He had heard the Emperor had musical skills that rivaled that of professional musicians and the young Prince thought he could hear a drum and loud clappers. He seemed to be walking through a cloud of perfume as incense smoke billowed out of braziers set in the corners of all the rooms. Truly, it smelled of paradise.

Born and raised the song of a King, the Prince knew not to make eye-contact with the Son of Heaven, and instead fell to his knees. The great Emperor rose to his feet and stepping off his dais, he bent down to bid the young Prince to his feet.

"You've come a long way. Have no more fears. For you are my brother and this is your new home."

With tears in his eyes, Pirooz knelt again and thanked the great Emperor. Prince Pirooz was to spend the rest of his days within China. He is said to have learned Kung Fu and then went on to become a general in the army. Sent West to fight their mutual enemies the Arabs, the Persian Prince used his remaining money and resources to make whatever trouble he could. He had probably given up all hope of re-taking his empire-- still it must have felt good to win a battle or two. The Tang chronicles state that when the Chinese emperor died, Pirooz and his son Narseh were allowed to be stationed along the western border garrisons by the new Chinese emperor. Immediately, they started clashes against the Umayyad Arabs. Soliciting the aid of Turkish tribes, Prince Pirooz spent the rest of his days fighting the Arabs along China's Western corridor. 

He died around 700 in the West, still fighting the Arabs wherever he could. His son-- who also begame a respected general in the Chinese army, wrote this in his diary (from Frank Chang's article which is pretty much the only thing around online about Prince Pirooz):

Pirooz requested only a simple burial and the Chinese emperor approved. The entire exiled court was in attendance along with the Chinese emperor. The Chinese emperor held Pirooz's shaking hands. Pirooz looked west and said: "I have done what I could for my homeland (Persia) and I have no regrets." Then, he looked east and said: "I am grateful to China, my new homeland." Then he looked at his immediate family and all the Persians in attendance and said: "Contribute your talents and devote it to the emperor. We are no longer Persians. We are now Chinese." Then, he died peacefully. A beautiful horse was made to gallop around his coffin 33 times before burial, because this was the number of military victories he had during his lifetime. Pirooz was a great Chinese general and great Persian prince devoted and loyal to his people.

And so our Prince died in one of the most remote regions on earth; fighting his enemies till the very end. He was buried facing West.

**

One of Iran's great contemporary playwrights, Bahram Beyzaie, wrote a very popular play about the murder of the last Sassanian King (Pirooz's father) called the Death of Yazdgard. Put on just after the Revolution in Iran, it was not well-received by the authorities. Still it was made into a film and has been staged several times outside Iran (as recently as 2006, in fact). The play, which is compared to in significance to that of A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman, basically explores issues of invasion (on many levels) and good kingship. This article about the Darvag performance in Berkeley and San Francisco is really interesting, especially about how they had to purge the play for any references about the ancient Arab invasion, because "we didn't want to cause any misunderstandings-- especially after 9-11."

BBC Radio Program of Sassanian Empire: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20071213.shtml

And from the Berkeley Daily Planet (a blast from the past) http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=09-17-04&storyID=19668

--For Guita-jahn

Sometime around 670, the son of the last Sassanid King-- still a young boy-- arrived in the Tang capital to ask for protection against the Arab invaders who now ocuppied his country. Exhausted and covered in dust from the journey, the young prince was led into the Great Hall. It had taken him the best part of a decade to arrive; in fact, he never believed he would actually make it; imagining instead being murdered or dying from cold and exhaustion in the great mountains and deserts through which he had passed on his way East. Somehow, though, he had made it, and arriving at dusk, just before the gates of the great city were secured shut for the night, a regiment of guards from the Chinese Emperor's Palace were there to escort him through the city.

The City. When he was a child, his father had told him much about the great capital to the East-- larger and richer than even Rome or Byzantium. Rome, of course, had been sacked two centuries before, and Byzantium was itself in decline. And then there was his empire-- it still brought tears to his eyes just thinking of it. The Sassanid Empire had been the greatest empire on earth-- rivaled only by Byzantium to the West and China to the East, but it now lay in ruins. His family all dead, his heritage scattered like the sands of the desert blown here and there in the wind. Gone forever.

When the Arabs had invaded, he and his family-- along with a great entourage of supporters-- had fled eastward. Born in 226 a.d. the ancient Persian Sassanid Empire had stretched from the Levant and Constantinople in the West to the Indian subcontinent in the East and had encompassed all of present-day Iraq, Armenia and Afghanistan; as well as much of Turkey, Syria, Arabia and Pakistan. These lands-- as well as the Persian colonies in Central Asia-- were all part of the Persian sphere of influence; whose emperors were held as equals by both the Roman emperors and the Chinese emperors.

For 400 years, they had been called Shahanshah-- or, the "King of Kings." And, theirs was the last great Persian empire prior to the invasion of the Arabs and the influx of Islam. Zoorastrians by religion, it was a Kingdom ruled by a federation of aristocratic families whose splendid cultural achievements would be taken up by their Arab conquerers with gusto. In fact, much of what later came to be known as Islamic culture-- from calligraphy and poetry to garden design and architecture-- was borrowed largely from the Sassanian empire.

When the Arab conquerers stormed the Persian capital of Ctesiphon in 637, such were their numbers that his Father's only choice had been to flee. From Ctesiphon, located on the Tigris, just a bit downstream from Baghdad (founded about 150 years later), on horseback they had raced East in the hope of gathering support for their cause. None of the great families, however, had agreed to help them mount an army to oust the Arab invaders, and by the time they had reached Merv, on the Eastern edge of their empire, they were spent.

It was there that the greatest tragedy of all happened. His Father had been murdered-- right in front of his own eyes. And what had been perhaps the greatest blow of all was that he had been murdered by a commoner. Robbed and murdered for his purse, the great Shahanshah, Yazdgerd III, had been killed by a miller. It was 651, and they had been in flight for some 14 years. 

So, that had been that. With their cause now dead, the aristocratic and ruling families who had followed them East decided to stay and put down roots in Merv, as well as in the nearby Persian areas of Sogdiana, Tashkent and Khotan. Our young Prince, however, would always live with a price on his head. He, therefore, required protection. He thought and thought, but there seemed nowhere to turn-- until he remembered his sister. Before he was born, she had already been married off to the great Tang Emperor to the East. And, so he had set out East--to China.

It was the heyday of the Silk Road, so he had just followed the well-worn path of other Persians before him. First into Sogdiana and then crossing the Pamirs, he had had to make it across the unending stretch of sand of the deserts of inner Asia. Skirting the southern edges of the Taklamakan Desert, first he traveled to Kashgar; then on to Yarkand, Khotan, and all the way to Dunhuang. From there, it had just been a matter of descending down off the plateau and heading East, toward the capital.   

Persian peoples dominated the entire route. The great middle men of the Silk Road, Persian communities (and most notably the Sogdians) had greeted him in every town he passed through along the way. From Merv to Changan, whenever he stopped, he had stayed in Persian inns, eaten Persian foods and had spoken in the refined Persian of the Court-- and he was, for the most part-- understood.

He would be further stunned to see of his country's influence in China proper as well. It gave him heart. Yes, theirs had been the greatest civilization of the world-- for even the Chinese thought so.

The Chinese capital, though, he had to admit, had surpassed even the Persian capital during its height. As French scholar Michel Beurdeley has noted, “the title of Middle Kingdom was richly deserved by China during the Tang dynasty,” as the high civilization and celebrated cosmopolitanism of the Tang dynasty truly had no precedent anywhere on earth prior to that time-- not even Byzantium saw such a rich display of goods and peoples.

While the Tang capital of Changan was the largest, most international city in the world of the time, the Second Capital of Loyang was no less impressive. Both cities were inhabited by traders, entertainers and religious teachers and students from places as far-flung as Syria, Oman, Iran, Khotan, Sogdiana, Turkestan, Tibet, India, Champa, Funan, Korea, and Japan, just to name a few. There were Mosques, Jewish, Manichean and Zoroastrian temples, Nestorian churches, as well as Buddhist monasteries of all sects, some of which were great centers of scholarship. Most surprising (considering the inward turn China would take in the coming centuries) was how stunningly exotic and open the city was.

It was a city where fine ladies adorned their cheeks with crimson laq from Vietnam and anointed their bodies with perfumed oils of Cambodia; where aristocrats kept falcons from Korea, parrots from the jungles of Java and lapdogs from Samarkand. Sleeping in Turkish felt tents was the latest fashion as were the dance moves from Sogdiana. And, the music. The capital saw glorious performances by dancers from Central Asia and India showing dances of such beauty that the famed Tang poets of the time composed poem after poem about them. Grape wine had also come into fashion and was served in glass ewers from Persia. There were lychees from Canton and those oh-so famous peaches of Samarkand.

Of all the foreign fashions, the influence of Iran was without a doubt most significant of all. During the Tang, anything Persian-- from music and dancing, to clothes, hairstyles and the game of Polo-- enjoyed huge popularity at Court and among the aristocracy-- indeed, they were considered to be the very height of fashion. This surprising turn in history came about as part of the Tang Dynasty’s political and military incursions further and further West, into Central Asia (to the land of their prized “blood sweating” stallions and jade) as well as into the Middle East (where beautiful glass and the mineral cobalt was secured).

It was the Iranian Sogdian peoples who held the greatest influence. They were the great merchants, traders and entertainers of the legendary silk road. Known in Chinese as hu jen 胡人, their cultural influence among the Chinese aristocrats was remarkable. It is written in the Tang histories that “the food of the aristocrats was hu food, their music hu music, and their women clothed in the most exotic hu robes that money could buy.” Indeed, in the words of one Japanese scholar, the Tang capital of Chang-an was “painted entirely in the colors of hu.”      

And so our Persian Prince was pleasantly surprised. Such was the Chinese Emperor's great appreciation of the accomplishments of the Persian civilization that upon their first meeting they declared themselves brothers. Following the Palace Guards down long and wide halls, the Prince could just make out the sound of music. He had heard the Emperor had musical skills that rivaled that of professional musicians and the young Prince thought he could hear a drum and loud clappers. He seemed to be walking through a cloud of perfume as incense smoke billowed out of braziers set in the corners of all the rooms. Truly, it smelled of paradise.

Born and raised the song of a King, the Prince knew not to make eye-contact with the Son of Heaven, and instead fell to his knees. The great Emperor rose to his feet and stepping off his dais, he bent down to bid the young Prince to his feet.

"You've come a long way. Have no more fears. For you are my brother and this is your new home."

With tears in his eyes, Pirooz knelt again and thanked the great Emperor. Prince Pirooz was to spend the rest of his days within China. He is said to have learned Kung Fu and then went on to become a general in the army. Sent West to fight their mutual enemies the Arabs, the Persian Prince used his remaining money and resources to make whatever trouble he could. He had probably given up all hope of re-taking his empire-- still it must have felt good to win a battle or two. The Tang chronicles state that when the Chinese emperor died, Pirooz and his son Narseh were allowed to be stationed along the western border garrisons by the new Chinese emperor. Immediately, they started clashes against the Umayyad Arabs. Soliciting the aid of Turkish tribes, Prince Pirooz spent the rest of his days fighting the Arabs along China's Western corridor. 

He died around 700 in the West, still fighting the Arabs wherever he could. His son-- who also begame a respected general in the Chinese army, wrote this in his diary (from Frank Chang's article which is pretty much the only thing around online about Prince Pirooz):

Pirooz requested only a simple burial and the Chinese emperor approved. The entire exiled court was in attendance along with the Chinese emperor. The Chinese emperor held Pirooz's shaking hands. Pirooz looked west and said: "I have done what I could for my homeland (Persia) and I have no regrets." Then, he looked east and said: "I am grateful to China, my new homeland." Then he looked at his immediate family and all the Persians in attendance and said: "Contribute your talents and devote it to the emperor. We are no longer Persians. We are now Chinese." Then, he died peacefully. A beautiful horse was made to gallop around his coffin 33 times before burial, because this was the number of military victories he had during his lifetime. Pirooz was a great Chinese general and great Persian prince devoted and loyal to his people.

And so our Prince died in one of the most remote regions on earth; fighting his enemies till the very end. He was buried facing West.

**

One of Iran's great contemporary playwrights, Bahram Beyzaie, wrote a very popular play about the murder of the last Sassanian King (Pirooz's father) called the Death of Yazdgard. Put on just after the Revolution in Iran, it was not well-received by the authorities. Still it was made into a film and has been staged several times outside Iran (as recently as 2006, in fact). The play, which is compared to in significance to that of A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman, basically explores issues of invasion (on many levels) and good kingship. This article about the Darvag performance in Berkeley and San Francisco is really interesting, especially about how they had to purge the play for any references about the ancient Arab invasion, because "we didn't want to cause any misunderstandings-- especially after 9-11."

BBC Radio Program of Sassanian Empire: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20071213.shtml

And from the Berkeley Daily Planet (a blast from the past) http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=09-17-04&storyID=19668

NHK Silkroad (part 1) 天馬行空

 

  

The power of a kingdom lies with its horses

Who would have known there were kofun (3rd-7th century megalithic tombs) in Tochigi? I had always associated these ancient tumuli with the old capitals of Nara and Kyoto.

T was as surprised as I was when Makoto invited us to go and take a look. We stopped for lunch at organic wonder, Howdy & Cafe. One has to have lunch before setting out to visit a tomb after all!

I told Makoto that I was watching the classic NHK Silk road documentary, borrowed from the local library. His eyes lit up, "The one with music by Kitaro?" We are talking about "the" video! Said to have started the "silk road craze" in Japan, it doesn't hurt that Japan is also home to some of the most important relics from the Silk Road in existence.

I would say that Japan has been in its "silk road boom" (their expression not mine!) for the entire 18 years I have been here-- and sure enough, it all started with the production of this amazing video series.

Production began in 1979. The first volume was a joint-production between NHK and China's CCTV. Setting out from what is usually said to be the "terminus" of the Silk Road, Xian, the team heads West. Not using public transportation, their caravan of range rovers and a bus aims to get as close to the original routes as possible.

Yes, they go off-road.

Even 30 years ago, NHK is NHK. It is public television at its best. Of course, TV has come a long way in 30 years. Instead of digital high definition, the program has a narrator who wears this very unfortunate white "jungle" hat (like the helmets Japanese wore during WWII). Carrying a portable box-like audio recorder with microphone, he is from a different time and space!

China too must have changed a lot. In the filming, you see rural images that could have been taken a 1000 years ago. And, even in Xian, everyone is in gray Mao jackets and red caps, bicycles everywhere. Party officials ride through the crowded streets like hornets in their motorcycle side-cars. Its like those communist-era ballets that you see-- you can hardly believe your eyes.

And, of course, it's the tail end of the 70's, so you get the obligatory psychedelic shots of 12 arm goddesses moving to the rhythm of Kitaro's new age synthesizer.

That said, still, it was remarkable for its time. Not only was it one of the world's only joint TV productions with communist China, but it marked the first time in history that a foreign camera crew was allowed to film along the Silk Road-- within what has long been a closed country.

The team, departing from Xian to the narration of a poem by a Tang dynasty poet, immediately headed west ("west of the River") toward the famous Hexi Corridor. For this first stage, they remain east of the famed Jade Gate (which marked the historical end of China proper). Because they are East of the Gate, the lands they pass through the Corridor have long been considered part of China-- though they were controlled by Tibet off-and-on during Tang times and then by the Xixia during Song times (this is the time period of Inoue's Dunhuang of my recent post).

Following the Yellow River, if you look at a map you notice two things.

First, this 1000 kilometer long stretch of land is sandwiched in between towering mountains to the south and the Gobi desert to the north. There is only one way to go-- and that is straight ahead, as the path barely skirts the edges of the Gobi, hemmed in by the mountains. The second point is that control of this long and thin corridor is de facto control of trade to and from China. Therefore, it has always been of great strategic importance as there really was no other way in or out of the Empire.

The first real settelment they arrive at is the city of Lanzhou. It is truly another world: as here we have arrived in the Land of ancient Chinese garrisons, troublesome nomadic tribes and the Silk Road. There are four main garrison cities located along the Hexi Corridor. They are the gate city of Lanzhou, then moving west is Wuwei, Zhangye and finally Dunhuang.  Just before reaching Dunhuang, in fact, on the Lanzhou-Urumqi railway line is the westernmost remaining segment of the Great Wall of China. To think that Wall reached this far West-- well, it boggles my mind. But then much boggles the mind along this road!

There isn't much to see at Lanzhou, so the team quickly pushes off. Their next stop is the garrison town of Wuwei, which was established as such during the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) when the Chinese were finally able to oust the troublesome Xiongnu (aka, "the Huns") from the area. In honor of the accomplishment, they named the new town, "Wuwei," (武威) which means military prowess.

The Chinese had pushed into the area during the Han and it was in a Han dynasty tomb just outside of the town of Wuwei that the famous bronze Galloping Horse was dug up. It is an extremely important piece of Han sculpture that the Chinese Tourism Agency uses as their official logo (why I am not exactly sure). With all four legs in the air and its tail aloft as well, the great power of the animal as it soars is made apparent by the swallow that is shown just under its foot. The glorious horse has flown, surpassing even the flying swallows in the air.

A heavenly horse soars through the sky 天馬行空

Not coincidentally, horses play an extremely important role in the unfolding story of the Silk Road. At Dunhuang the Silk Road-- in order to avoid the desert of death-- splits into two roads: the Southern and Northern routes. The two routes then come together again at the town of Khotan. This is quite near the legendary area of the blood-sweating horses of Ferghana. Located on the southern banks of the Syr Darya (in Oxiana), Ferghana was in all probability populated by the descendants of Alexander the Great's Greek colonists. In this lush valley surrounded by the towering Pamirs , came the heavenly horses 天馬 which were celebrated for a thousand years in China.

China's many amazing accomplihsments are really all the more amazing when one consideres how early in history they were achieved. From astonishingly ancient times, China had become what was a huge agricultural country with a highly sophisticated social structure.  During different times in the country's history, from Beijing stretching 2000 miles to the west (as well as along their western flank), China had had to contend with nomadic (and semi-nomadic) peoples who made up for their lack of sedentary culture with great military might. This military might was achieved through outstanding horsemanship and weaponry. From the Khitans to the Tanguts, from the Mongols to the Manchus, these people to the north were expert horsemen and archers. They were the reason, after all, why the Great Wall had been built and re-built for centuries. 

So because of this situation, whether the Chinese liked it or not, their future was bound up in their own ability to fight on horseback. Training a calvary and keeping horses became top priority, and this was especially so during Tang times.

So  magnificent, they were believed to have been descended from dragons, the horses of Ferghana were known as "celestial horses," horses of the air" and as "blood-sweating stallions." Both China and Persia vied for them and both countries at all costs sought to keep the supply lines open to their source in Central Asia.

Horses had been popular among emperors and aristocrats at least since Han times. It was the famed Han dynasty diplomat Zhang Qian (who-- such was his steadfast loyalty to his country-- really puts all future diplomats to shame!) who brought back tales of the horses of the heavenly mountain area of Ferghana. Dispatched by the Han Emperor in the 2nd century BC, his task was to travel west to find out more about the peoples of Central Asia.

 At first, he didn't get very far at all as he was detained by the dreaded Xiongnu for 10 years! Finally managing to escape, his next stop was Ferghana. Known in Chinese as Duyuan (or the great Yuan people), the name is thought to come from he word, "yona" which was the word used to designate the Greek colonists of the area of the time. Official Zhang describes the people of Ferghana as being civilized and peaceful like the Parthians and Bactrians.

 From Han times onward, the desire for these heavenly horses continued unabated, but it was during Tang times that the horse craze really took off in China. Tang art is known for its glorious silver metalwork and ebullient three color ceramics. It is also known for its horse paintings and sculpture.  Indeed, during the middle Tang, so popular had horseback riding and polo become that women for the first time in Chinese history left their veils and robes behind in favor of men's trousers and low cut tops. The most popular hairstyle of the day was a swept-to-the-side hairdo known as a "thrown from the horse bun." Riding and polo was the aristocratic pastime par excellence during the Tang when women rode like men.

 The art of calvary warfare required the best horses that money and silk could buy, and the horses of Ferghana became a great symbol of power-- both military power and the power of appropriate foreign policy. They also came to be associated with imperial power itself. The horse shown in the ink painting at the top of this post remains my all-time favorite Tang horse painting-- and miraculously it is now housed at the Met in New York. "Night Shining White" was the name of Emperor Xuanzang's favorite steed. The characters for his name--照夜白 means "illuminating the night white"-- in reference to the animal's brilliant lunar-white coat. He was the emperor's favorite steed and in art stood in for the emperor himself. Is he a still half-wild creature or is he dancing like some of the emperor's famed "dancing stallions"? That the picture has been be lovingly passed down for a millennium years is attested to be the colophons and seals on the scroll which span a thousand years of Chinese history. 

The NHK documentary takes great pains to ensure that we keep in mind that this part of the silk road is as much about horses as it is about silk. And, not to state the obvious, but by Tang times, Chinese-style foreign policy can already be seen. Having colonies on the other side of the world never interested the Chinese. Their focus has always been on the lands which border their realm. And the further from thhe Centre, the less interested China became.

Keeping the North and West "pacified" and maintaining relations with important foreigner powers for the sole purpose of trade comprised the focus of Chinese-style foreign policy-- this mainly continues right down to today. This is a relationship which defines Central Asia and perhaps even ancient Persia as well. The great Russian Orientalist V.V. Bartold described as a symbiotic relation, calling it the "Steppe and the sown." Mutually independent, the steppe peoples and the sedentary civilizations have always had a very uneasy relationship. For 3000 years in fact, this uneasy balnce of power continued, with the steppe people posing a constant threat, China waivered between using trade and war to deal with them. And, horses were absolutely essential to this.

Fortified cities and armed fortresses were also bult the entire length of the country along China's northern border. If military help was required, great fires were lit sending huge smoke into the air which could be seen from the next lookout. In what had to be the world's most magnificent smoke relay signal in history, NHK says that a signal set in Dunhuang would reach the capital some 2000 kilometers away in half a day!

Anyway, from Wuwei, our team hit the road again. On the dusty and desolate road that skirts the Gobi, the announcer says, it's impossible to really believe they will come upon another town. And, yet, for a thousand years or more, travelers traveled along the Hexi Corridor in camel caravans. Departing from one oasis at dawn, they would walk half a day before reaching the next oasis that afternoon. It was slow going; the narrator says they averaged 40 kilometers a day. 

There next stop would be the city of Zhangye. Known as Ganzhou in ancient times (this is the Kanji NHK uses which throws me off), Marco Polo stayed here for a year. In my post Pearls of the Taklamakan, I talk about at great length the Buddhist kingdoms of East Central Asia. For now, I will just reiterate what Susan Whitfield says in her Life Along the Silk road, that people tend to be thrown off by modern day Western China and Eastern Central Asia.

Nowadays, not only is the entire Central Asia region-- from the former Turkestan to Kashmir and on to Uighur country-- almost completely Muslim, but the people themselves are altogether different as well.  Where now there are Turkic and Persian derived Muslims, there once existed here great Buddhist Kingdoms composed of Indo-Europeans. 

Zangye was one of these great ancient Kingdoms. And as if Marco Polo's visit wasn't enough, Ganzhou has a Sleeping Buddha statue, dating from 596 AD(!) that is not only larger than the glorious Wat Po, but it is one of the largest sleeping Buddha statues on earth!

And speaking of the famous Venetian merchant, People still fight over whether Marco Polo even made it as far as China. However, Popo himself wrote that he stayed in Ganzhou for a year with his uncle on "business that is not worth mention." Hmmm.... The video showed a statue of Polo which stands today in the center of the modern town.

Zhangye is the largest oasis of the Hexi Corridor. Driving into town the road is lined with tall poplar trees. It reminds me of the town T lived in in Lesotho. You would drive into Mafeteng from the lunarscape of the high mountains of this Kingdom in the Clouds, and approaching the town, the road was lined on both side by tall poplar trees. Standing in two perfectly straight lines on either side of the perfectly straight road, the trees would wave gently in the wind. That is the typical oasis look-- a splash of green along the road as you approach.

Zhangye is dominated by its huge bell and drum tower (which dates from the Ming dynasty). As the camera does a closeup on the structure, the narrator mentions that 7th century documents from the town record that during the early Tang 27 different nationalities had permanent trading missions set up in the town-- not bad for the days before trains and airplanes, I'd say. In 609, the Sui Emperor himself traveled here to attend a grand trade fair that took place. Marco Polo waiting for permission from the Great Khan to travel further East, mentioned that the cosmopolitan town was full of temples and even had three Nestorian Churches which were "quite fine." And, speaking of the Great Khan, the temple of the Great Buddha is reportedly said to be the birthplace of Kublai Khan himself.

 The video ends at the Western-most point of the Wall. Hundreds of soldiers were stationed here to defend "China" during  Ming times. The Wall. It is said that rather than breaching the wall, Genghis Khan had just bribed his way in.

A wall is only as good as the soldiers who protect it after all explains our narrator, still in his unfortunate hat. From this point, the road leads to Dunhuang...

**

Of Zhang Qian's extraordinary 2nd century BC mission, of 100 men dispatched only 2 made it back to the capital alive. French scholar Luce Boulnois takes time to describe the amazing manner in which-- Zhang Qian kept his imperial insignia safe during the entire course of his travels. Attached to a bamboo pole 2 meters high were three great tufts of tak's tail-- which was considered an emblem of power throughout Asia from very ancient times. Can you imagine? For what had to be 8000 or so kilometers roundtrip, he managed to keep a 2 meter tall bamboo standard safe from harm....

 In the late 90s the China Institute in New York put on yet another unforgettable show. This one called Power and Virtue: The Horse in Chinese Art. The catalog remains one of two important books on the subject (You can see Shining White on the cover). You would be amazed at how many important Chinese works of art in the horse genre are kept in US museums. Below is a review of the exhibition that I thought worth giving offering the link to as well. It's here and is certainly worth reading. The Painting just above is by famed modern painter Xu Beihong.