Shadow of the Silk Road Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Colin Thubron
Under these dim vaults their lives are reinvented in a vacuum–their colours faded to rust and grey–yet are sweetly precise. When they follow the chase, their hunting leopards perch on saddles behind them, with a falcon or two, while a pair of provision-laden camels lumbers contemptuously behind.
They inhabited a city of fabled refinement and excess, whose street plan mirrored an imagined cosmic order. In spring its boulevards drowned in a snowstorm of apricot and peach blossom, with women sailing through the air on swings. These were the people, connoisseurs of the peony and the courtesan, who lifted to their lips the amber wine-cups which now rest in the city museum. Its cabinets still shine with their vanity: gold hair-pins, petal-shaped mirrors, silver censers for the wardrobe.
But beneath this artifice, of course, a power was throbbing: the power of trade. In the Western Market where the Silk Road came to rest, two hundred guilds of merchants worked. Their reach was immense. They embraced almost every people between Arabia and Japan: Persians, Turks and central Asian Sogdians especially, Indians, Bactrians, Jews, Syrians. There were times when whole echelons of the Tang court–including its elite bodyguard–were foreign. The moneylenders–sometimes so extortionate that people pledged their slaves and sacred relics–were Uighurs from the west. Along the Silk Road too came the music and dance of Turkestan–a fearsome, whirling flamenco was the rage for years–along with acrobats, jugglers and trapeze artists; and in the inns near the Gate of Spring Brightness the fair girls of Central Asia sang to flutes and befuddled the poets with their green eyes.
Although the imperial supervision of foreign merchants stayed rigid and finicky, a new tolerance was in the air. The silks andceramics of the time show winged horses and peacocks–the decorative motifs of Persia–flying alongside Chinese dragons; and no burial was complete without its attendant figurines of roaring camels led by a gnomish barbarian in a Phrygian cap. The classier brothels gave puppet shows satirising big-nosed people in peaked bonnets. Fashion followed suit. The enveloping mantle of the palace ladies slid away, and by the early eighth century women were to be seen riding like steppeland men in boots and Turkic caps, even bare-headed.
And deeper attachments were at work. For two centuries the capital reverberated with the gongs of Buddhist temples and monasteries. In 645 the pilgrim-monk Xuanzang returned from India laden with more than six hundred scriptures, settling to translate them in a pagoda that still stands, and the whole city massed to greet him. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manicheism–all were accepted with benign curiosity, while the indigenous faiths of China–Taoism and Confucianism–bided their time.
But by the tenth century this city of complicated glory lay in ruins. The willows binding its canal banks had been cut down for barricades, the beams and pillars of its mansions lashed together into rafts, on which its people floated away to greater safety in the east.
Somewhere in the northern suburbs the imperial palace of Changan is turning to dust. I cannot find it. The people living in the district are recent immigrants, and poor. It is hard to ask among their hovels for the Palace of Great Light. In any case, they do not know.
Only through a Tang historian Hu Ji–friend of a friend–do the gates of a forbidden compound clank open, and we enter a building site ringed far away by smoking suburbs. It is a scarred hillside. On one hand it descends to broken-down cottages and workshops. On the other I look up and see with chill astonishment the huge, sepulchral terraces glimmering in blue-white stone. The palace foundations have just been restored.
Hu Ji is slight and greying. He carries an old canvas shopping bag, and seems more fragile than his years. A sharp wind is cuttingacross the terraces. He has come with his
They inhabited a city of fabled refinement and excess, whose street plan mirrored an imagined cosmic order. In spring its boulevards drowned in a snowstorm of apricot and peach blossom, with women sailing through the air on swings. These were the people, connoisseurs of the peony and the courtesan, who lifted to their lips the amber wine-cups which now rest in the city museum. Its cabinets still shine with their vanity: gold hair-pins, petal-shaped mirrors, silver censers for the wardrobe.
But beneath this artifice, of course, a power was throbbing: the power of trade. In the Western Market where the Silk Road came to rest, two hundred guilds of merchants worked. Their reach was immense. They embraced almost every people between Arabia and Japan: Persians, Turks and central Asian Sogdians especially, Indians, Bactrians, Jews, Syrians. There were times when whole echelons of the Tang court–including its elite bodyguard–were foreign. The moneylenders–sometimes so extortionate that people pledged their slaves and sacred relics–were Uighurs from the west. Along the Silk Road too came the music and dance of Turkestan–a fearsome, whirling flamenco was the rage for years–along with acrobats, jugglers and trapeze artists; and in the inns near the Gate of Spring Brightness the fair girls of Central Asia sang to flutes and befuddled the poets with their green eyes.
Although the imperial supervision of foreign merchants stayed rigid and finicky, a new tolerance was in the air. The silks andceramics of the time show winged horses and peacocks–the decorative motifs of Persia–flying alongside Chinese dragons; and no burial was complete without its attendant figurines of roaring camels led by a gnomish barbarian in a Phrygian cap. The classier brothels gave puppet shows satirising big-nosed people in peaked bonnets. Fashion followed suit. The enveloping mantle of the palace ladies slid away, and by the early eighth century women were to be seen riding like steppeland men in boots and Turkic caps, even bare-headed.
And deeper attachments were at work. For two centuries the capital reverberated with the gongs of Buddhist temples and monasteries. In 645 the pilgrim-monk Xuanzang returned from India laden with more than six hundred scriptures, settling to translate them in a pagoda that still stands, and the whole city massed to greet him. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manicheism–all were accepted with benign curiosity, while the indigenous faiths of China–Taoism and Confucianism–bided their time.
But by the tenth century this city of complicated glory lay in ruins. The willows binding its canal banks had been cut down for barricades, the beams and pillars of its mansions lashed together into rafts, on which its people floated away to greater safety in the east.
Somewhere in the northern suburbs the imperial palace of Changan is turning to dust. I cannot find it. The people living in the district are recent immigrants, and poor. It is hard to ask among their hovels for the Palace of Great Light. In any case, they do not know.
Only through a Tang historian Hu Ji–friend of a friend–do the gates of a forbidden compound clank open, and we enter a building site ringed far away by smoking suburbs. It is a scarred hillside. On one hand it descends to broken-down cottages and workshops. On the other I look up and see with chill astonishment the huge, sepulchral terraces glimmering in blue-white stone. The palace foundations have just been restored.
Hu Ji is slight and greying. He carries an old canvas shopping bag, and seems more fragile than his years. A sharp wind is cuttingacross the terraces. He has come with his