The History of China - #99 - Tang 17: The Battle of Talas

Episode Date: May 29, 2016

The armies of the Far West Anxi Protectorate of the Tang face down a force commanded by the ascendant Abbasid Islamic Caliphate, fresh off its victorious insurgency over the Umayyad Caliphate. But in this one and only clash between Chinese and Arab might, the ramifications for both will be felt long after the blood dries on the battlefield along the Talas River. Time Period Covered: May- September, 751 Major Historical Figures: Tang Dynasty – Protectorate of Western Pacification Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (Li Longji) Governor-General Fumeng Lingcha Governor-General Gao Xianzhi (Go Seonji) Bian Lingchen, Court Eunuch on Assignment to Anxi Lieutenant Li Siye Officer Duan Xiushi Transoxiana: Lesser Bolü Kingdom (Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan) Shi Kingdom (Tashkent, Uzbekistan) Turgesh Khannate Karluk (Qarluq) Turks Tibetan Empire Abbasid Islamic Caliphate: Governor Ziyad ibn Salih Major Works Cited: Bartold, Vasily (1928). Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (Trans. T. Minorsky & C.E. Bosworth). Chen, Sanping (2012). Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Golden, Peter B. (1990). “The Kharakhanids and early Islam” in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, vol. 1 (ed. Denis Sinor). Hoberman, Barry (Sept/Oct. 1982). “The Battle of Talas” in Aramco World, vol. 33 no. 5. Ibn al-Athir, Ali (ca. 1231) The Complete History. Sima, Guang (1084). Zizhi Tongjian. Soucek, Svak (2000). A History of Inner Asia. Starr, S. Frederick (2004). Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland. Szczepanski, Susan (2015). “Battle of Talas River” in About.com: http://asianhistory.about.com/od/centralasia/a/BattleofTalas.htm Tsien Tsuen-hsuin (1985). “Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1: Paper and Printing.” In Science and Civilization in China: Vol. 5. Twitchett, Denis (ed.) (1979).“Hsuang-Tsüng: Li-Lin Fu’s Regime” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and

Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Before we launch into the show today, let me first recommend that, after you're done here of course, you go check out Roy Field Brown's excellent 10 American Presidents podcast. In each show, Roy Field has a guest give us the life and legacy of 10 of the U.S.'s most influential leaders. My personal favorite episode is, in fact, the first, which is the life and administration of Richard Nixon, as told by none other than Dan Carlin. Yeah, that Dan Carlin.

Please give it a listen, and while you're doing that, check out all of the other shows on offer through the Agora Podcast Network at www.agorapodcastnetwork.com. Thanks again, and enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 99, The Battle of Talis. Today we're going to pick up more or less where we left off last episode, at the conclusion of our broad sweep across the western and northern borderlands of the Tang Chinese Empire round about the year 750.

Up to this point, Emperor Shenzong's militaries have been largely successful in their clashes with neighboring civilizations, and, a few hiccups with the Khitan and Koreans notwithstanding, have been able to push both Chinese interests and borders outwards with very few setbacks. Well, that's all about to change today, as the Tang Empire faces off against a new and unfamiliar foe in its furthest western reaches of Central Asia, which we're going to continue to collectively identify as just Transoxiana. It's a clash between two world empires, one old, one new, that has for centuries been passed over, ignored, and virtually forgotten as insignificant,

and yet one which more recent scholarship has shown to be far more important than the historians of the ancient world could have possibly realized at the time. Before getting to the titular battle, however, let's take a look at the man who would come to be in command of the Chinese military of the far western Anshi Protectorate in 751, and who would be so embarrassingly defeated there that year. By now, it should come as little surprise that, as a military commander of the frontier armies, General Gao Xianzhi was not, in fact, Chinese. He was instead Goguryeo-Korean, and as such, we sometimes see his name rendered in the Korean style as Go-Song-Ji. Gao's father, Go-Sagye, had been a Goguryeo commander, captured by the victorious forces of Emperor Gao Zong, and then removed to the Tang Empire, and later

given a military commission in its army. Sagye's commission assigned him to a post in the Anshi Western Protectorate, and it was there that his son, Xianzhe, was born, although the date is uncertain. Gao Xianzhe is described in both the old and new books of Tang as rather unusual for a military man, much less one who would eventually command entire armies. He's written to have been small, scrawny, and even sickly, causing his father to frequently worry about his poor health. As can so often be the case with children given a physical disadvantage, however, young Xianzhe rather overcompensated for his small stature with an outsized sense of bravery. Like all military men of the Tang, and especially those stationed in the Western Protectorate, becoming useful as a soldier meant learning the ways of the horse and bow from an extremely early age.

Xianzhe might not have been the biggest or the strongest, but he could ride and shoot with the best of his peers. Because of his boldness and bravery, sickly little Gao Xianzhe was rapidly promoted through the ranks of the protectorate force, earning himself his first commission as general in his mid-twenties. His first command would be of the desert area surrounding Kashgar, which sits right on the border of China, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan today. Nevertheless, in spite of his rapid rise to a generalship, further promotion would have to wait. Over the course of Xuanzang's Kaiyuan era, he was repeatedly passed over for nomination to the regional governorship,

in spite of his commanding officers repeatedly recommending him for such a promotion, given his bravery and skill on campaign. It would only be towards the end of the Kaiyuan era, circa 741, that he would at last be given the deputy governor-generalship of Anxi, directly under the current governor, a man named Fumeng Lingcha. Now, as we discussed last episode, there were several competing powers with interests in the region. Of course, there was the Tang Dynasty, but also the Islamic Arabs, who we'll get to

in a little bit, the Turkish Khanate, and China's chief rival power in the West, the Tibetan Empire. It would be against the Tibetans that Gao would command his first Western campaign. Over the early 740s, Tibetan intrigue and marriage alliances had convinced a number of the Transoxianic city-states to switch their allegiance and vassalage over to them. The greatest and largest of the city-states to flip over to Tibet was known as Lesser Bolu, or Xiaobolu, in what is today the northernmost reaches of Pakistan. With the assistance of the Tibetan military support, its walls had managed to resist no

fewer than three concerted attempts by the Chinese military commanders to forcibly retake it. In 747, however, General Gao personally led a fourth campaign against the Tibet-backed Lesser Bolu, leading an army of supposedly some 10,000 mounted cavalry in a three-pronged surprise attack against the city. Gao's cavalry managed to take both the Bolu and the Tibetans by surprise, seize control of the city, and take the king and his queen, who was a Tibetan princess, as it were, captive. With them in tow, he then returned victorious to the Anshi Protectorate to report his great victory. Now, proper military protocol dictated that Gao should report this to Governor Fu Meng,

who would in turn report the news of the victory back to the Tang capital. It was just the chain of command. But Gao wasn't about to let his boss steal his thunder for this conquest, and so bypassed Fu Meng entirely and reported his victory directly to Xuanzong. As you might imagine, this breach in the chain of command did not sit well at all with the regional governor. In what was just a truly epic rant, Fu Meng read Gao the Riot Act. According to the translation of the Old Book of Tang by Sanping Chen in his book Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages, Fu Meng went so far as to

insult his very ethnicity, quote, Continuing the quote, Gao Xianzhe, a rising star in the Tang army and an ethnic Korean, was cursed by his dog-worshipping proto-Tibetan, ethnic Qiang, superior Fu Meng, as, quoting Fu Meng now, a Korean slave who eats dog intestines and thus dog shit, end quote. Governor Fu Meng then threatened to kill Gao, a threat he seems to have been prepared to carry out, if not for the intervention of Bianling Chen, a eunuch sent from the capital under orders from the emperor himself to monitor and report on Gao and his forces. Bian promptly, or at least as promptly as travel between Anxi and Chang'an could be expected, reported Fumeng's threats to Emperor Xuanzong. Now, it seems that Bian must have had the direct authority

to order a stay on Gao's potential execution here, since the trip would have taken him weeks or months in either direction. Regardless, once the situation was made known to the capital, Emperor Xuanzong dispatched an order to the frontier, simultaneously recalling Fu Meng Lingcha to Chang'an and promoting Gao Xianzhe to the governorship to replace him. Sima Guang writes in the Zizhi Tongjian that in the wake of this surprising reversal, one of the other military regional governors and at least two of his generals,

who were loyal to Fu Meng, then attacked Gao, forcing him to order their arrest. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter he had the three released and reinstated to their posts, explaining that he felt that they had merely been venting their anger and frustration, and now, having had sufficient time to cool their heels, he felt that he could still work with them. It's not stated directly whether or not the attackers were of or related to the same people as Fumeng, who again was classified as a member of the Qiang tribe, but it does seem likely, given their violent reaction.

And if that was the case, their outburst might be seen as a kind of canary in the coal mine of the far west, that with so many different nationalities and ethnicities all working as the Tang Empire's outermost bulwark, the policy of using barbarians to deal with barbarians, as we've called it, it's unsurprising, perhaps even inevitable, that fractures would develop. Fractures likely to split open at the most inopportune of times. For the moment, though, anyway, Gao Xianzhe's successful campaign to capture the Bolu city-state had yielded far more than just the one kingdom. In the wake of its capture, dozens of trans-Oxianic states flocked to declare themselves once again as Tang vassals,

with some sources citing as many as 72 minor kingdoms defecting from the Tibetans, Indians, Sogdians, and critically, the Islamic Caliphate. Governor-General Gao would follow up his first campaign with a second strike to the west, aimed at consolidating and further expanding his imperial holdings there. This second strike would likewise prove successful, but was capped off rather infamously with the sacking of the city-state called in Chinese Shi Guo, or literally the Stone Nation, in what is now modern Tashkent, Uzbekistan, whose name likewise means Stone City, so how's that for continuity? The Zizhi Tongjian recounts the event as the Tang army encamping outside the walls of the city, and Gao entering into negotiations with its emissaries to conclude

a peace treaty between the two. The treaty was apparently signed and completed, and one of the stipulations was that Shiguo must stand down its defenses and open its gates before the imperial army. But upon doing so, surprise, Gao ordered his troops to attack without warning, and with the Shi Guo army caught completely flat-footed, the city was almost immediately taken. Its king and the majority of the city's population were taken captive, and Gao both ordered that the Shi king be sent back to Chang'an to be publicly executed, and also that any among those taken prisoner who were old or sick or weak were to be publicly executed, and also that any among those taken prisoner who were old or sick or weak were to be immediately executed. As you might imagine, this raised the hackles of all the

surrounding city-states and minor kings to the Tang commander's treachery, and understandably so. Before departing, captives in tow no less, Gao made sure that his men thoroughly looted the city as well, with him personally taking a large supply of diamonds, several camel loads of gold, prized horses from the region, and many other treasures. It's all a matter of perspective, though, isn't it? Because while the kings and populace of Transoxiana viewed Gao Xianzhe's actions as an abominable act of treachery and cruelty, back in Chang'an, Emperor Xuanzang saw things a little differently. And by a little differently, I mean he commended Gao's victory

by bestowing on him the title of Kaifu Yitong Sansi, which we might translate as the government agent of the third rank, and was a hugely high honor, especially to be bestowed on a foreigner like Gao. Gao and his Anxi protectorate army had done their best to round up any and everyone from Shi and shut them up one way or another. But as it so happened, they managed to miss in their roundups one of the Shi princes, the son of the king, who slipped Chinese patrols and fled the region. The Shi prince made his way to one neighboring kingdom after another, ultimately making it as far west as the great regional capital of Samarkand, bringing with him his story of the Tang army's treachery

and their apparent propensity to turn on, enslave, or kill even those states with whom it had concluded formal peace deals. His outrage was, as you might imagine, infectious. If the Shi kingdom could be betrayed by the Tang agents, what was to stop the same from occurring to any of its neighbors? Even banded together, though, these minor kingdoms and city-states couldn't hope to stand against the Chinese military's supremacy. What they began to realize that they needed was an equally powerful protector. And as luck would have it, they were in luck. One is emerging as we speak. The Islamic Umayyad Caliphate had sprung out of the Arabian peninsula of Asia Minor in the mid-7th century, following the death of the fourth and final Rashidun, or rightly guided, Caliph, that had pushed Islamic and Arabic control out of the sands of Mecca and Medina and onto the world stage. Taken completely by surprise, both the Eastern Roman Empire of Constantinople to the northwest

and the Sassanid Persian Empire to the east had both been knocked firmly on their heels by the unexpected and vigorous expansionism of the fearsome and religiously invigorated armies of the prophet. Taken thoroughly by surprise, the Byzantine Romans had been thrown onto the defensive against Arabic raids and armies, but had been able, at least, to fall back into defensive positions throughout Anatolia and across the Bosphorus Strait, and of course behind the impenetrable walls of Constantinople itself. The Persians, on the other hand, had not fared nearly so well, and in the time between the 630s to their final defeat in 654, they had steadily lost ground to the Arabs, culminating with the Caliphate completely

conquering its holdings throughout Central Asia, and with the final Shah-in-Shah of the Persians, Yazdegerd III, meeting a truly ignominious end when he was murdered by a peasant for his purse while hiding in the city of Merv. In the intervening nine decades following the Arab conquest of Persia, the Umayyad regime had consolidated its holdings and continued to press against the Byzantines, but had also seen growing rifts from within. To really, really simplify it, to really, really simplify it, the ruling Umayyad clan had first made rivals of, and then outright enemies, of the Abbasid clan, over questions of right to rule, and whether or not blood relation to the Prophet Muhammad

should determine eligibility to lead. In any case, that had finally boiled over into outright civil war in, wouldn't you know it, 747, when the Abbasids, based in Kufa, along the Euphrates River in modern Iraq, not far from where Baghdad sits today, launched their revolution against Umayyad control. Progress against the crumbling edifices of the Umayyad regime was rapid, and by January of 750, following a decisive victory at the Battle of the Zab, resulting in the final Umayyad caliph fleeing to Egypt, the Black Standard of the Abbasids was flown over Damascus, signaling the effective end of the old order. The newly ascendant Abbasid Caliphate, then, was riding

high in the year 750. They had just done the seemingly impossible and toppled an impossibly huge empire from within. Moreover, unlike the Syrian-based Umayyads focused on the western borders rubbing up against the Eastern Roman Empire, the Abbasid's base of power, and thus focus, was far more eastern-facing, stemming as it was from central Iraq, and in fact in short order they would move their capital to the new city of Baghdad. It's pretty easy to understand from that perspective, then, that when the armies of the new Caliph received pleas for assistance from its easternmost vassal kingdoms and tribes against what sounded like, and let's just call it out, totally was, Tang Chinese aggression. They were only too eager to test their mettle against this new and unfamiliar foe. Historian of Central Asia,

Svat Susek, writes in his A History of Central Asia, quote, Not only were the Arabs at the height of their youthful vigor, but their outlook had a far more He then goes on to relate the specific circumstances of the lead-up to the war to come. Quote, The tentacles of Chinese power now began to probe the territories to the west as well, and the rulers of Tashkent and Fergana appear to have been among the vassals of the Tang. Like them, the nomadic Turkish too recognized Tang suzerainty. In 750, there erupted a quarrel between the Chabish and the Ixid, the two rulers' respective titles, by the way. Continuing the quote, with the Turgesh taking part as the allies of the Tashkent Chabish, the Ferganan Ixid requested help from the Chinese, end quote. All right, so let me just pause there a moment and get us all

up on the same page here. If all these names and peoples and conflicting titles sound confusing as all get out, that's only because it totally is. Transoxiana at this point is a confusing muddle of settled city-states, minor kingdoms, and roving conets of nomadic horse-riders. Trying to make heads or tails of all the conflicting relationships between all of them, well, we could probably spend hours and hours just trying to untangle that. For our purposes, though, the important bit is that the Tashkent prince made his way to Samarkand, which as we just said was newly under Abbasid control, and was able to make his appeal to the city's governor, Ziad ibn Saleh.

Ziad, in turn, asked the Abbasid military commander, Abu Muslim, for reinforcements to deal with this apparent border dispute, and by the following summer of 751, it was on. It'll probably forever be impossible to determine with any hope of real accuracy the number of combatants on each side, and especially so since they both gave such wildly different accounts of one another. Both sides in all likelihood wildly inflated the number of enemy troops, and it's easy enough to understand why.

From the winner's perspective, well, everyone likes an underdog, and saying that your plucky band of righteous warriors managed to win over numberless hordes is a classic trope. Heck, we're still retelling the story of the 300 Spartans holding off the million-man army of Persians at Thermopylae 2,500 years after the fact. And if you happen to be the side that lost, well, what were you supposed to do?

There were just too many of them. Nevertheless, it's both interesting and amusing to hear the two different takes on the same battle. By Chinese accounts, they showed up with about 30,000 troops, 10,000 of whom were ethnic Chinese, or at least near enough, while the other 20,000 were made up of a band of Turkic mercenary cavalrymen known as the Karluk or the Garluk. The Abbasid records, on the other 20,000 were made up of a band of Turkic mercenary cavalrymen known as the Karluk or the Garluk. The Abbasid records, on the other hand, insist that the Tang army was more than three times that size, numbering them at over 100,000 strong.

Numbers have a similarly wild swing for the number of Abbasid Arabs and their allies on the other side of the field. The Arab records don't seem to give a definite number, though we can assume that they claimed far less than the frankly ridiculous number written in Chinese sources, numbering the Abbasids arrayed against them, or as they called them, the Black-Robed Warriors of Great Shi, at more than 200,000 soldiers,

including contingents sent by their ally, the Tibetan Empire, as well as their own contingent of Karluk Turkic horsemen. Whatever the actual number on either side, though, both sides do agree that the Arab force was the larger of the two as the Tang and the Abbasid forces met at or near the Talus River in what is today Kazakhstan, under the beating, oppressive heat of the July sun. Governor-General Gao Xianzhe ordered his army to attack, and the two forces would commence in a struggle that would last for the next five days. But if General Gao had acquired a reputation of treachery after his sacking of Shiguo, well, he would come to know exactly how bitter betrayal could feel during his time at Talis. The specific details appear to have been

lost, indeed if they were ever written down in the first place. Perhaps the Karluk's under the Tang command had simply been bought off by the Arabs, or perhaps they felt the tide of battle shifting against their interests as the days of hard fighting ground on. It seems likely that their tribesmen on the Abbasid side might have played a role in their decision to defect. It also seems likely that there was more than sheer politics or tribal loyalty at play, given the time and nature of their defection. Maybe the Tang Chinese commanders had rubbed the Karlukes the wrong way, or had offended them somehow. It certainly wouldn't have been the first bridge Governor General Gao Xianzhe had burned. But whatever their rationale for doing so, the 20,000 Turkish horsemen decided to betray their Tang paymasters

in just about the most spectacular fashion there was. This wasn't them just slipping off in the middle of the night to cross the lines and effect. Oh no, the Turks waited until the two armies had joined together on the fifth day of battle and then, in the pitch of fighting, one and all turned on their stunned Chinese erstwhile allies, joining their brethren Turks, Tibetans, and Abbasids alike in the slaughter that was to shortly follow. Pinned by the Arabs from the front, the Tang armies could do little indeed as a full two-thirds of its army

turned and proceeded to massacre them from their flank. Or at least that's the Chinese viewpoint. Again, the Arab interpretation differs rather wildly. According to the traditional Arab historian, Ali ibn al-Atir's recounting of the battle, the Turks had all been allied with the Arabs from the beginning, and rode up from behind the Tang Chinese army on the fifth day as part of a calculated strategy of the Muslim commander Ziad ibn Salih. 14th century Muslim historian Al-Dahabi wrote of the victory,

God cast terror into the hearts of the Chinese. Victory descended and the unbelievers were put to flight, end quote. What Al-Dahabi does not mention is that the victory that descended on horseback to rout the Chinese were themselves also likely unbelievers, or at least some of them. Though Islam had begun to make inroads into Transoxiana as a philosophy, the Turkish at this point would have still largely been followers of some combination of Tengriism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism, along with a whole mess of other beliefs. Nevertheless, most modern interpretations of the battle side with the Muslim interpretation on this particular point. It seems just far more likely that the Turks would have joined the fray conclusively

on the side of the Muslims from the start, and acted, as cavalries often do, as a surprise flanking force, rather than the rather less believable Chinese insistence that they would have turned in the middle of a battle. We don't know, though. It could be. According to the accounts of the Zizhi Tongjian, of the 30,000 troops that had ventured under Gao's command to the banks of the Talis River five days before,

a mere 2,000 were able to escape back to the Anshi Protectorate. Though of course, it should be remembered that of those 30,000, 20 of them had up and turned traitor. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over 10 generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com.

That's the Ancient World Podcast. Gao Xianzhe was one of those lucky few, thanks almost entirely to his lieutenant, a man named Li Siyue. As Gao tried in vain to reorganize his shattered and stunned lines of remaining troops following the Kharlok's apparent battlefield defection. Lieutenant Li managed to shake his general out of whatever illusions of scrounging of victory he still possessed, pointing out that continuing the battle would be beyond useless, beyond futile, but an out-and-out suicidal proposition. Li advocated ordering a full retreat, which, had it been carried out, would have almost certainly resulted in a full and unorganized rout. He was, however, rebuked by another Tang officer, named Duan Xiu Shi, who exclaimed, quote,

Both Gao and Li agreed. Thus, while Gao organized a more methodical retreat with the remnants of his army, Li Saye organized a rearguard action to cover him and allow the remaining scattered Chinese troops, still alive, the opportunity to escape the field of carnage. For their actions and advice, both Li and Duan were promoted following the Battle of Talis and would remain one another's close advisors thereafter. So what are we to make of this crushing Chinese defeat at the hands of the youthful upstart Abbasid Empire? Does it herald the decline of Tang influence west of the Tarim Basin? Does it mean the further eastward push of the Abbasids into lands claimed by the

Son of Heaven? Well, no, not really. As Susak puts it, the Arab victory at Talis was barely noticed by contemporary chroniclers, Muslim or Chinese. The fact of the matter was, at that time, it really didn't matter much to either party. Gao Xianzhi, for instance, was neither castigated nor demoted for his defeat at Talis, and at worst, it simply marks the point at which Chinese domination finally pressed far enough west into a military force able to push back in any truly meaningful sense. Let's put it into a numerical context, shall we? The Chinese lost, by their own estimate at least, some 8,000 men.

Certainly not the Tang army's best day ever, but at this point, the standing army of the whole empire was, according to historians, like Bai Shouyi, exceeding the half million mark. If you were to throw an army of that size up into the modern world, that would place the Tang empire of the 8th century as the world's 7th or 8th largest active military force on the planet today, of rough parity with the likes of Iran and Turkey. Losing 8,000, or even 28,000, frontier soldiers was a bad day, a bad roll of the dice, but that was about it, and certainly how Chinese historians have traditionally portrayed the encounter, and not as anything more. To the Abbasids as well, this was a frontier issue, and a minor one at that.

Both Tang and Abbasid empires, drawn into the conflict at the behest of their respective vassal states in the region, seem to have been quite simply not that interested in pressing the issue any further. In fact, we only get a single source that even bothered to recount the battle from the Muslim side at all, and that's Seljuk historian Ali ibn al-Atir, who only mentioned it in passing when he wrote it half a millennia later in the 13th century. Sure, it might have stopped the westward push of the Tang influence permanently, but it likewise didn't see Arabic influence exerted further to the east either. On its own terms, the Battle of Talis wasn't terribly significant to either of the major parties.

So then, you might be asking yourself right about now, why am I wasting your time with what amounts to a meaningless border dispute? Well, on its own terms, and at the time, it might not have seemed terribly relevant. But the significance of the outcome along the Talis River really only comes into focus with enough historical hindsight. In fact, it's only been in the last century or so that its importance and implications have really begun to be explored. Potentially one of the earliest sources saying as much was the Russian, and later Soviet, historian Vasily Bartold, who wrote in 1928, quote, The early Arab historians, occupied with the events then taking

place in Western Asia do not mention the battle, but it is undoubtedly of great importance in the history of Western Turkestan, as it determined the question of which of the two civilizations, the Chinese or the Muslim, should predominate the land of Turkestan, end quote. Other subsequent historians have somewhat tempered the amount of importance laid at the feet of this battle. For instance, S. Frederick Starr wrote in 2004 in his book Xinjiang, China's Muslim Borderland, quote, Unfortunately for Gao, his Turks turned against him. Still, this battle is not as

important as is sometimes implied, for the Arabs did not advance. End quote. Still, there's little doubt that it was far more important than either traditional Arab or Chinese historians had thought in centuries past. Though it was barely a line-item report on the dockets of either Chang'an or Baghdad at the time, it did have far-reaching and long-term effects for both empires and the world as a whole. For instance, the outcome of the Battle of Talis did signal the end of a direct line of contact between the Buddhists of the Indian subcontinent and those of China. What this would mean in the centuries to come was that the two iterations of the philosophy

would evolve fundamentally independently from one another, and thus develop significant distinct spiritual and philosophical elements. In the future, we're going to be effectively done with the long and storied tradition of Chinese Buddhist priests journeying to the West to receive enlightenment from the pure source in India. China would become its own spiritual center of Buddhist thought, ultimately eclipsing outright the point of origin

and accompanied with the emergence and development of its own native branches, such as the Pure Land and Zen sects. And this increasingly indigenous form of Buddhism would be the version that spread to the likes of Korea and Japan. If you've heard of the Battle of Talis before this show at all, though, it's probably for the following reason, and that is it is how the Arabs, and thus the West,

acquired the ability to produce one of the most important and yet perhaps underrated inventions humanity has ever created, the process of combining wood pulp, water, and a frame into a piece of technology we have used daily for more than a thousand years. Paper. Of course, the Chinese had been the one and only masters and keepers of the secret of paper since its initial refinement and manufacture by Cai Lun during the early 3rd century, just before the final collapse of the Han dynasty. Prior to Cai's refinement of the process, which itself had crude origins as early as the 2nd century BCE, Chinese writers had precious few options on which to pen, or just as often carve, their thoughts. The most typical material prior to the adoption of paper were either bamboo strips laced together,

bone fragments, or rolls of silk. You can probably see the issue with any of these methods. They're either difficult, expensive, or both. And this, of course, was the bane of both this podcast and, of course, early Chinese historians since time immemorial. That so many sources alluded to or referenced by surviving works simply did not survive the rigors of the intervening centuries, or were occasionally consciously destroyed entirely by those wishing to quite literally erase contrary viewpoints from history. If there are only five copies of a silk scroll, for instance, or one roll of a bamboo strip, it's pretty easy to ensure, through accident or design, that none of them survive. In fact,

it's something of a miracle that we still do have as many of them as we do. The rest of Asia and Europe, well, let's just go ahead and say the world, had much the same problem, though they'd come up with their own varieties of solutions. Ancient Mesopotamian civilizations initially carved their legal writings into soft clay tablets and then left them to dry. You've probably heard of ancient Egypt's solution to the problem of what you write on, which was pressing together and drying off the stems of cypress papyrus reeds, commonly simply called papyrus. This had proven very effective, but was a laborious process to say the least. The precisely cut stems had to be interwoven in just the right

way and then allowed to partially decompose in water in order to enhance their sticky adhesion before finally being allowed to dry, and then they had to repolish it before they could write on it. A law of supply and demand, of course, dictates that such a material would have been artisanal and thus expensive, not something you're going to write your next sticky note on. Yet that had been the go-to solution for writing needs in Egypt and the surrounding kingdoms since the 3rd millennium BCE. It was a technology some 3,000 years old, still alive and well in the 8th century, over large parts of the world, for the simple reason that there was literally nothing better.

Non-Mediterranean Europe had found its own inventive solution to the age-old question of what the hell are we going to write on. Given that most of the continent was sadly lacking in cypress reeds, the parchment of Europe had been largely vellum, or the prepared skin of a calf, although other animal skins were also commonly used. Now vellum was superior in at least one sense to papyrusus in that it was far more durable since it was based on animal membrane rather than compressed weeds. The trade-off, of course, was that calves are both in rather shorter supply than reeds and that any one calf could,

on average, be expected to produce three, maybe three and a half medium-sized sheets of quality writing material. What that means is that if you're wanting your next George R. R. Martin book published in vellum, you're going to have to skin a lot of baby cows for every copy. And moralistic objections aside, that is going to be a hugely expensive copy of The Winds of Winter. All of this meant that for the rest of the world outside of China, writing, and thus reading, were an incredibly elite affair. Now I'm sure we all have a vision in our heads of the typical medieval peasant, and one of those most common traits I bet our imaginary serfs possess is that they are

fundamentally illiterate. Unless they were of a noble house or had gone into the clergy, we all know that they couldn't read. Usually, we dismiss these people as being stupid because of it. Ha, look at that idiot covered in filth who can't read. It makes me think of nothing so much as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And there's a joke in the movie's first act, which is that the dung-covered peasantry King Arthur encounters has somehow heard of and embraced anarcho-syndicalist communism. It's impossible not just because it's anachronistic, but also because the idea of them embracing such a philosophy heard of and embraced anarcho-syndicalist communism. It's impossible not just because it's anachronistic, but also because the idea of them embracing such a philosophy presupposes that

they could have read and understood it. Of course, that's the absurdist humor of the joke. We all collectively understand that these idiot peasants couldn't have understood Noam Chomsky if a time traveler had warped in and handed them a copy of his book in person. So, ha ha ha. But I think that when we stop and really think about it, we know at a deeper level that people couldn't read because they used to be stupider or something. They couldn't read because there was no reason or opportunity to ever learn how. If you're a subsistence farmer, spending your hard-earned cash to maybe be able to afford one single copy of the extremely limited,

extremely expensive editions on vellum was just about the last thing you'd ever want to prioritize. There were just much more practical things to spend that cash on. In modern terms, it might be a question along the lines of, well, should I buy a new tractor this year or one copy of the War and Peace? You're not an idiot if you pick the former, but you just might be if you pick the latter. For European peasants, yeah, your church had a book. Maybe if you live in or near a big city, it had a library of them. The wealthy aristocracy might have a few precious heirlooms, but even those, outside of the hyper-wealthy of the era, were few and far between. We have to remember that for the vast, vast majority of the world,

books and reading were not only not a given, but an out-and-out, laughably esoteric skill. It'd be like knowing C++ or JavaScript coding languages, but it's the year 1900. And that monopoly on the written word, make no mistake, was hugely powerful. Today we understand the power of the written word at such a fundamental level because it's been democratized, but back then, most of the peasants didn't even realize the benefit that knowing how to read could yield them. The elites, on the other hand, be they of civil or theistic bent,

understood that monopoly on power in a way that few, if any, of the illiterate peasantry ever did. By controlling the information and its interpretation, they could therefore control the flow and dissemination how they saw fit. It's no coincidence that Gutenberg's introduction of the printing press to Europe coincided with the first major split in church orthodoxy since the times of the Council of Chalcedon, nor the Renaissance or Enlightenment following closely on its heels. The democratization of information that first paper and then mass publication enabled was hugely powerful and hugely destabilizing

for the Old World Order. But I'm sorry, I'm getting dangerously close to running this episode completely off the rails into unconnected ramblings on pre-Renaissance Europe. Let's get back to the Middle Kingdom and 751. The Chinese technique creating paper was such a revolutionary shift in the medium for the simple reason that it's cheap as all get-out to make, at least once you know the process and have designed machinery that can produce it at scale. It can be made out of wood pulp like we do today, sure, but it can also be from just about any plant matter that has been sufficiently mulched up. Historian Qian Sunshun, who sadly died just this past year in 2015 and at the age of 105,

wrote of the process, quote, Cai Lun then initiated the idea of making paper from the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, rags of cloth, and fishing net. From this time, paper has been in use everywhere and is universally called the paper of Marquis Cai. End quote. The point is, you can make functional paper out of just about whatever you have lying around that has sufficient cellulose in it. That's the beauty of it. And it was so diffuse and widespread across China that by the 3rd century, 400 years before where we are now, it was not only used for writing, but also as wrapping paper, as padding or shielding for potentially toxic medicines or herbs, and even being folded into tea bags just like we still

use today. In the 9th century, the Chinese would begin the practice of using the material as toilet paper. That tells us a lot about just how cheap and easy it was for the Chinese. You know something costs virtually nothing if you're using it to wipe yourself once and then throw it away. This had allowed for a much broader segment of the population to become literate. It was just more practical than in the West. And as such, cultural and, dare I say it, even civilizational developments had been able to propagate at a much more rapid pace than elsewhere in the world. The story of paper's transmission to the Arab Caliphate goes like this.

Several prisoners were taken captive by the Abbasid army following their victory at Talis. Often the number is two, but sometimes there's more than that. They were taken back to the Khorasan provincial capital, Samarkand, and after some time, given what was the then standard issue option, the Arabs gave foreign captives. You can either stay here and languish in jail forever, or if you have something useful you can teach us, teach it to 10 of our craftsmen and we'll let you go free. The Chinese prisoners, who just so happened to moonlight as papermakers, readily gave up the secret of its production and assisted the Abbasids to construct their very first paper mill right there in Samarkand. This technology was soon duplicated and then refined in Baghdad, and then through the rest of the Abbasid Caliphate,

into Egypt and North Africa by the early 10th century, Muslim Valencia, Spain by the late 11th, Morocco by the 12th, India via Muslim merchants by the 13th, and to the remainder of continental Europe and the British Islands between the 14th and 16th centuries. And the rest, as they say, is history. And that's a nice story, for what it's worth. A single point of transmission from one culture

to another, nice and neat and easy to wrap your mind around. Which is why it almost certainly didn't actually happen that way. Two prisoners who just so happened to be able to give specific technical instructions on not only why paper was going to be useful, but how to make it? I mean, come on. In spite of the historical trope of Chinese civilizational secrets being ironclad until the beans are all spilled at once, let's be real here. Knowledge and the use of paper had been seeping slowly out of China for several centuries at the least. Korea and Japan, for instance, cultural and political satellite states that they were, were some of the first countries to begin independently

producing paper based on Chinese designs, as early as the late 3rd century, although some estimates do range at as late as the early 7th. Central Asia had also been exposed to paper for centuries by this point, and there's archaeological evidence of a letter written on paper in Samarkand dating from as early as the 4th century. So Talos wasn't the moment it happened in all capital letters, in the traditional storytelling sense. More likely, what the Battle of Talos did for papermaking was accelerate that slow westward creep by drawing the Abbasids' attention to the curiosities along its eastern periphery. Arab commanders and soldiers were

marching all the way to the Paramir Mountains to fight the Chinese, and some of them probably saw this strange writing material all over the place and thought, hey, that seems like a good idea, and brought some back to replicate. Nor would that technological transmission prove to be one-directional either. The Abbasids would go on to develop a method that utilized human or animal-powered mechanical hammer systems to grind and mix the cellulose during preparation, rather than the old Chinese methodology, which at that point still relied entirely on hand-grinding with a mortar and pestle. The Muslim power hammer method would ultimately find its way back eastward along Transoxiana and Turkestan, and be adopted in turn

by the Chinese as a far less labor-intensive method. So the Battle of Talis, in the end, was neither the meaningless border skirmish many traditional and classical accounts once sought to paint it as, before quickly moving along to whatever else was more important next. But it also wasn't exactly some epochal shift in Central Asia's history that wrestled for the very soul of Transoxiana like late 19th and early 20th century historians like Vasily Bartold rediscovered it as. Maybe it's better to think of it as a little of both, somewhere in between those two extremes. Much like the region itself, the implications of the one and only military clash between the Abbasid Arabs and the Tang Chinese defies easy explanation or clear understanding.

Geopolitically, nothing much changed for the time being. The outcome did not herald an immediate loss of power in the western reaches for the Tong, nor, as we've already noted several times, some prelude to invasion by the Arabs. It was literally a one-off encounter in a region too remote for either side to really sit up and take notice about. The cultural, religious, and political domination of Transoxiana would indeed be accomplished by the Arabs after 751, but that was a process that would occur gradually in the decades and centuries to come,

and was certainly not decided here and now. Yet the defeat at Talis does set an ominous precedent in the history books, a major defeat on the battlefield to a foreign power. And though no one in China could have known it at the time, events were brewing under the surface of the seemingly stable Tang dynastic order that would ensure in the years to come that Talis would be remembered as only the first of a devastating string of defeats and military conflicts, both inside itself and from outside. And markedly unlike Talis, which, though embarrassing,

was strategically unimportant to both the Tang and the Abbasids, the wars to come will leave the very fate of the dynasty hanging in the balance. And so next time will, of course, be our 100th episode special, where we will answer questions that you guys have been sending in, and please keep them coming, by the way. But after that, once we're into the triple digits, we'll watch the Order of the Tang that Xuanzang had spent more than 40 years wrestling into place completely unravel as his close friend and most trusted governor-general, An Lushan, launches a rebellion to supplant the dynasty altogether and install himself as the son of heaven, and in the attempt, commit one of the largest atrocities in all of human history. Thanks for listening.

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