Silk Roads
I didn’t pay much attention to history during my primary and secondary school years. In the classroom, I thought the subject was boring, since it seemed to comprise a series of memory tests and lists: recall the date for the Battle of Agincourt, or the years George IV reigned. Why? That was compounded in my teenage years by a teacher who spent lesson time writing facts on the blackboard for us to copy and learn for the next test. Boring? Brain deadening!
It wasn’t all bad. I did learn the basics of English history through humour, laughing all the way through ‘1066 and All That’, which offered a clever way to impart some needed knowledge. [i] Any book with a front cover which added it was “A Memorable History of England comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates” had to be a success, all the more so as the two authors listed their accomplishments at the University of Oxford as ‘unable to attend lectures’, and ‘failed MA, etc.’, respectively. Bad kings? One was King John: “John finally demonstrated his utter incompetence by losing the Crown and all his clothes in the wash and then dying of a surfeit of peaches and no cyder; thus his awful reign came to an end.” In fact I did have a second, and more serious, resource. On the basis I loved reading, my mother gave me a copy of G M Trevelyan’s History of England, and I read that through, more than once. However, by the time I was fourteen years old, I was concentrating on science subjects at school, and history classes disappeared from my timetable.
It would have been 20 years later I started to buy the odd book on English, European or US history. It became a small area of interest, mainly focussed around events from the French Revolution onwards. I learnt some of the world history I had missed, even a little about China. However, that changed dramatically in 2005. I had started visiting China for work since 1997, after odd visits in the previous 12 years. However, it was in Malaysia that what had been my patchy historical understanding of Asia was thrown into focus by an unexpected new light. I had received an invitation to attend the launch of an exhibition titled ‘Envoy of Peace from China’, to be opened by the Malaysian Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. I discovered the exhibition was in commemoration of the great Chinese maritime explorer Zheng He. Malaysia was the first stop for the global commemorative activities outside of China. The exhibition went on to other locations in Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia and East Africa over the next three years, tracing the routes that Zheng’s voyages had covered 600 years earlier.
Zheng He led huge fleets of Chinese ships on seven major expeditions from 1405 to 1433, travelling to over 30 Asian and African countries and regions, and, it seems likely, even to Australia. Zheng He was a eunuch, an adviser in the court, and early in his career took part in the the military campaign to capture the imperial capital Nanjing. It was the beginning of a stellar career, eventually as a Grand Director and then as Chief Envoy during the three decades he carried out seven voyages on behalf of the emperor, trading and collecting tribute in the eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans. Zheng He was the admiral in control of a huge fleet and armed forces that took part in the expeditions. The scale was extraordinary, including, for example, so many linguists the Emperor established a foreign language institute at Nanjing. The first fleet included 317 ships, with almost 28,000 crew. Subsequent fleets were equally massive.
In a forerunner of China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, Zheng He’s fleets travelled across the Indian Ocean to Africa and Arabia, as well as many countries along the way. These were vast trading exercises, exchanging gold, porcelain, and silk for ivory, various timbers, and a menagerie including ostriches, zebras and camels. He needed his large ships! It was somewhat later I discovered that if his fleet was extraordinary, the routes he followed were not unknown. In fact he travelled along well established and well mapped routes. Was this just about trade? There were many soldiers aboard the ships, and the evidence suggests this was about power as much as exchange. What I have read suggests Zheng He preferred using diplomacy, especially as his large army encouraged would-be enemies to seek agreement on his trade terms. However, a contemporary reported that Zheng He “walked like a tiger” and did not shrink from violence when he considered it necessary to impress ‘foreign peoples’ with China’s military might. [ii] Zheng He wrote of his travels:
“We have traversed more than 100,000 li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly] as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare.”
This come from on a tablet erected by Zheng He in Changle, Fujian Province, in 1432.
From the moment I entered that exhibition in Kuala Lumpur I have been fascinated by Zheng He. Enchanted by his exploits I next read accounts of trade along the ‘Silk Road’, the land based exchange routes running from China to the Mediterranean, with silks and precious metals going one way, spices, livestock the other, and, a little later, gunpowder and paper from China, and plagues in both directions. To begin with my romantic image was of traders on camels going all the way from one end of the Silk Road to the other, and I was somewhat disappointed to learn that most only went a relatively short distance to link up with the next group in a chain of connections. Some did travel the whole way, of course, most famously Marco Polo in the 14th Century, who kept a record of his journeys, a source of attraction to the ‘mysterious East’, even if his imagination appears to have added a little additional colour to what he was describing.
Learning more about the chain of trade led on to other issues, and especially the exchange of ideas. As I have written elsewhere, I was an avid reader of Journey to the West, a Chinese classic. An avid reader? Well, the truth of the matter is that I was initially drawn in by the 32 volume children’s illustrated version of the story. Over that series of books I read about the Tang priest travelling from China to India on a white horse (which later turns out to be a dragon) to collect Buddhist manuscripts, accompanied by a friar, a pig, and, of course, Sun Wukong, or Monkey. Monkey is one of the great delights of literature, fearless, foolish, and mischievous, just managing to avoid horrible scrapes, and always, eventually, helping the priest on his journey. Even the more serious several-hundred-page book still offers humour and adventures based on Monkey’s amazing abilities. However, it was the children’s version that got me addicted. It was many years after that I discovered the journey had its basis in fact, and that a priest had been sent to collect sacred Buddhist materials from India, successfully bringing them back to help consolidate Buddhist practice in China.
Ever the adventitious reader, I was stunned when I was given Peter Frankopan’s book, The Silk Roads. There wasn’t a single road, from China to the West, nor had the Silk Road emerged sometime around the time Marco Polo went exploring. I should have had the wit to realise there had to have been more than one road, many of them in fact, cutting across large areas of Asia and the Middle East. Trade has been integral to communities for millennia, and the well-worn paths of barter and exchange must have been in place for thousands of years. What Peter Frankopan did was to pull together just some of the work of recent researchers, and illustrate something of activities ranging from more than 2,000 years ago to the recent past. Silk, as a product and as a currency, was one part of many of these exchange routes, but just one strand, as it were, in a complex set of links and transfers that kept different societies and cultures in contact. It was one way in which tensions and warfare were ameliorated, merchants providing a necessary mechanism to encourage and support cooperation, just as they still do today.
If nothing else, a discussion of Silk Roads makes one thing abundantly clear: as in so many things, Europeans (let alone contemporary Americans) have a woefully distorted view of their place in the world. The Silk Road as it was in the past was not a means for China to come and beg at the door of the Mediterranean. If any one power has been dominant over much of the past 2,000 years it is possibly China, not the West. But even that is misleading: if there is a ‘centre’ to the world it might be in Persia/Iran, or the ‘Stans’, or even the Indus Valley in northern India.
As Frankopan documents, the past 2,000 years have seen states and civilisations emerge and disappear along the trade routes that run between Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He notes that Chinese silks were worn by the Carthaginian elite two millennia ago, the same time as there is evidence wealthy Iranians used Provencal pottery, while spices from Indian spices found their way into Afghan and Roman cuisine. Artefacts, culture and cuisines, and scientific and philosophical ideas, all these have flowed in both directions for a long time. The process is much older than the period Frankopan’s book covers: the limits on what is known is a function of the ephemeral nature of much that was traded before the Greek and Roman eras, combined with the lack of records.
Research has been growing. Cambridge’s King’s College has established a programme for the study of the history and culture of the Silk Road countries, societies, and cultures of Asia from the Western borders of China to the Mediterranean Sea, as well as their relationships with China in the East and Europe in the West. This broad programme of studies includes lectures, seminars and conferences, as well as graduate scholarships and Research Fellowships, which explore relationships and the movement of materials, knowledge, and technologies between China and the Mediterranean at any period in history up to the present day. Contemporary research, like that being driven by King’s Silk Roads Programme, has uncovered a wealth of archaeological material. There will be more.
As historical research has grown on activities across Eurasia, there has been another shift. Traditionally researchers were European, typically white men. Their task was to uncover the past, and then cart the evidence back home, to museums in England, France and Germany. Locals in Afghanistan might be working at the ‘digs’, but their role was little more than menial labour, brushing off surplus dirt and establishing some necessary infrastructure. One major change has been that today finds from sites are placed in local museums. Sometimes artifacts may be examined or shown by European research institutes, but only on loan, and only for a limited time. Despite the complicated politics and tensions across this wide region, cooperation and collaboration is building networks and associations that may soften divisions, and help the countries across the region restore pride. There may not be a single centre in this new landscape, but rather a network of states, collections and researchers, creating a very different picture of the world before the 16th Century and colonial rule. Yes, I know. Too simple. However, these are steps in the right direction, as we know, understand and appreciate more.
There is one more and very consequential part to this story of the Silk Roads. The celebration of Zheng He’s voyages, 600 hundred years after his historic travels in an exhibition in Kula Lumpur was about much more than history. That event was part of China’s political and economic diplomacy, building good relationships for trade and influence in the 21stCentury. Eight years after the Zheng He exhibition, Xi Jinping was in Kazakhstan, where he announced a huge global infrastructure development strategy, the Silk Road Economic Belt.
This quickly became known as ‘One Belt, One Road’, or OBOR. The Belt was a modern version of the Silk Road, now to be developed as a series of rail and road connections from China through Central Asia and all the way to Europe. One Road referred to a series of shipping lanes (or ‘sea roads’) through the Indo-Pacific extending from China through to Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East and Africa (as well as through the Suez Canal into Europe). The whole initiative is targetted on 2049, the centenary year for the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and will represent a Chinese-centred trade network to consolidate China’s aim to be the leading economic power of the 21st Century. More recently, the overall strategy is referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI or B&R. Altogether, more than 138 countries and 30 international organisations have signed up for elements of BRI, accepting investments in ports, railways, highways, power stations, aviation centres and telecommunications systems. By 2018, the cost of committed constructions projects had exceeded $US140bn, and other investments more than $80bn. [iii] Are these the signs of a new ‘colonial’ era?
China’s aspirations in international affairs remains unclear. I guess that was a bit silly. Quite clearly China wants to be the dominant player in world politics and trade. Ever since 2015, and the formation of the its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the economic plan has been obvious. The more difficult part is to understand is its political ambitions. Some of the time, its aspirations seem to be getting back the bits of China that had escaped. Hong Kong is now firmly in its grasp. Taiwan must be on the short-list, as well as those islands in the South China Sea. All that might be seen as restoring ‘Greater China’, especially given the recent display of military might at the 70th National Day parade in 2019. Does it have broader aspirations? Will it be satisfied with economic dominance, or will it want to assert direct control over other countries? And how far might that go?
The next decade or so will be revealing. In the past, the Silk Road connected China to the rest of Asia and Europe, but it was a trade connection, easily severed from time to time. The message was clear: “you might need to trade with us, but we don’t need you”. Belt and Road could be another economic network vulnerable to periods of Chinese disinterest. However, it is equally likely the new ‘silk roads’ will anchor the world to China’s economic empire. Time will tell.
[i] Sadly, my original paperback edition has gone to the happy hunting grounds. I have the posh 1990 Folio edition.
[ii] Cited in Wikipedia from Bentley, J. H.; Ziegler, H.; Traditions and Encounters, McGraw Hill, 2007, p. 586.
[iii] For an excellent overview of B&R see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road
