In the lost civilizations of the Silk Road
THE SILK ROAD. Trade, travel, war and faith. Susan Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams, editors. 400pp. British Library. £45 (paperback,£25). 0 712 34858 1.
For nearly 2,000 years, from the fourth century bc to the fourteenth century ad, Dunhuang was one of the great desert cities of the eastern Silk Road, both sustained by and sustaining the first worldwide trading network. The name Dunhuang means "blazing beacon" and it was a well- garrisoned and wealthy oasis at the meeting point between two immense deserts, the Gobi and the Taklamakan -the north-western gateway in and out of China. Westward, on trails running north and south of the feared Taklamakan and over high mountain passes into Central Asia, thick-haired Bactrian camels carried silk, ceramics, paper, even gunpowder. Eastward, caravans from the Mediterranean took Roman and then Persian glass, cotton, spices, gemstones and furs, the legendary blood-sweating horses of Central Asia's Ferghana Valley and, above all, jade the luminous nephrite carved since the Neolithic period and prized, throughout China's history, beyond all other riches.
Travellers arriving in Dunhuang had just come through the deadliest stretch of the Silk Road, a wilderness of barren, razor-edged mountain escarpments and the treacherous sliding sands of hundred-foot dunes. Sandstorms could kill, winters were glacial, and night travel was the only way to survive the deadly summer heat.
Yet commerce thrived. Not only goods made the trip. Ideas and fashions, inventions and beliefs travelled these routes, carried by pilgrims, priests, scholars and entertainers as well as armies.
The passage of Buddhism from northern India and Afghanistan to China is marked by hundreds of stupas, statues and painted caves. But only a dozen miles from Dunhuang stood the most secret and dramatic of the religious sites. The cave temples of Mogao came suddenly upon the ancient traveller, so abruptly that at night a weary man could easily have fallen over the mile-long cliff from which they had been hollowed. Along the river-washed gorge below were the entrances to hundreds of luminously painted, incense-wafted caves, spreading the benediction of Buddha in all his multiple manifestations. The first cave was hollowed out, plastered and painted in ad 336 following a monk's vision of the Buddha as a thousand points of light (possibly the effect of light playing on the fool's gold scattered over the nearby Sanwei mountain). The sanctuary was to develop over the next thousand years into an astonishing picture gallery.
Nearly 500 of the great honeycomb of caves burrowed out of the cliff's soft rock were painted with murals of extraordinary beauty and sophistication, and embellished, particularly during the Tang dynasty, with exquisite clay sculptures. Through these, it is possible today to track the transformation of the austere, essentially abstract philosophy of Buddhism, as it was absorbed by Tibetan and Chinese cultures, into a religion rich in fable, figurative iconography and tutelary deities. The paintings, depicting the rhythms of daily, monastic, courtly and military life in detail that misses nothing from the precise curve of an ancient lute to the design of a Tang perambulator, constitute a pictorial encyclopedia of the influences coursing through the eastern Silk Road.
A number of historical flukes was also to make Mogao the repository, for posterity, of the world's "largest and earliest paper archive and only Buddhist library of its time", a trove of more than 50,000 manuscripts and paintings sealed into a cave, forgotten and rediscovered only in 1900. The documents were hidden in the eleventh century -almost certainly from invaders, for Dunhuang lay at the north-western rim of settled Chinese control, control that was only sporadically assured. Established as a Chinese garrison in 111 bc in the course of campaigns that saw Chinese forces defeat the formidable cavalry of the Xiongnu (Hun) empire and penetrate as far westward as the Ferghana Valley, the city was to be coveted and fought over by rivals of many nationalities -not only the armies of the Tibetan empire, which governed Dunhuang from 781 to 848, but local Khotanese, Turkic Uighurs and Tanguts -eventually falling under control of the Mongol empire of Genghis Khan (1271-1368).
