The Silk Road: A New History (19 page)

This particular list of envoys reveals the neighboring kingdoms with which the rulers of Turfan maintained diplomatic relations, but it does not identify their most important trading partner. Other coins and documents from Turfan indicate a consistent and unmistakable pattern: the Iranian world, especially the eastern Iranian world around Samarkand—not Rome—was the most important trading partner of first the independent Gaochang Kingdom and then, after the 640 conquest, Tang China.

As early as the year 300 the residents of Turfan used silver coins minted by the Sasanian Empire based in western Iran. Famed for their purity (between 85 percent and 90 percent silver), Sasanian coins are distinctive.
³²
The face of each coin shows the profile of the reigning ruler, each identifiable by his characteristic crown, and his name in Middle Persian, while the reverse shows two attendants tending a fire altar that represents the state religion of Zoroastrianism, shown in color plate 4B. The earliest Sasanian coins found anywhere in China date to the fourth century and have been found in hoards buried in the dirt ruins of Gaochang City. Many of these early coins show little wear, because they did not circulate widely.
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Confirming this impression of limited use, the fourth-century documents from Turfan record payments in bolts of cloth.

The first document that specifically mentions silver coins, a list of goods placed in the grave, dates to 543. It lists one hundred silver coins, one hundred gold coins, and 100,009,000 cubits of “climbing-to-heaven silk.”
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(A cubit measured roughly 10 feet, or 3 m.) Although this grave inventory does not specify where the silver coins were minted, Chinese coins at this time were cast from bronze, so the silver coins must have been Sasanian. The elevated amounts of textiles and coins indicate that facsimile textiles and coins were placed in the tomb, not actual goods.

The earliest certain mention of real silver coins appears in a contract dating to 584 for the rental of a field of one mu for five silver coins. Similar contracts continue until 677; people used silver coins to rent land, trees, oxcarts, or homes and to buy land, hire people to staff beacon towers in their place, make loans, and pay taxes.
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Confirming the information from Chinese-language contracts, the one surviving Sogdian-language contract from Astana records the sale in 639 of a female slave for 120 “very pure” silver coins.
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The documentary record indicates that the Turfan residents used silver coins from the late 500s to the late 600s, a pattern supported by coin finds. Archeologists have unearthed 130 Sasanian silver coins in the ruins of Gao-chang City and thirty in the Astana cemetery, many wrested from the jaws of the dead by Stein’s assistant Mashik.
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Sasanian silver coins continued to circulate after the Chinese conquest of 640, and even after the Sasanian Empire fell to invading Islamic armies in 651, when the conquerors shifted to Arabo-Sasanian coins minted by Arab governors. The Arabo-Sasanian coins, like their precursors, weighed about four grams; mints replaced the portrait of the Sasanian emperor with that of the Arab governor and added an Arabic inscription to the face of the coin.
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Some 1,300 Sasanian coins have been excavated in China. Of those, the vast majority have been found in Xinjiang.
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In the modern town of Wuqia (Ulugart in Uighur), far to the west of Turfan on a tiny side road outside of Kashgar, archeologists found the largest cache of silver coins anywhere in China. In 1959 a road crew using dynamite to widen a road uncovered 947 silver coins, many fused together, along with thirteen gold bars that had been hidden in a rock crevice. The hill was near the main route between Turfan and the capital of the Western Turks just northwest of Lake Issyk Kul in today’s Kyrgyzstan. The findspot, on the side of a hill, is so remote that someone—perhaps a merchant? an envoy? a bandit?—must have left the money for safekeeping and never managed to return.
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The 947 coins included both Sasanian and Arabo-Sasanian coins. The presence of Arabo-Sasanian coins dated the hoard to after the fall of the Sasanian Empire to caliphate armies in 651, and the presence of Chinese copies of Sasanian coins, possibly as much as a quarter of the hoard, underlines the continuing appeal of silver coins to the residents of the Western Regions.
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What was the purchasing power of 947 silver coins in the late seventh century? Documents recovered from the Turfan tomb of a moneylender named Zuo who died in 673 offer some clues. The tomb contained a folded-up letter from a servant to the deceased that denied responsibility for the theft of five hundred silver coins six years earlier in 667. The servant, like many Chinese, believed that courts in the underworld meted out justice both to the dead and to the living. His letter indicates that a prosperous member of the community might have as much as five hundred coins on hand at any given time.

The fifteen intact contracts buried in the moneylender Zuo’s tomb record that he usually made smaller loans: between ten and forty silver coins or between three and thirty bolts of degummed silk. Government regulations specified that purchasers should use bolts of silk for large purchases, such as of slaves and livestock, and coins for less valuable items, probably because coins were often in short supply. In line with these regulations, the moneylender Zuo purchased a slave girl for six bolts of degummed silk in 661, and paid 450 silver coins for ninety bundles of hay in 668. Eight contracts record loans of silk or silver coins, while five contracts record the rental of fields, at least once to someone who had borrowed money from him. Unlike so many of the other Turfan documents, the contracts were placed intact in his tomb, probably because Zuo had not managed to collect on them during his life but hoped to do so after his death.
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The contracts buried in his tomb consistently charge interest of between 10 and 15 percent each month. The rate seemed high even to contemporaries: the Tang Code limited interest to 6 percent each month.
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Ordinary people who fell into debt for a variety of reasons came to the moneylender to borrow money to tide them over. We do not always know what happened to these people, but it is certain that they never paid back the loans, because if they had, the moneylender would have destroyed his copy of the contract as was customary on receiving the final repayment.

While people in Turfan were using silver coins, people in central China used the same bronze
wuzhu
coins that they had been using since the second century
BCE
. The distinct currency spheres, silver in Turfan and points west, bronze in China, persisted after the 640 conquest of the oasis. Only sometime around 700 did people in Turfan shift to bronze coins, which they often strung together in bunches of a thousand, called strings. The latest Astana document to mention silver coins, a tax receipt dated 692, specifies the equivalent value in bronze coins: two silver coins were worth sixty-four bronze coins.
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The use of silver coins in Turfan during the sixth and seventh centuries reinforces the point that China’s main trading partner at the height of the Silk Road trade, when the Tang stationed massive armies in the northwest, was the Iranian world, not Rome. Recall that no coins minted by the Roman republic (507–27
BCE
) or the subsequent principate (27
BCE
-330
CE
) have been found—so far—anywhere in China. The most thorough survey by Luo Feng, the leading archeologist in Ningxia Province, identifies the earliest Byzantine solidus coins found in China (there are two) as minted in the reign of Theodosius II (409–50) and buried sometime in the early sixth century, and the latest in the mid-eighth century.
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The period of these Byzantine coins overlaps with that of the Sasanian silver coins, and the two were often found together. Far fewer gold coins have surfaced in China than silver coins: eleven in Xinjiang and thirty-seven in central China for a total of forty-eight (versus more than 1,300 silver coins).
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These coins all appear to be solidus coins. First minted by Constantine (reigned 306–37), and containing 1/72 of a Roman pound’s worth of gold, or 4.55 grams, they show the reigning Byzantine emperor on the face and have an image of the Cross or Christ on the back.
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When Muslim troops conquered large chunks of the Byzantine Empire after defeating the Sasanians, Islamic mints removed all Christian elements from the solidus coins, just as they had removed Zoroastrian elements from the silver coins.

On close inspection, many of the Byzantine gold coins turn out to be fakes.
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Sometimes they weigh less than the standard weight of genuine coins, or the iconographical details of the emperor’s portrait are wrong, or the lettering on the inscription is incorrect.
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Many have holes punched in them, an indication that they were sewn onto clothing, most likely for use as protective talismans (one is shown in color plate 4A).

The largest number of gold coins found together in China is five, and it is far more common to unearth a single coin.
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Archeologists have not uncovered anything comparable to the hoards of silver coins from Wuqia and Turfan, yet another indication that the Byzantine gold coins were used for ceremonial purposes and did not circulate as a genuine currency, either in Turfan or in central China.
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None of the Astana documents record a transaction using gold coins, and those that have been excavated from tombs were often used as talismans. The Wuqia hoard, with its 947 silver coins and thirteen bars of gold, confirms this basic pattern: it shows that silver circulated in the form of coins while gold was used as bars.

As the widespread use of silver coins indicates, Turfan lay halfway between the Iranian and Chinese worlds. During the years of the Silk Road trade, Turfan absorbed many foreign immigrants, none more numerous than the Sogdians who came from Samarkand. Sogdians came to settle in Turfan during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and the pace of migration heightened considerably after the fall of the Sasanian Empire in 651 and the Islamic conquest of Samarkand in 712.

Although the Sogdians were famous traders, the Sogdians living in Turfan pursued a wide variety of occupations including cultivating the land, serving as soldiers, running inns, painting, working leather, and selling iron goods.
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When local officials, either under the Gaochang Kingdom or the Tang dynasty, drew up household registers, they did not label which residents were Sogdian and which were not. As a result, modern scholars must identify Sogdians by analyzing their family names and given names. Although the Chinese generally referred to the Sogdians as the people of the “nine jeweled surnames,” most Sogdians adopted one of seven Chinese family names: Kang, used by those coming from Samarkand; An, from Bukhara; Cao, from Kabudhan, north of the Zerafshan River; He, from Kushaniyah between Samarkand and Bukhara; Mi, from either southeast of the Zerafshan River or Panjikent; Shi, from Kesh, modern-day Shahrisabz; and Shi (written with a different character), from Chach, modern-day Tashkent.
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In recent years two Japanese scholars of the Sogdian language, Yoshida Yutaka and Kageyama Etsuko, have reconstructed forty-five different Sogdian given names from their Chinese translations.
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Many of the original Sogdian immigrants who moved to Turfan used these names, while those who lived in China for generations tended to give their descendants traditional Chinese names—in much the same way that immigrants often choose American-sounding names for their children.

In addition to naming, the Sogdians who migrated to Turfan gradually modified their burial practices, bringing them in line with Chinese practices.
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Because Zoroastrians believe that flesh pollutes the pure earth, they traditionally exposed the dead to scavengers and buried the cleaned bones in ossuaries. Two ossuaries have been found in Turfan.
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Zoroastrians sacrificed animals to the major Zoroastrian deities, including tree, rock, and mountain gods; the god of wind; and the supreme deity, Ahura Mazda.
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It is likely that the political and religious leader of the Sogdian community, a man who bore the title
sabao,
led these sacrifices.
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Many of the Sogdians living in Turfan adopted Chinese burial practices, including burying wooden slips to represent servants to serve the dead in the next world.
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Recent excavations of a graveyard to the northeast of Gaochang City in Badamu Village have found more than eighty graves of Sogdians, as indicated by their family names written on Chinese-style epitaphs.
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These naming patterns make it possible to identify Sogdians who appear in different documents, whether household registers recording the names of each member of the household or other materials.
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Sometime around 600 officials of the Gaochang Kingdom recorded the names of forty-eight merchants who paid a tax, called a scale fee, on the goods they sold to one another.
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After the goods were weighed, the tax was assessed in silver coins. This much-studied document survives as ten paper shoe soles cut from four different sections of the original register. Offering a series of snapshots of individual transactions over the course of a single year in the early seventh century, it is the single most informative document about the commodities exchanged in the Silk Road trade. These documents embody all the joys and the frustrations of the documents pieced together from the Astana graveyard: they give more information than any other materials available, but missing sections of the documents—where they were cut to make shoe soles—mean that they are incomplete.