The Silk Road: A New History [Hardcover]

Hansen covers the silk road from roughly 200 to 1200 CE and from Xian to Samarkand, with an emphasis on the oasis cities around the Taklamakan desert, such as Niya, Tucha, Turfan, and Hotan.

One of Hansen's main themes is that the reality of silk road trade is very different from the romantic vision of a mighty Silk Road carrying goods from Xian to Rome. There was no single grand highway but rather a varied collection of relatively local trade routes. The volume of trade was generally fairly low. Some of the goods being traded may occasionally have ended up going long distances through a series of local hops, but there were no merchants consciously trading from China to Rome.

The documentary evidence for the silk road trade is very uneven. Due to the desert climate, occasional caches of documents survived, in a wide range of language and scripts, from Sogdian to Hebrew. Sometimes we are lucky and there are business records for a garrison, or records of traveling envoys, but there are large gaps. Hansen is able to use the available records to assess the likely local scale and impact of the long distance trade. For the most part the records suggest relatively small scale trading, with a mostly local focus. The records show a complex flux of controlling cultures including Sogdians, Chinese (especially under the early Tang) a Uighur khanate, a Tibetan Empire, and Islamic Turks.

Hansen argues that in terms of raw traffic "the Silk Road was one of the least traveled routes in human history" but also argues that we should assess the route by its cultural and technological impact, not by simple raw trade volume. The Taklamakan area was a key conduit for Buddhist travelers between India and China. Paper making and silk production traveled slowly West, glass making East. Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam all spread East.

This is generally an interesting and useful account. However, it has some weaknesses. Because Hansen focuses on a careful analysis of the available surviving texts, this leads to rather uneven coverage, as there are so few surviving documents. So in some ways this book functions less as a general overview and more as a series of focused windows on specific areas where textual evidence has survived.

Valerie Hansen's new history of the Silk Road is a superbly written account of an enormously significant part of Asian history. The author brings together a stunning range of texts with the material culture excavated from Central Asia to offer a new interpretation of the commerce and contact that connected Eurasia. Accounts of each major Silk Road oasis and its exploration by later travelers and archeologists untangles an often complicated mix of historical sources to give the reader a clear historical narrative. The result is a compelling book, enlivened on every page with characters ancient and modern whose connections through time and space make the Silk Road such an engaging topic.

Hansen has done a great service to history by telling the story of the so-called "Silk Road" through its own documents. After traveling to Kashgar, Urumqi, Turfan and Dunhuang, I had tried to understand the subject by reading through a stack of books. While often lavishly illustrated, none of the swashbuckling popular histories really made sense. Not until Hansen's book came out just this year was I able to get a grip on the history. The passport documents reveal the small number of animals in the typical caravans from 200-1000 CE. Tax records and contracts reveal the main source of income, not independent trade but military budgets and the gifts of official emissaries. Money was largely barter, but direct payments could be made in coins when available, grain, and bolts of plain silk. The economy was largely subsistence agriculture for most of its history. When it comes to traders, Hansen highlights the Sogdians, an ethnic group with a talent for trade over longer distances (though hardly non-stop across the region), and a habit of keeping accounting records. She quotes from the eight ancient Sogdian letters found by Aurel Stein in a mailbag that had been abandoned in about 315 CE. Written by traders rather than government officials, they form a rare window on everyday life, including an irate wife named Miwnay denouncing her husband in a letter on Chinese paper written in a language that today can only be read by a hand-full of scholars. Paper only became available in Europe first in Spain and Sicily in the 11th and 12th centuries, a century later in northern Europe. Cancelled pawn tickets are another source of information about loans and everyday survival in a harsh landscape. The Buddhist texts are of course better known, particularly the Diamond Sutra, considered the oldest complete printed book, from 868 CE. Hansen does mentions the travels of the famous Buddhist scholars back and forth between India and China, but she brings out details from the records that show Buddhist monks marrying, establishing families and joining the local subsistence economy, not the stereotypical image of the celibate sages of popular imagination. Where there are gaps in the archival record, there are gaps in our knowledge. No archives, no history. On Aurel Stein's looting of the Dunhuang library cave, Hansen is fairly non-judgmental. More troubling is that even today ancient manuscripts are still being looted from archeological sites and offered for sale on the antiquities market. The Chinese are faced with the old dilemma: buy the stolen documents and you are not just receiving stolen merchandise but also creating a profitable market for looting; turn down the documents offered for sale, and they are lost.