Shadow of the Silk Road Read online

  So he was planning to make the move most coveted now: out of administration and into business. He had grown up in the new China of Deng Xiaoping, the land where riches were glorious, an arena of accelerating mobility.

  But I felt an amazed misgiving for him. I said: ‘Do you know anything about Brazil?’

  ‘Brazil is in South America. It has some economic problems. Many people have no job. But some economies are better than here in China, some companies. I’ll make contacts in these businesses…’–he began planting airy seeds again–‘touch…touch…touch! I’ll find a company with big production. Maybe they are making this’–he picks up a tinny bell from his table. ‘So I’ll send one of these to friends in China who’ll find a company to make them cheaper. After that we sell them back to the Brazil company. This, this!’ He taps the bell, which doesn’t work. Then he advances down other avenues, to other schemes. And slowly, as he juggles with a ferment of percentages and notional deals, my fear for him dissipates. I start, with dim foreboding, to pity the Brazilians. I imagine Huang conquering the world. Under his squat hands the tinny bell gets substituted by a porcelain saucer, which is joined by a vinegar-pot. They move across the table and rehabilitate themselves in another security or investment portfolio (I’ve lost the thread). He is talking like a machine-gun. His mind has a tough, calculating acumen. His English floods into Mandarin. His eyes never leave my face. They glitter with an innocent cunning. ‘…The company puts its own label on it, of course–but same quality! Then…’

  After that I understood nothing he said, in either language, but became lost in a narcoleptic mist of figures, and only emerged after seeming hours to hear: ‘But I won’t stay in Brazil, because this country not so good economy. I’ll go to a better country…’

  Xian was once the greatest city in the world. For three centuries after AD 618, under the royal name Changan, ‘Eternal Peace’, it incarnated the zenith and decline of the peerless Tang dynasty. For twenty-two miles its ramparts enclosed nearly two million inhabitants, and immured them again in a nest of inner walls and gates, as ward after ward piled up around a vast chessboard of avenues. The nine-mile walls of today’s Xian trace merely those of Changan’s inner city. On one side it sucked in tribute by canals stretching to the South China Sea; on the other it stood as a lodestar at the eastern end of the Silk Road, where the Tang empire stretched to the Pamirs.

  Its aristocracy survive in the damp murals of their tombs pockmarking the Wei valley. Along the underground walls their women walk in décolleté bodices and silk gowns, chatting together or playing with pet cicadas. Fabulous birds flutter for a moment out of the plaster. Beneath their chignons, piled up like crowns and cats’ ears, the faces are dimpled by tiny mouths and lizards’ eyes. They look like exquisite children. Their men, meanwhile, are playing polo, a game imported from Persia, in a charge of weightless cavalry. Under these dim vaults their lives are reinvented in a vacuum–their colours faded to rust and grey–yet are sweetly precise. When they follow the chase, their hunting leopards perch on saddles behind them, with a falcon or two, while a pair of provision-laden camels lumbers contemptuously behind.

  They inhabited a city of fabled refinement and excess, whose street plan mirrored an imagined cosmic order. In spring its boulevards drowned in a snowstorm of apricot and peach blossom, with women sailing through the air on swings. These were the people, connoisseurs of the peony and the courtesan, who lifted to their lips the amber wine-cups which now rest in the city museum. Its cabinets still shine with their vanity: gold hair-pins, petal-shaped mirrors, silver censers for the wardrobe.

  But beneath this artifice, of course, a power was throbbing: the power of trade. In the Western Market where the Silk Road came to rest, two hundred guilds of merchants worked. Their reach was immense. They embraced almost every people between Arabia and Japan: Persians, Turks and central Asian Sogdians especially, Indians, Bactrians, Jews, Syrians. There were times when whole echelons of the Tang court–including its elite bodyguard–were foreign. The moneylenders–sometimes so extortionate that people pledged their slaves and sacred relics–were Uighurs from the west. Along the Silk Road too came the music and dance of Turkestan–a fearsome, whirling flamenco was the rage for years–along with acrobats, jugglers and trapeze artists; and in the inns near the Gate of Spring Brightness the fair girls of Central Asia sang to flutes and befuddled the poets with their green eyes.

  Although the imperial supervision of foreign merchants stayed rigid and finicky, a new tolerance was in the air. The silks and ceramics of the time show winged horses and peacocks–the decorative motifs of Persia–flying alongside Chinese dragons; and no burial was complete without its attendant figurines of roaring camels led by a gnomish barbarian in a Phrygian cap. The classier brothels gave puppet shows satirising big-nosed people in peaked bonnets. Fashion followed suit. The enveloping mantle of the palace ladies slid away, and by the early eighth century women were to be seen riding like steppeland men in boots and Turkic caps, even bare-headed.

  And deeper attachments were at work. For two centuries the capital reverberated with the gongs of Buddhist temples and monasteries. In 645 the pilgrim-monk Xuanzang returned from India laden with more than six hundred scriptures, settling to translate them in a pagoda that still stands, and the whole city massed to greet him. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manicheism–all were accepted with benign curiosity, while the indigenous faiths of China–Taoism and Confucianism–bided their time.

  But by the tenth century this city of complicated glory lay in ruins. The willows binding its canal banks had been cut down for barricades, the beams and pillars of its mansions lashed together into rafts, on which its people floated away to greater safety in the east.

  Somewhere in the northern suburbs the imperial palace of Changan is turning to dust. I cannot find it. The people living in the district are recent immigrants, and poor. It is hard to ask among their hovels for the Palace of Great Light. In any case, they do not know.

  Only through a Tang historian Hu Ji–friend of a friend–do the gates of a forbidden compound clank open, and we enter a building site ringed far away by smoking suburbs. It is a scarred hillside. On one hand it descends to broken-down cottages and workshops. On the other I look up and see with chill astonishment the huge, sepulchral terraces glimmering in blue-white stone. The palace foundations have just been restored.

  Hu Ji is slight and greying. He carries an old canvas shopping bag, and seems more fragile than his years. A sharp wind is cutting across the terraces. He has come with his twenty-eight-year-old daughter Mingzhao, who looks like porcelain, like him. We are alone. The last time he was here, he says, the foundations were a heap of rubble. And now this. ‘It is strange.’ I cannot tell what he is thinking.

  For a long time we climb over this perfect, sterile geometry. Beneath us the city moans invisibly through smog: the drumming of a train, faint cries. Sometimes his daughter takes his arm, as if comforting him for something. I try to imagine the imperial Son of Heaven conducting state affairs from this gashed hillside, gazing down on the ocean of his prostrate officials or the passage of a military parade. Viewed from below, wrote chroniclers, the palace seemed to float in clouds. But now the great ramp of platforms, shorn of all structures, all colour, makes a cold, Aztec symmetry against the hill.

  ‘Look…here is some of the old stone…and here.’ The professor tugs back some plastic sheets to show a patch of wall, the socket for a pillar. They lie isolated in the waxy sheen of reconstruction. ‘You see how vast it was. There’s a Tang-era palace in Japan, but you could fit it into one wing of this…’ His pride sounds sombre in the bleakness. ‘The first time I came here, nearly forty years ago, this place was almost out in countryside, and people were carting away its stone for their houses…’ He shivers in the wind.

  ‘Why were you here?’

  But I think I know. Nearly forty years ago, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards had rampaged all through the country
.

  He says tightly: ‘We travelled free by train everywhere that summer. We were happy for a moment.’ At that time the pillaging of the Tang palace had made perfect sense: the destruction of the feudal past by the working masses.

  But Hu had come because he loved history…

  He belonged to that lost generation who were banished to the countryside after the chaos grew too great. Many Red Guards returned years later with their faith annihilated, their schooldays wasted, to a world which was forgetting them. Some lived with the memory of unspeakable things. Ageing towards its sixties now, this cynical generation makes a black hole in China’s heart. Yet Hu Ji, I sense, has escaped.

  As we mount the Linde hall, the pleasure palace of nineteen successive Tang emperors, his daughter falls back beside me. She is pretty and delicate, with child’s hands. Her father is tracing where the columns of the banqueting chamber have left their circles in the flower-speckled earth. ‘In the Cultural Revolution he was sent into the mines,’ she says. ‘He was there eleven years. He had silicosis in his lungs long afterwards. But he kept up his studies even there. I’ve seen his old notebooks, covered in Maoist slogans.’ Her father is stooping curiously over a stone-lined basin: a solitary detail in the ruined earth. ‘But what he most remembers,’ she says, ‘is his old tutor. This man committed suicide just before the Revolution, knowing what was coming. My father feels a great debt to him, and great sadness.’

  Hu Ji has stood up among the ghosts of Tang banqueteers. ‘Imagine here,’ he says, ‘the music of the emperors!’ We gaze over the mounds, the faltering lines of brick. ‘The emperor Xuanzong had an orchestra and a dance troupe of thirty thousand!’

  This ruler, he says, changed their musical instrumentation for ever, to play the Western music which the Chinese loved. Its flutes and harps still sound on their tomb walls. He enjoys these transmutations, as I do: how the harp travelled east from Central Asia or the flute went west; or how the horsehead fiddle–created in legend by a Mongolian prince to speak his sorrow to his dying horse–moved down the Silk Road to become the ancestor of strings everywhere, even the European violin.

  Hu Ji is now lamenting Xuanzong, the emperor of China’s misfortune. He ruled for forty years or more, but his generals were catastrophically defeated by the Arabs. In an episode beloved of poets, says the professor, the concubine he adored was executed by the army; and civil war weakened his dynasty for ever. Hu Ji speaks with whispering fastidiousness. I cannot imagine him a Red Guard. But some broken ideal, perhaps, has healed in the rational glow of the Tang.

  In the vanished banqueting hall he is smiling. ‘The emperor had four hundred beautiful horses! He taught them to dance…’

  The Silk Road started at the western gate of old Changan. The Xian municipality commissioned a train of camels in commemoration, sculpted in red sandstone, twice life size. But the gate’s site had already been engulfed by a supermarket, splashed with advertisements for credit cards. So the camels occupy a traffic island nearby.

  In Tang times nobody spoke of the Silk Road. It was a nineteenth-century term, coined by the German geographer Friedrich von Richthofen, and it was not a single road at all, but a shifting fretwork of arteries and veins, laid to the Mediterranean. Historians claim its inception for the second century BC, but the traffic started long before accounts of it were written. Chinese silk from 1500 BC has turned up in tombs in north Afghanistan, and strands were discovered twisted into the hair of a tenth-century BC Egyptian mummy. Four centuries later, silk found its way into a princely grave of Iron Age Germany, and appears enframed–a panel of sudden radiance–in the horse-blanket of a Scythian chief, exacted as tribute or traded for furs twenty-four centuries ago.

  Silk did not go alone. The caravans that lumbered out of Changan–sometimes a thousand camels strong–went laden with iron and bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and those returning from the west carried artefacts in glass, gold and silver, Indian spices and gems, woollen and linen fabrics, sometimes slaves, and the startling invention of chairs. A humble but momentous exchange began in fruits and flowers. From China westward went the orange and the apricot, mulberry, peach and rhubarb, with the first roses, camellias, peonies, azaleas, chrysanthemums. Out of Persia and Central Asia, travelling the other way, the vine and the fig tree took root in China, with flax, pomegranates, jasmine, dates, olives and a horde of vegetables and herbs.

  In eras of stability, when the great Han imperium reached across central Asia towards ancient Rome, or the Mongol empire laid down its unexpected peace, the Silk Road flourished. But even in these times the same caravans never completed the whole route. No Romans strolled along the boulevards of Changan; no Chinese trader astonished the Palatine. Rather their goods interchanged in an endless, complicated relay race, growing ever costlier as they acquired the patina of rarity and farness.

  Beside the carved camels, stranded on their traffic island, Hu Ji’s daughter suddenly asks me: ‘How long is your journey?’

  In the shadow of the sculpted cameleers–central Asian Sogdians, who dominated Silk Road trade for half a millennium–any modern journey faded away. My answer–eight months–would have sounded nothing to these men. They were sometimes gone years. Sometimes for ever. Their bones scattered the sand. In glazed earthenware the Sogdians’ figures–usually crowned by dwarfish hats–look faintly comical. With their popping eyes and knob-like noses, they smack of Chinese caricature. But they grasp recalcitrant beasts, and their quaint-looking shoes are upturned only to reduce friction in the sand. Their chances of death–by bandits or sandstorm or flash-flood–were a calculated risk, a percentage in hard heads. By comparison my own chances–an Afghan mine, perhaps–only frivolously existed. That night, in the idle interval before sleep, I imagined one of these grizzled entrepreneurs.

  He: What are you going for?

  I [piously]: For understanding. To dispel fear. What did you go for?

  He: To trade in indigo and salt from Khotan. Why should your understanding dispel fear, idiot?

  I [worried]: It’s true, it may confirm it.

  He: Are you, then, afraid?

  I: I’m afraid of nothing happening, of experiencing nothing. That is what the modern traveller fears (forgive me). Emptiness. Then you hear only yourself.

  He: ‘Nothing happening’. I offered two pounds of incense to the Buddha for that. As for yourself, you’ll hear that anyway. I know a sorcerer in Bukhara, sells bronze mirrors. There’s only yourself in this world, he says. The rest is illusion. There’s just you. Nobody else. Is that why you go alone? Only pilgrims

  and madmen go alone. Which are you? [Silence.] You should take a concubine. [Tugs his beard.] Which is your country then?

  I: England…

  He: England does not exist. [Silence.] You talk of the world’s heart, but the world is not a person, idiot. No part is more meaningful than any other part. Even in Siberia, there is amber. [More kindly:] Why don’t you trade in tin? There’s value in tin…

  In a dim-lit gallery of the city’s chief museum, almost unnoticed, hangs the oldest piece of paper in the world. Its surface–a dull café au lait–is ridged and lined like a relief map, and its edges are in tatters. It was made in the reign of the emperor Wudi, about 100

  BC, from the fibre of hemp and a local nettle. Nothing is written on it. It is as if a camel had rubbed off its hide against the museum wall.

  You gaze on this wrinkled ancestor with a sense of time shaking. It would be over twelve hundred years before paper-making reached Europe. Meanwhile, in Changan, paper was being used as clothes, armour, handkerchiefs, kites, belts, money. Beautiful coloured vellums appeared (the favourite was Pure Heart Hall paper, finished in scrolls over fifty feet long). The imperial library owned two hundred thousand scrolls, catalogued by coloured ivory labels, their wrappers studded with rock crystal and their paper glossed with mica. As early as the sixth century the production of sacred texts was so common that a noted mandarin was forbidding his family to use them as lava
tory paper.

  Only after AD 751, when the Arabs routed the Chinese at the battle of Talas, did the jealously guarded craft of paper-making travel west, along with captured Chinese artisans, to Samarkand. It would not reach Europe for another three hundred years. In the hushed museum this first page looks too rough to inscribe. But by AD 100, letters written on mulberry bark were travelling the Silk Road. The archaeologist Aurel Stein, while investigating a watch-tower in the Lop desert, came upon a cache of undelivered mail, with messages in Sogdian dating back to AD 313. These are the first known inscribed paper. Their words are in carbon ink. One contains the outburst of a neglected wife (‘I’d rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!’). Another touches on the failing state of China–the sack of cities, the flight of the Emperor–and its implications for trade. But for the rest, across their fragments, the script runs neat as a company balance-sheet: ‘In Guzang there are 2,500 measures of pepper for dispatch…Kharstang owed you 20 staters of silver…He gave me the silver and I weighed it, and there were only 4.5 staters altogether. I asked…’

  In a dumpling restaurant that hangs its red lanterns near the city’s drum tower, Hu Ji and his daughter are debating something. They share the same small mouth and slim nose. She is studying the Sung dynasty, as he has studied the Tang. Sometimes she laughs, while he smiles. He is writing a book of essays–they are complex, provocative–which will expose old pieties to a new light. ‘We have these stories which go far back in our history.’ He orders up the dumplings as if they might be memories. ‘I am trying to question them, to rewrite them in a way that will put them in doubt.’