Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun

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      IT WAS AUGUST 627. The great Western Gate of Chang’an closed at nightfall. On the drum tower, the watchman was ready to strike the hour. The streets were emptying. Traders in the Western Market were putting up their shutters and seductive attendants were waiting outside taverns to lure them in. Among the throng of people leaving the capital were Xuanzang and another monk, clad in long robes. They had all their belongings wrapped in cloths slung over their shoulders. They walked briskly, with their heads down, trying to avoid the gaze of the officials, who were checking travellers’ passes at random.

      Once on the road, Xuanzang took a last look back at Chang’an in the twilight. He was excited; his dream of going to the land of the Buddha was beginning to come true. He had failed to get permission to travel and was leaving in defiance of the emperor’s edict, but that could not dampen his spirits. He felt free. How he wished he could fly like a bird to India. But he would have to make his way laboriously, on foot or on horseback, along all the thousands of miles lying ahead.

      As the train pulled out of Xian station in the middle of the night, I was excited too. This was the start of my journey in his footsteps. I could have flown, but I liked the pace of the train – I could not walk as he did but at least I would see what he saw. The rhythmical rattling of the wheels sounded a bit like footsteps, though the train did in one hour what took him two days or so. Still, 1,400 years apart, we were on the same highway, the famous Silk Road.

      Xuanzang would have known the Silk Road well. It acquired the name in the late nineteenth century, long after its demise, from the German scholar Ferdinand von Richthofen, but its history usually begins with the mission of Zhang Qian in 139 BC, almost seven hundred years before Xuanzang. Zhang, an official in the Chinese court of the Han dynasty, was assigned to seek an alliance in Central Asia to fight against the foremost threat to China, the marauding Huns. He was captured and imprisoned by the enemy, but he never forgot his mission, and managed to escape after thirteen years in captivity. His report and the tale of his adventures inspired the emperor. Before long, watchtowers were built and manned along the way within the Chinese empire. Sogdian merchants began braving the arduous journey to China regularly, trading the most treasured and valuable commodity: silk.

      The ancient world, the Romans in particular, could not get enough silk, alluring to the eye and delicate to the touch. They spent colossal sums on it – it was half of their imports. The Emperor Tiberius was so worried that he tried to ban people from wearing it – the Romans would have nothing of that. But they would not have minded paying less for the fabric, which was said to cost as much as gold by the time it travelled the whole length of the Silk Road. Agents were sent out, trying to reach directly the distant land that they called Sere, from which came sericus, silken, but they never made it. Although the Chinese were willing to sell silk to the barbarians, they did not want to relinquish the secret of how it was made. Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote: ‘The Seres are famous for the wool of their forests. They remove the down from leaves with the help of water and weave it into silk.’ As late as the mid-sixth century AD, the Romans believed his account.

      The Silk Road was not a single road but many, stretching from Chang’an, across the Taklamakan Desert, over the Pamir Mountains, through the grasslands of Central Asia, into Persia and then to the Mediterranean, with spurs into the northern Eurasian steppes and India. Over 5,000 miles long, it traversed some of the most inhospitable terrain, and linked up some of the greatest empires in the ancient world: Rome, Persia, India and China. This was where Xuanzang’s journey would lie.

      When the day broke and the sun came into my compartment, I saw ranges of mountains, brown and dusty, with terraced fields stepping up them. Walnut and persimmon trees, laden with their fruit, stood here and there in clusters, sheltering old brick houses, their chimneys smoking as people cooked the morning meal. When we left the villages behind, the farmers walking on the windy mountain paths made me think of the Silk Road again.

      The Silk Road no longer exists, and most Chinese have forgotten it, although every one of us is familiar with silk. Even I had raised silkworms as pets. One winter, Grandmother came back from a visit to her village and brought us apples, peanuts, chestnuts and a small bag of strange, fluffy white balls – silk cocoons. She said if we looked after them very carefully, putting them in a clean place not too hot, not too cold, and making sure insects would not bite them, we would have butterflies and then silkworms when the spring came.

      I put my cocoons in a shoe box next to my pillow and examined them every day. They looked dry and dead. How could butterflies ever come out of them? Grandmother said not to worry, they were only sleeping and would wake up soon. I waited as eagerly as I did for the Chinese New Year. One day when I came back from school, the cocoons were open and there were some white moths. I was fascinated but disappointed; they were quite ugly, not at all pretty like butterflies. Grandmother said I should just wait. And then very soon the moths dropped tiny white blobs on the bottom of the shoe box and a few days later some ant-like creatures appeared. Before long they began to crawl, tiny caterpillars, shedding their skins like snakes. It seemed an extraordinary process, and it was magical to see the beginning of their life.

      Every day I ran back as soon as school was over to check them. Grandmother said they liked mulberry leaves best but our city had so few mulberry trees, we had to make do with cabbage leaves. My sisters and I had a competition among us to see who had the fattest and whitest silkworms. But the most fascinating part was when they secreted a shiny thread, which seemed just to go on and on. We asked Grandmother what the thread was for. She said it was silk, and it made the most wonderful material. We did not believe her. Then she opened the wardrobe and pulled out a bright red quilted jacket which I had never seen anyone wearing. ‘This was what your mother wore when she got married,’ she said happily. ‘This is made of silk. You feel it.’ It was so smooth and shiny, like my hair. It was hard to imagine such beautiful cloth could have come from those insects in my shoe box.

      Looking back, it is equally hard to imagine that the thread from the silkworms could have been the source of so much wealth and beauty, and changed history. Today the Silk Road has declined, but something else, something more enduring, still touches our lives. For over a millennium, religions, technology, philosophy, culture and art were transmitted along its branches. It was through this highway that four of China’s greatest contributions spread westward – paper-making, printing, gunpowder and the compass – and it was along the same road, in the other direction, that Buddhism came to China. The seeds of ideas travelled across the barriers of mountains, deserts and languages. Some took root; others died; some flourished and spread extensively. What each traveller carried was small, but wave succeeded wave; and in the process, all the peoples along the Silk Road enjoyed the fruits of the diffusion.

      The Silk Road was possible because there were strings of oases to supply the caravans. One of the biggest oases in the region west of the Yellow River was Liangzhou, the capital of several short-lived dynasties set up by nomads as well as the Chinese. It was very popular with the merchants, who had long used it as their base from which to make forays into the rest of China. Mostly they prospered. But things could go wrong. In the early fourth century AD, a merchant based in Liangzhou sent a letter home to Samarkand, reporting that many of his fellow-merchants had died of starvation because of a peasant revolt and war in China, and claiming that he himself was on the verge of death too. ‘Sirs, if I were to write to you everything about how China has fared, it would be beyond grief.’ He asked his business partners to look after a large sum of money he had left with them, to invest it on behalf of his motherless son, and to give his son a wife when he grew up.

      But for all the dangers the lure of the Silk Road and its high profits was irresistible. When Xuanzang arrived in Liangzhou from Chang’an in 627, after travelling over seven hundred miles in one month, he found a bustling city of over 200,000 people, many of СКАЧАТЬ