13Story

23 June 2010

Silk Route II

Routes of Exchange

* The Roots of Silk Road     * The Silk Road and the Nomads     * The Silk Road and China    * Inscriptions    * Diplomatic documents    * Maps    * Dunhuang along the Silk Road     * Early Christian communities in Asia: Nestorianism

 

The Silk Road and the Nomads The Xiongnu, ancestors of the later Mongolians, formed a constant threat to the Chinese from their basis in the Gobi desert. These feared archers on horseback conducted raids on the northern Chinese borders with alarming regularity. Silk and grain was their booty and was used elsewhere as a medium of exchange for metal weapons and bronze vessels. In this way they formed a link in the already existing trade network. When the construction of the Great Wall could not stop them, Emperor Han Wudi (141-87 BCE) made a number of attempts to subjugate them. He sent his ambassador Zhang Qian to unite other nomadic tribes, like the Yuezhi and the Wusan, in an alliance against the Xiongnu. But this tactic met with little success and Zhang Qian was imprisoned twice for long periods of time. After thirteen years of unfinished business he returned to China. But he did bring with him reports of “celestial horses” from the Ferghana Valley, and contact with the Roman Empire in Bactria (Afghanistan), where Chinese silk was used as common currency. When Emperor Han Wudi finally drove the Xiongnu from the Gansu Corridor in 121 BCE, the thriving commercial oases of the Taklamakan Desert came under Chinese authority as protectorates and agricultural colonies. The resistance of the nomads was for the moment broken, and the trade roads fell into the hands of the great empires: China, the Kushans, Persia and Rome. What had functioned for thousands of years, albeit in a fragmented form, became an international network of trade routes in the 2nd century BCE. In 1877, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term “Silk Route” to describe the phenomenon.

  

 

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