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Among the most romantic notions perhaps ever produced by the human race has to be the experiment in distributed overland networking known as the Great Silk Roads. A spontaneous, self-organizing system of international commerce spanning 2 years of travel time by horse, camel, and donkey, this marvel of human cooperation is often erroneously attributed to single rulers at different times who guaranteed safety across various sections of its length, or whose patronage pushed merchants and traders further and further along than might normally have been undertaken.
The major credit for such a venture being able to go on for hundreds of years at a time should always be given to the thousands of individual men and women who acted as nodes for this distributed network, for out in the vast grasslands, mountains, and wastes of East, Central, and West Asia, there was no central planner, no centralized security force. Instead, city-states, tribes, and individuals, in search of bettering their own situation, helped facilitate the movement of goods from the Gansu Corridor in China all the way to Constantinople. Silks from China were never delivered to Rome; instead, silks were delivered to the ancestors of the Uighurs, who traded them with the Sogdians, who traded them to merchants from Kushan, who traded them to the Qipchaks, who traded them to the Persians, who traded them to any number of terminus nodes on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire.
No individual sultan, khan, or emperor could structure or organize such a complicated, multi-lingual system of exchanges across so vast a territory. The Silk Roads were like a great river, and all these rulers could do was position themselves upon its banks, and allow its life-giving waters to lap up against their walls. Yet the river flowed as much through wasteland as through civilization, and even here, a network of waystations operating in the vast frontiers of Central Asia’s deserts and plains sprouted to life as enterprising individuals sought to enrich themselves.
Just imagine what these places must have been like: a veritable Star Wars cantina scene of races and tongues mixing, relaxing, and bartering. If the Silk Roads are the most romantic artifact, how many words trigger a bigger cascade of romanticized imaginings than “Caravansary”? Much like the the term “Silk Road” which was popularized by a German sinologist, the word Caravansary is emblematic of the route itself; the word for a camel train in Persian being kārvān, and the word for an inn being serai. Silk is what was traded chiefly, and Persian was one of the lingua franca.
The nodes that enriched themselves the most on the fruit of this trade are many and diverse, but many of the most famous of them all sit in Uzbekistan, as do I. These are evocative names, held most delicious by Orientalists of the past: Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva. Iran, China, and Turkey hold many others, but today, these three, with the exception perhaps of the Tarim Basin’s Urumqi and Kashgar, are the most linked with the iconic route.
In these cities, the Silk Roads are used as a marketing scheme and are not particularly representative of the nature of them. One of the most significant developments in the history of the Silk Roads was the diffusion of sailing routes and technology through the Spice Islands, around India, and up the Persian Gulf. Sailing was easier, often safer, much faster, and one could carry much larger quantities of goods. As early as the 10th century, Arab sailing merchants were writing about Korea. By the time of Kublai Khan in the early 14th century, the future of this great distributed network was a maritime one. As a result, a hundred years later when Amir Temur, the West’s Tamerlane, was building up Samarkand as his capital city, the purpose was to create a testament to his glory and that of his heirs.
It is this legacy that endures today, and in Bukhara also. These are places of religious structures like mosques, madrasahs, and also palaces, and mausoleums. The legacy of commerce is little to be felt. He did not rebuild the city as a market center, and his successor Mirzo Ulugbek even converted the city’s largest caravansary into a madrasah to cement his father’s legacy as the patron and teacher of Muslims: the great ‘Sword of Islam’. Mirzo didn’t include any mention of the mass slaughter and deportation during his sacking of Damascus, or a small matter of ordering his cavalry to trample to death every boy in a certain Muslim city, the latter having each existed dressed in white and holding Qur’an as a plea for mercy.
Here, at the very heart of the Great Silk Roads, the sense is of a palatial building zone, while the markets of the routes’ termini, Damascus, Constantinople, and the Tarim Basin, are far more stocked, far more evocative of that great romantic legacy of anonymous intercontinental connection. Tamerlane’s memorial here in Samarkand, the capital of his empire built on a house of skulls just as much as it was of cards, speaks of his reviving of the Great Silk Roads, but this route had long moved south to the oceans.
Mountainous quantities of Ming Dynasty porcelain found in shipwrecks along the Maritime Silk Road bear witness to the incredible size of the trade in goods overseas, which was opened for business by Zhang He and his fleet of hundreds of treasure ships—an incredible story and source of many children’s books in China. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: © Andrew Corbley
