Secrets of the Silk Road
The discovery of a cave full of manuscripts on the edge of the Gobi Desert reveals the details of everyday life on the Silk Road.
O n a summer night in 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu was sweeping sand from the entrance to the caves known as the Grottoes of Unparalleled Height near the town of Dunhuang in northwest China. These medieval caves housed Buddhist statues and murals dating from the fourth to the 14th centuries. By the late 19th century, however, this erstwhile centre of Buddhist worship had lost its lustre and few visitors came to see the caves anymore. Wang was originally from a violent, desolate county in Hubei province in south China and had fled in his late forties to Dunhuang, hoping to find peace. Perhaps the lone resident at the caves, Wang was eager to rebuild parts of them, not in their original forms, but as a Daoist ‘Palace of Celestial Purity’. On this night in 1900, as he channelled running water in front of one of the caves, an opening appeared in its wall, ‘giving out a flickering of light’. Intrigued, Wang dug through the opening and found a small hidden chamber about 13 square metres in size. As scholars would eventually realise, this chamber had been sealed in the early 11th century and remained undisturbed for 900 years. It contained 60,000 manuscripts.
Two decades before Wang opened this hidden library, a scholar at the other end of the Eurasian continent made a different kind of discovery. Ferdinand von Richthofen was a German geologist and geographer. Unlike Wang, who stumbled upon the sealed chamber, von Richthofen was a trained scholar who spent years travelling in China and other parts of Asia. In a world that was mostly interested in ‘civilisational centres’ on the edges of Eurasia, von Richthofen cast his eyes towards the heartland of the continent, motivated in part by an ambitious project to construct a trans-Eurasian railroad. He took the long view in his efforts, reaching back to the records of ancient geographers for precedents of a connected Eurasia. In both the Greek geography of Marinus of Tyre (c.70-130), transmitted by Ptolemy, and in Chinese treatises on Central Asia by Sima Qian (c.145-86 BC) and Ban Gu (32-92), von Richthofen detected a tenuous route through which, it seemed, luxury goods like silk might have travelled from workshops in China to the markets of the Roman Empire. He called this route the ‘Silk Road’.
