In Our Time - The Silk Road

Episode Date: December 3, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Tim Barrett, Naomi Standen and Frances Wood discuss the Silk Road, the trade routes which spanned Asia for over a thousand years, carrying Buddhism to China and paper-making and gunpowder westwards.In 1900, a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuang. Inside, he found thousands of ancient manuscripts. They revealed a vast amount of evidence about the so-called Silk Road: the great trade routes which had stretched from Central Asia, through desert oases, to China, throughout the first millennium.Besides silk, the Silk Road helped the dispersion of writing and paper-making, coinage and gunpowder, and it was along these trade routes that Buddhism reached China from India. The history of these transcontinental links reveals a dazzlingly complex meeting and mingling of civilisations, which lasted for well over a thousand years.With:Tim Barrett is Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies; Naomi Standen is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Newcastle University; Frances Wood is Head of the Chinese Section at the British Library.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1900, a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuan. Inside, he found thousands of ancient manuscripts. They revealed a vast amount of evidence about the so-called Silk Road,

the great trade routes which had stretched from Central Asia through desert oases to China throughout the first millennium. Besides Silk, the Silk Road helped the dispersion of writing and papermaking, coinage and gunpowder and ideas. It was along these trade routes that Buddhism reached China from India and Islam also moved east along the Silk Road. The history of these transcontinental links reveals a dazzlingly complex meeting and mingling of civilizations

which lasted for about 1,400 years. With me to discuss the Silk Road are Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Naomi Standen, Senior Lecturer in Chinese History at Newcastle University, and Francis Wood, head of the Chinese section at the British Library. Francis Wood, can you give us a working definition of the Silk Road that we'll be talking about this morning? I hope my colleagues agree that the Silk Road is a term that was applied in the late 19th century to a series, a network of trade routes,

from the east to the west. There are some people who take these trade routes much further than perhaps we will today. But for our purposes today, I think we're talking about a route which goes from Dunhung, on the edge of the deserts which sit in the centre of Asia. You get one route running north along the oasis towns, one route goes south along the oasis towns there, avoiding the central desert. They join together at Kashgar.

Now the whole area is surrounded by mountains, and at Kashgar you could make the decision if you wanted to take your silk any further, you might go down into India, across the Pamirs, or you might go further on across Persia and eventually to the coast of the Mediterranean. So it's a network of trade routes which runs on the either side, as it were, of the central deserts of Central Asia. But we know the silk reached Rome and the reports of the route going into Morocco, So when it got to Europe, it sprayed out in different directions but just kept moving along. Yes. And I think, well, I think one of the most important things to say about these trade routes is that the goods are not carried, as it were, by one man all the way from China to Rome. Goods were passed on. So it is a network. Most people would have just traded goods from their oasis town onto the next oasis town, possibly a little further.

So we should talk about the goods that are transported really along the routes and not think about. individual travellers, so much. So let's talk about the goods. Can you give us some idea of the spread of the goods? There are all sorts of things that go. Mostly, I think, the things we know about, of course, are the more valuable materials. Because these are recorded in documents.

You get, for example, the Sogdhian letters of about 300 AD, which describe some of the materials which are transported. We don't know about perishables. But there are things like wool and linen. There are all sorts of aromatics, musk, white lead for cosmetic purposes, furs. Jade, Jade was perhaps the first thing to be traded along the roots from Cotan to China, probably, oh, many thousands of years ago.

And silk, of course. And silk, yes. And all sorts of spices, as you've said, and strange things like rhubarb and jugglers came along with it. People came, or people were traded too, as it were. Yes, they absolutely. I mean, and horses too are another of the most important things that the Chinese wanted from the West. And you get beautiful things like Persian Silver going to China. As fashions changed in places like China, then the things that were transported along the routes changed.

How did they, well, we stick into the land routes now because we could include the sea routes, but that was later and we're not going to. How was it by camels? How did they take the stuff by the edges of these deserts? Because it was pretty formidable territory, even though they skis. the central massive desert and they went under the shadow of the mountains from oasis to oasis. It wasn't easy. So how were they carrying the stuff? There are wonderful discrepancies or differences between the sizes of the caravans that you get described.

I mean there are descriptions of caravans in the Tang Dynasty which consisted of things like 40 men, six horses, six donkeys and a horse. Or you can go up as much as having a caravan that was described as having at least, well, 300 plus camels and 4,000 plus bolts of silk. So you had little caravans, have little groups of merchants, and you had enormous ones. A lot of walking,

and then donkeys, horses and camels. And the main beasts of burden, and yaks, if you're crossing the Pamirs. So we're punching in, we're talking at the moment, let's talk at the moment, punching in from the west towards the east. Alexander the Great made a foray in that direction.

Can you be thought of as part of this story? Tim Barrett. Yes, in the sense that he made the Mediterranean world aware of Central Asia. There had been Greeks, of course, working for the Persian Empire at an earlier stage. Xenophon, for example, was a mercenary for the Greeks. But Alexander was the one who really brought a Greek presence right the way across the Iranian-speaking world to, I think the last city he found, was in present-day Tajikistan.

There was another one near what is now a Bagram Air Base. So plonking down these centres of Greek civilisation so far away from his original base in Macedonia meant that there was a chain of communications at the very least that brought a knowledge of that part of the world back to Greece and later to Rome. Of course he did, one of the first. stage invade the plains of India and so that area too became known to the Greeks. So certainly in, although the trade, as Francis said, was probably very ancient passing from, through different hands so that goods had actually made the journey before. This was the first time on the western

side that people became aware of the Central Asian world, or that part of the Central Asian world. There were Greek settlements, right, a little Greek settlement because of Alexander from Afghanistan right through the Mediterranean and North Africa. Yes. There was a Greek world able and willing to bring trade to each other. Yes, that's what made the whole process, I think, a lot easier at that stage. From the Chinese point of view, Tim Barrett, in the second century BC, the Han dynasty, China, which was there for about 400 years,

powerful in this, they started, they started to go west. Now, how did they said about that? Well, it must be said that as far as our sources are concerned, they don't seem to have been interested in following trade routes. There are two

reasons why the hand became interested in moving west, and I think the most important is geopolitical, shall we say. At about the same time as China was unified or a little bit later, a unification of the people's dwelling to their north, largely nomadic in lifestyle, also took place.

And that led to confrontation. And indeed, the beginning of the hand was quite hard-pressed by these nomads. They were forced, for example, to send princesses to be married to the great Khans of the nomads and so forth, which was a humiliation. So to avoid these kinds of humiliations, they started to look for allies who might help them in attacking the nomads. And it so happened that in the creation of this great nomad empire, the nomads had displaced peoples from some of the oasis towns to the west of China, to the immediate west of China. they'd done the usual thing, they'd turn the skull of the ruler of these unfortunate people into a drinking cup. So the Chinese naturally thought, well, if we can find the remnants of these people who have run away to the West, perhaps they will be bent on revenge and we will be able to ally with them in counterattacking against the nomads.

Good idea, so they sent off an envoy, Zhang Tian, who travels westwards to try and find where these people, people had run away to. He was captured by the nomad, spent a decade on the whole process of eventually getting away and making contact, but he found the remnants of these people in what had been the Greek area of Bactria, northern Afghanistan, the sort of area that Alexander had made Greek. They had invaded after the collapse of Alexander's empire, somewhat after some of the repercussions of that and managed to establish a new empire there. So when the envoy showed up, they said,

oh, those nomads, yes, we've forgotten about revenge. Bactria is quite a nice place. So he went home again, but with a lot of information. But there's still the important thing about the hands that we're not talking perhaps necessarily, well, we aren't talking about the Silk Road, you said, so you're the expert, so we aren't. We are talking about the Chinese beginning to move west,

which was unusual for them. because their whole world was their own world until then. And one things that drove them was not just revenge, as I understand it, named Sam. But the desire to get hold of bigger horses. They had little ponies on the plains, but they couldn't breed the bigger horses that they yearned for. Well, that was connected with, very much with Zhang Chin's envoy mission because it was him that saw these horses for the first time

in a place called Fergana, which is just to the west of the desert. and he saw these big Arab-style horses in Fagana, which amazed him, and he took that news when he eventually got back to China, he took the news back with him that there were these amazing horses in Fagana, and the Han Dynasty said, well, in that case, we must have them. And they sent continuous missions thereafter as soon as they knew that they were there to try and buy these horses.

So at that point, they were sending people, people along, mostly the southern route around the desert, to Fagana to purchase these horses with vast quantities of silk. So this is the Silk Road. I mean, they're using one of the Silk Road. Let's take the North of the Desert or South of the Desert. They're using one of the Silk Roads. It's trying to say at the beginning, you start there.

They split, they come together, and the other side of the desert. They go along a bit, and then they split in several different directions. So they're going along the Silk Road to get these big horses, which could carry things and do all sorts of things. Their little ponies couldn't. It's really at this point that it becomes the Silk Road. And the hand were breeding horses and buying horses from the Mongols, I'm sorry, from the nomads in the north.

But they couldn't do as many things as the big horses could. They couldn't carry as much. And they weren't as magnificent. And fine horses, in relatively small numbers, were what they were after in Fagana. Large numbers of cavalry horses they would get from the steps. But the small numbers of fine horses, they came from the West. And they came along this southern route around.

the desert, back to the Han. And it was this that was really the beginning of the Silk Roads, because this was the point at which East-West communication, including China, came into being. And that's really as an offshoot of these Envoy missions, because what happens is that on the envoy missions, they're relatively large missions, and it seems that almost anybody could go

if they could spin a good yard about what they'd seen in the West. They turned up at the hand court and said, there were fabulous things out there and I can get you all these amazing things from the West and the hand court seems to have said, okay, you can go on the next mission and go and buy horses. So these people took the silk from the

Chinese court, carried it along the routes, but in the oases along the way, before they got to where the horses were, they did some trading of their own using the Chinese court silk and that seems to have been the beginning of the silk road routes including China.

Just for a moment, perhaps I rather The psychology of the hand, it wasn't just that they wanted horses to carry things because they were big... Wasn't there a huge fashion and competition for horses? It was like the German states competing for opera houses in the 18th and 19th. Didn't they think that these were wonderful things to have?

Many of the Chinese sculptures, their own horses, they're very proud to be on horses. That's more of a tang thing. It's later, about 500 years later. Although you do get the wonderful... In tomb bricks and so on, frequently show chariots with rather fine horses with marvellous tails and so on.

So I think, but you're right that it was mainly in the town that they got, that they wrote poems about the horses, there were legends about the horses, and the fabulous sculptures of the imperial steves. Can I just get a bit of a bit of a grip on the T'aqlacan Desert? How big was it? How awful was it? How did they manage to get through it? Well, it's a large area. I actually don't know exactly how large.

Your hands are wide apart. They're almost touching Francis and me, really. It's about 2,000 kilometres east-west and about 1,500 north-south. I mean, the name is supposed to mean, and we were talking about this earlier, it's supposed to mean you go in and you never come out. We're not actually sure whether that's true. But certainly it is one of the lowest places on the face of the earth. It is incredibly dry because it's surrounded, it's low and it's surrounded by mountains.

It's extremely inhospitable. to human life. But the fact that it's surrounded by mountains mean that the water, the rain breaks on the mountains, rivers flow down the mountains, and therefore you have, that's why you have at the foot of the mountains, these wonderful oases, where it's possible to have fairly extensive settlements in some cases, and they could grow crops and things like grapes. So it's fertile in very small pockets. So let's say, sorry Francis, yes. I was going to say one of the things too, I think that when we say desert, we tend to think of sort of

the storybook desert with palm trees and so on. I mean, this is a desert that's fantastically cold in winter and fantastically hot in summer, and which has seasons because most of the trees in the oases are poplars, and so in the autumn, the leaves go golden, and then they drop. So it's a very different

desert to an African desert, if you like. So we've established silk going along the Silk Road. That's where we are in our story this morning so far. Can we now begin to talk about what else is going along the road besides goods? We've listed quite a few of the goods, just a few of them, Francis. Let's talk about the way that Buddhism went, ideas went along the road.

Let's talk about the way that Buddhism went from India to China along Silk Road. Yes, quite when, Tim can probably correct me on this, quite when Buddhism first arrived in China is a matter of dispute. I mean, but round and about the turn. I mean, first century BC to first century AD, you still. start getting traces of Buddha images. And certainly Buddhists began to be extremely important in China very soon after the arrival of Buddhism.

One of the great things is that, of course, you've got, I mean, there are the people like the Sogdians are kind of intermediaries. It's the people sort of in between the Chinese and the Indians. I was saving the Sogdians up. Yes, I'll stop talking about them at this minute. We can talk about intermediary peoples. But one of the things about Buddhism is that it was a religion by then which had a huge scripture.

And the scriptures were the things that needed to be translated into Chinese. And so you get pilgrims bringing scriptures into China and being translated by wonderful teams of translators, often with several languages before you actually get to the Chinese at the far end. And Buddhist sites begin to be constructed along the Silk Road. I mean, Dunhung is, I suppose, for a Chinese pilgrim going to India to collect Buddhist scriptures, would be, as it were, the last place he could get a decent Chinese meal. Then after that he sets off.

And again, when he gets back to Dunhang, he's sort of back into China as well. But, I mean, I think Tim is probably more of a specialist in the immediate beginnings of Buddhism than I. We know just about it, enough for our purposes. What impact did it have on China? That's much more important. This religion arrives in an ancestor worship. ancestor worshipping culture, a culture in the sense where the worship is based on history.

It's a different thing entirely. Can you tell us what impact Buddhism had there? It's interesting that you should pick up ancestor worship as characteristic of the Chinese and something that was perhaps very different from the Buddhist world for you, which is to do with man's condition in general. It's a universal religion.

But on the other hand, this is a period of warfare, especially as the Highen dynasty waned and eventually perished in tumult this meant that a lot of people were losing their lives in very unsettled conditions where perhaps ancestor worship was no longer possible because he moved away from the ancestral tombs

as a refugee from plague, flood, invasion and so forth and in fact Buddhism, because it addresses the question of the individual's fate did provide means for trying to ameliorate that fate after death. And in fact, for people who, for lost souls, as it were, who were no longer being tended for in the system of ancestral worship, it perhaps provided a way of allowing,

the Chinese after the Han period to deal with the thought that so many people had perished and were not being looked after. Have we any idea of the size and the spread of it, Tim? We don't have conversion figures or anything like that. We know that

a big breakthrough seems to have occurred at the beginning of the fourth century and this may perhaps be related to calamitous events of that time when in fact the northern peoples who had in fact been absorbed into the Chinese empire, rather like the Romans did, use barbarians to keep out worse barbarians.

At that point, because the Chinese were infighting, the non-Chinese decided that they would take their own fate into their own hands and basically threw them out of North China. This was a terrible blow for the, if anything, the sort of self-image of Chinese people. civilization that the Chinese dynasty had to retreat south towards the Yangtze. And this shattering of cultural self-confidence probably gave Buddhism an opportunity. Naomi Stanton, we come to the Sogdians.

Who were they and what did they contribute to the Silk Road? They contributed a lot over several hundred years. It seems from your notes, it's somewhere between 500 and 800 and 800 years. So we're talking about a big presence there. They are the premier merchants of the Silk Road. They seem to be an Iranian-speaking people. They are based in, again, just to the west of the desert in a rather fertile river valley

that flows directly out of the western end of the desert. Near Samarkand. Near Samarkand was their main base. And they carried goods and perhaps most importantly, they established colonies everywhere they went. So there are colonies of Sogdhdiens found in all the oasis towns around the desert,

but also in the narrow corridor that leads from the desert into China and in China itself, including at the capital, the Tang Dynasty, especially at the Tang Dynasty capital, at Chang'an, which at the time was the greatest city in the world. From what I read, they were multilingual, they didn't, they flitted from face to faith if they had to, they just got on with being traders.

What sort of a group were they? Were they, had they left, you say, in Iran, but did they feel that they were a tribe, a group, a country? Can you give us a bit more of a grip on them? It's difficult to see what ties them together. Because they were so dominating, yeah, right now, yes. Absolutely. The Sogdian language seems to have been an important thing that bound them together.

And in fact, Sogdian became the lingua franca along the Silk Roads for a period of several hundred years. Because other people clearly found it worthwhile learning Sogdian. They translated Sanskrit into Sogian and then Sogdian into Chinese. They did indeed, yes. So some of the earliest Buddhist scriptures in China have actually come through Sogdian translations and were translated by Sogdian. Some of the early translators were Sogdians. Holding them together,

it's hard to say other than the trade connections and the fact that we have these fantastic letters, the ancient letters of the Sogdians, which show that the... there was a network at several levels, a local Sogdian network, a more intermediate and an international Sogdian network, with letters being sent to different places,

to different levels along that network. But Francis Wood, as I understand it, they didn't have armies and stuff, they didn't want to fight anybody. They just kept trading and trading and trading. Yes, and I think that... One of the wonderful things, I mean, Naomi mentioned the Sogdgdgdian letters. This is only a handful of letters,

which were found in a post bag, which was abandoned near Dunhung. I mean, the postman had fled, got bored, who knows, forgot. And from this handful of letters, really, we develop almost everything we know about the Sogdians. But they taught very in great detail about exchange of things. You know, you owe me a camel, I owe you a this,

there was a slave girl for sale there and so on, plus one tiny detail that one poor woman whose husband was a Sogdian trader who'd gone off trading along the Silk Road, she'd been left behind in Dunhung, looking after his affairs there. So women, perhaps, you know, having quite an important position in the trading networks. And so, and you can see, obviously, it's families based in different places. And she says that she'd rather be married to a dog or a pig than him.

So the Sogdian letters do also contain some of the information about Sogdian feelings. The Tanginister, like the Han, saying we're up to the 7th century 80, you know, we're moving rapidly across it, pushed Westford again. What did they do in the Silk Road? with the silk still going along the road, all these goods that we were talking about, still pushing out there, an increasing weight of that to trade? I think one of the things about the Tang Dynasty is, I mean, I think people have said that there was a fashion for all things central Asian in the Chinese court.

So, yes, more and more and more. Different things. I mean, the horses continue, slave girls continue to be traded along the Silk Road. And also, I mean, you can see things like the clothing that was adopted sort of slightly later in the time. dynasty was this kind of much looser sort of garb that was worn by Central Asian traders and you get things like the wonderful

padded-toed shoes which you can see in which move across from west into China. They had shoes which were made of silk but with sort of almost like armchairs padding at the toes and women wearing kind of very loose turbans so

a fashion for all things Central Asian meant that there was a huge demand really for luxury goods to flow into China Tim Barrett, we've been talking quite a bit about China, but then we have the spread of Islam, and the great battle of Talas. We'll come to that in a moment. But how did Islam, how did the Muslims come into the Silk Road story?

Well, Islam had been moving westwards through the eastwards, sorry, through the Iranian world. And got... as far as Samakand and Sogdiana. They had some trouble in subduing the Sogdians. How did that if Sogians had no army? Well, I think although the Sogdians had no army and built no empire except a financial one, I don't think you can completely underrate them

because some Sogdians seem to have acted as mercenaries in China. So it's not like they were entirely tin. and only interested in finance. And certainly, I think they probably resented being incorporated into a world, albeit one that would have given them opportunities to the West. It cut off to some extent their ability to deal with the East, or perhaps that's what they feared, because in the long run, things didn't turn out that way.

So Islam has appeared, as it were, on the doorstep of China, as we established, the Tang is interested once again in the West and Tang armies were intervening at the western side of the Taklamakan. And then suddenly they, amongst all the other confrontations they had to deal with, a Tibetan state that had become centralized and was also trying to compete with them, various empires of people speaking Turkic languages, the Uyghurs, rather the remote ancestors of today's Uyghurs, had appeared in the 8th century as other competitors,

and suddenly there is this new force of Islam on the horizon. And it is a force, isn't it, Naomi's Stanton? They're moving fast east, and the Tang China is expanding west, and they clash. Can you tell us about the clash and the significance of it? the climax of that clash and the significance of it? Well, they meet, the Tang come through the oases, which they're really controlling at this point,

around about 7.50, and the Islamic armies are moving up through Central Asia. And they meet, again, they meet just to the north of Fagana, where the horses come from, at a place called Talas, which is in stepcountry, to the north of the mountain. that bound the northern edge of the desert. They met at a place called Talas in 751.

There's a huge battle there. And the sources, if you read the sources from the two sides, it looks like both sides are claiming a victory, but it does seem like the Chinese were actually defeated. And they withdraw back from Talas. And the Tang does not attempt to maintain their status in the oasis. partly because, very shortly after Talas, there is a huge rebellion in China which destroys the central authority of the Tang Empire. When you say a huge battle on the steps, have you any idea of the numbers involved?

No? Tens of thousands, but... But how many? Are we not going to get very far? There are supposed to have been about 10,000 Chinese prisoners taken away after the battle westwards. So, yes, we are talking about tens of thousands involved. Must have been quite a sight, mustn't it? I mean, the Chinese

against the Muslims on the steps of Asia, goodness. Anyway, never mind, let's not get carried away. Right. So, Tim Barrett, that had the law of unexpected consequences. After that battle, the prisoners taken, among those 10,000 Chinese, brought to Europe, that which he had not

had before, which pushed Europe forward massively. In the long run, or so the Arab sources tell us, they tell us that these are slightly later medieval sources tell us that amongst the prisoners were a craftsman who could make paper. In fact, although this is credible,

we don't have to believe this was the sole way in which paper making techniques spread westwards from China because we already have examples of paper made in the region of Samarkand before the battle and it shows that it's probably a slow spread of techniques through Central Asia because Central Asian paper, unlike Chinese paper, has a higher, more of a tendency to use rag-based paper,

fewer sort of plant fibres available. And it's this that spreads through the lands of Islam and eventually through Spain and Sicily ends up in Europe in time for it to be used to print on, because in fact it takes the Gutenberg system and printing much better than anything but the finest vellum. So, yes, we wouldn't be sitting here with your piece of paper in front of you, were it not for the Silk Road.

That's a bit of a jump, but still. Can we talk just briefly about other technologies which came, let's say, to the west from the east, use it geographically and not geopolitically? I was going to say, as I was looking quite carefully to try and find things that came from the West. I don't think there's so much apart from chariots. Well, there is an example, again, of technicians moving from one area

to another, and this is actually we tend to eliminate India from this discussion and talk about East West in a rather Eurocentric way. But in fact, we do know that again under the tongue, technicians who could improve Chinese sugar making were recruited

from India. So it was a two-way exchange of technology. But we read that gunpowder came from China, that not much a compass came from China, that the block printing came. So it's moving west, isn't it, from China there? And that's coming through the Silk Road, that's being carried through there.

Absolutely. I mean, it's the same people's, the same ideas and so. Sogdian letters were written on paper, one should remember, in 300 AD. but technology moves along the Silk Road with its specialists. And you said the Tang drew back, Naomi. The Tang drew back into their own, back into China, partly because of the disruptions at the centre.

And what happened to China after that before we come to the Mongols, and particularly Genghis Khan? Well, after the big rebellion, Tang Central Authority has broken down. China breaks down into a provincial arrangement. really where governors may be paying nominal, giving their allegiance nominally to the centre, but actually are acting autonomously. There's a rise of nomadic groups to the north.

And when the Tang finally gives way to the Song dynasty in the later 10th century, the nomadic groups are controlling the northern parts of China. by the time the song starts in 960 nomadic groups control everywhere from Beijing northwards and that only gets worse for the song because in 1126

they get pushed further south again and they end up only controlling the southeastern corner of China and then Genghis Khan comes on the scene more or less yes not quite then it is a bit later but I want to get to it before we move on So he comes on with the Mongols

and then one of the things he does is drive West again, very hard. That's right. In 1206 he begins his expansion. He ends up, not he personally, he's dead by then, but by the end of the 13th century he's taken the whole of China. But in fact, before that happens, the early conquests of the Mongols actually push across the Silk Road and they very quickly take control of the groups that control the Oasis.

So I'm trying to keep on to the Silk Road because there's so many fascinating side roads, but let's stick to the... So they're using the Silk Road, they're going along with, King's Guy and his successors, and they're using the... I just want a little note here, Francis. When I was at school, Marco Polo did all this. He seems to have disappeared.

I hoped he wasn't going to be... Well, I think... Marco Polo... I think we should leave the personality out of it. If we forget Marco Polo, there is a text or a series of texts associated with the name of Marco Polo, which I think do consist of a sort of medieval database of European knowledge of China at the time. And the story, anyway, so if we go back to the story, the story is that Marco Polo's father and uncle were trading from Constantinople and were thinking of going home to Italy, but were driven east by Mongol wars. and finally they reach Caracorum,

they come face to face with the great Khan of all the Mongols and he likes them so much he asks them to come back again, bringing priests with them so that they can have arguments about religion and so they go back home to Italy and then they come back again bringing Marco Polo with them and eventually they're supposed to have saved 20 years in China. So that's Silk Road travel as told by Marco Polo

and or his father and uncle. And it's quite clear that medieval Europeans did know quite a a lot about what conditions were like on the Silk Road, whether it is an individual like that, or more likely, I mean, the information comes in fact from the missionaries who were being sent in increasingly large numbers eastwards by nervous popes and nervous kings of France who were looking, I mean, rather as Tim talked about, the Chinese in the Han, trying to find allies along the Silk Road against their local enemies. So Europeans were sending priests along the Silk Road, trying to find Christians

who might help them in their fight against Islam in the Holy Land. So the third big flow, Buddhists, Muslims and then the Christians and others as well. There's Osserians and so on. How did it come to an end, the Silk Route that we've been talking about, Francis?

What do you want to talk about? Tim. You're passing the buck here, you're going to. It landed with you, the buck stops with you. Fair enough. Okay, you want to end it around about 14. 1900.

No, you. I'm in your hands. Well, put it this way. Again, it's geopolitical in my view that the Mongols were eventually driven out of China who by a leader

who said, the Mongols were all right. They just weren't tough enough, meaning really they weren't organized enough to keep control of China. But although a new Chinese dynasty, the Ming, did manage to reassert Chinese control, the Mongols actually retreated

back into Mongolia. And although they spent most of their time squabbling with each other, they did, in Chinese eyes, remain a threat. And you find in the early 15th century massive armies, allegedly half a million men being sent to try and deal with this threat. So China is really rather too preoccupied with its northern frontier to expend much effort on trying to control the silk road. And also, they had an unfortunate problem with Tibet, which had been part of the Mongol Empire, and the Tibetans and the Mongols had become close in terms of religion. Their form of Buddhism was the same. Now, the Chinese had influence in Tibet, but not control,

with the result that if they tried to push into Central Asia, they could have been squeezed from two sides. Therefore, in terms of the Chinese influence along the Silk Roads, there was really no point in trying to keep it going as a Chinese concern. And also they started to carry more goods by sea.

You could get more in a ship than you could on a horse and that sort of meant that it fell into a certain to sue you. Didn't it? Name is Stanning, if I said I mentioned the inconnectedness fostered by the Silk Road, could you give us some examples of that? The different civilizations, people's

ideas going backwards and forwards. Can you just enrich that for us a little? Well, the cultural mixing that happens along the Silk Road, and in the Oasis particularly, is quite astonishing. And you see some of fantastic combinations of different cultural influences. So, for example, in the southern oases at the eastern end of the desert, you find there's a kingdom there that ends in the fourth century. and in the communities which have been found there preserved in the sand abandoned communities you find

Gander and Buddhas so with Indian influence combined with Corinthian columns astonishing combinations like that and in another place you find angels classical angels painted by somebody who signs their name Taita which seems to be perhaps a Greek or

Roman name, again combined with Buddhist elements. But perhaps the most astonishing thing, or the thing which encapsulates the combination, is actually from this Indian-influenced area that Tim is interested in talking about. And that's from the Kushan Empire, which forms in Bactria around about the same time as the Han dynasty. and there's a reliquary there that seems to have held possibly Buddhist relics but it's not completely clear what kind of relics and it is an astonishing decorated vessel and on the top of it there's a Buddha, a Ganderan Buddha with again this Indian influence

but it's flanked by two Hindu gods Brahma and Indra and then on the side of the vessel there is an image of the Kushan king wearing Kushan clothing of the heavy sort of top coat and boots and he is flanked by two Persian gods for the sun and the moon and then there are these cherubic very familiar to us from classical Mediterranean cherubic boys

supporting a garland which seems to connect the whole thing together and the inscription is in Karosti one of the Indian scripts and this is just an astonishing vessel which just seems to encapsulate the mixing What I was thinking is that something that still persists I think until this day is that if you go to the markets I mean, this is the timeless Silk Road.

The markets were always the place where the people from different groups met. And if you can read in 19th century accounts, early 20th century accounts, and see yourself. If you go to the markets, you see Kyrgyz with woolly hats and knee boots and black sort of frock coats. And then you have Uyghur trainers wearing little black skull caps embroidered with white, and you have all the ICAT robes. You can actually see people from different cultures, if you like, mixing together still in the marketplaces, which are so character.

characteristic of the Silk Road. And that does seem to be, you say the time of Silk Road, but it certainly does seem to have centuries of history behind it, in that vast numbers of different people with speaking different languages, practicing different religions, different social and political organisations, seem to have been able to meet and interact on the Silk Roads.

And they did it, for the most part, without fighting each other. They was fighting, obviously. But most of the interactions for most of the time were fairly peaceable. Any concluding remarks from you, Tim? Well, yes, I also find it extraordinary that although trade didn't normally act with direct, it went from hand to hand, you still get people moving right from one end to the other, like the cleric from the area of Beijing, who ends up talking to Edward I. Or, in fact, if we look at the Indian side of it, coming down the silk routes,

we find Goths in India in the 4th or 5th century. Goths, indeed. Thank you very much. Francis Wooden Amos and Tim Barrett. Next week, Pythagoras and the Pythagorean, that the basic idea of the world can be expressed in numbers and in mysticism. That's about it, isn't it? Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC Radio 4 podcast, why not try BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas podcast,

which includes the highlights of this year's free-thinking festival. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash podcasts.