The balance between keeping China open to trade, yet safe from alien predators, was rarely maintained. To the north and west of Dunhuang, the rammed earth barriers of the outermost ramparts of the Great Wall, built more than a century before Christ by the Eastern Han Dynasty, bear witness to China's determination to secure its expanding empire against the predations of "barbarians". Yet the very name of the Yumen, the wall's Jade Gate on the desert, conjures up the wealth of an empire open to the world. Particularly during the three centuries of Tang rule that began in 618, those same "barbarians" enriched the most splendidly and assertively Chinese dynasty in history and strongly influenced its society, its aesthetics and its pleasures.
the great mass of historical evidence is Chinese, and Chinese sources and objects bulk large in the catalogue under review, the insistent emphasis of The Silk Road: Trade, travel, war and faith is on these "barbarians", the non Chinese denizens of the eastern Silk Road. Compiled for the British Library's recent Silk Road exhibition, this unconventional and satisfyingly subversive collection of essays does much to redress the comparative neglect of the desert civilizations' contributions to the cultural as well as commercial history of the Silk Road. As maritime trade supplanted East-West land routes, those cultures declined into obscurity. For centuries, their history is all but buried. Partly because the "myth" of the Silk Road was established when next to nothing was known about them, partly because "nomads" were too easily assumed to be culturally insignificant, Europeans and Chinese alike have long tended to see the great caravan trail between East and West as a link running across wastes as barren of interest as they were hazardous.
As Susan Whitfield, the curator at the British Library responsible both for the book and exhibition, observes in her introductory essay, "the concept of a road can be a distraction, concentrating attention on the beginning and end at the expense of the stops en route". It could never, she points out, have been through "an ocean of emptiness" that the Silk Road merchants travelled, for "routes depend on civilizations to maintain them". Travellers, however hardy, need rest stops, inns, water -and a minimum of security against bandits. It is on these lands-in-between, their peoples and their often highly cosmopolitan societies that The Silk Road is particularly illuminating -above all, those lands lying to the east of the Persian empire, the "golden" cities of medieval Bukhara and Samarkand, and the extraordinary Greco-Buddhist civilization, a legacy of Alexander the Great, that is somewhat loosely described as Gandharan.
Far from being a remote, featureless expanse, Whitfield robustly asserts, this region was then "the centre of the world, the progenitor of many of civilization's most important inventions, and the crux of a world economy".
That may redress the balance a shade too far; but unquestionably, the city-oases of the eastern Silk Road were places of intense artistic, linguistic and religious interchange, melting pots for all the great cultures and religions of the ancient and medieval worlds, Chinese, Indian and Tibetan, Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian and Persian -and, eventually and aggressively, for the outward thrust of Islam.
The people of jade-rich Khotan, for example, had founding legends deriving from both Buddhist India and China, spoke an Indo-Iranian dialect, and used money modelled on the Attic coinage of Bactria, but inscribed in Chinese. Tapestries excavated in the Taklamakan desert some 200 miles east of Khotan depict recognizably Roman gladiators; a Buddhist temple at the eighth-century Tibetan fort of Miran at the edge of the desolate salt-lake desert of Lop Nor, where China today has its nuclear test site, contained paintings of winged angels that look just like Western cherubim. One strange decorative motif, in which three hares chase each other round a circle, with the tips of each hare's single depicted ear meeting in the circle's centre, crops up in sixth-century painted ceilings at Dunhuang, thirteenth- century floor tiles in Chester Cathedral, and places in between. A stunning sixth-century pigmented marble Sogdian funerary couch found at the edge of the Gobi shows a merchant from Samarkand with his Chinese wife, his Zoroastrian funeral rite and the Chinese funeral theme of a riderless horse under a parasol. A fragment of late Tang painting from Mogao that looks for all the world like a classic Chinese Bodhisattva turns out on closer inspection to have blue eyes -and a Maltese cross on breast and head-dress. He may be a Nestorian saint; it was adherents to the Nestorian sect who first brought Christianity to China.
These Silk Road civilizations, shifting and often short-lived, were until a century ago buried, literally as well as figuratively, in the harsh climates and forbidding topography of Central Asia. This book shows how their languages, their art, their social structures and their traditions are being rescued from obscurity. It is a story whose details are bewilderingly complex, because these are interwoven histories, racially as well as culturally. China's Northern Wei dynasty, for example, came from a group of nomadic tribes known as the Xianbi Tuoba, and another people, the Di, formed the rival fifth-century Northern Liang Dynasty. The traditional notion of a clear division between Han Chinese and nomadic desert-dweller begins to evaporate: as the compilers of this catalogue intend that it should.
In her introduction, Whitfield writes that the "primary purpose is not to showcase beautiful, striking, original paintings and artefacts", but to select those that "are charming, informative, illustrative or in some way contribute to the telling of the stories of the Silk Road". So, in many languages and scripts, some still obscure, there are documents about preserving grain, getting out of debt, outwitting a neighbour, or the best way to apologize for getting blind drunk, alongside prayers for an abducted child, poems and caricatures, and intensely spiritual Buddhist paintings.
The result is a catalogue unlike others, a tale of fragments, of the fascination of fragments and of the evocative and instructive powers of those fragments. It is built around the prodigious labours and meticulous record-keeping of a single, and singular, scholar-explorer, to whom it is in many senses a belated official tribute and who, at a time when archaeology still had much in common with fortune-hunting, left no ancient desert rubbish dump unturned or latrine pit unexamined, and no object spurned. Marcus Aurelius, later Sir Aurel, Stein wrote this of the unregarded detritus of vanished lives, unearthed in the course of four great expeditions involving treks, of some 25,000 miles in all, across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth:
