The Early Years of the Silk Road!! Excellent Presentation!!

Hello everyone. Thank you for checking out my YouTube channel, The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. My name is Nick Barksdale, and today I am excited to bring you an announcement that I'm going to be uploading four videos provided by the China History Podcast, Laszlo Montgomery. I'm really excited to bring you these. Three of them are actually going to be on the Han Dynasty in China. I know many of you in my last video when I wanted to know what y'all wanted to see had requested ancient China quite a bit, and so this is just for you, but also for those who want an economic and a cultural history, I'm bringing you also from the China History Podcast, the early years of the Silk Road. If you have not listened to his podcast, you have to check it out. He is literally amazing. Excellent, excellent style, very well spoken, and honestly a great personality. I'm honestly very grateful to him for providing me with content for my channel, so I ask you check out his website, check out his SoundCloud channel, check out his Facebook page. I mean anything I can provide you involving him is actually going to be in the links in the description of each video. Please check them out. Give this gentleman all the support that you can, and especially check out his YouTube channel and SoundCloud account as well. His YouTube channel will also be down below, so please subscribe to that gentleman, give his video some like, and give him all the support you can. Thank you all so much. I hope you enjoy what's coming, and thank you for sticking with me. I wish you all a wonderful week, and have a wonderful day. Hey everyone, how's it going? Laszlo Montgomery here. Just as I feared, as soon as I left the friendly confines of Claremont, there was a degradation in the frequency of weekly podcasts, so my apologies for the delay. Today we're finally looking at The Silk Road. I couldn't bring a lot of books out with me last week to Germany, so I relied mostly on Francis Wood's book, The Silk Road, 2000 Years in the Heart of Asia, published in 2002. I was happy to get to re-know The Silk Road. Francis Wood basically delivers the whole product to you, complete with black and white and color photos as well. Front and center in today's topic are two main forces of nature. First are the various Central Asian people who made up all the towns, cities, empires, and whatnot of Central Asia, and the second was the infamous terrain that these rugged travelers faced off against each time they left the safety and comfort of the oasis. These Central Asians tied two parts of the world together, Europe and China. They did this through the mechanism of trade and through their perfectly centrally located geographic position. They were the ones who lived in the lands in between these two empires, so it was only natural that they would act in the role as the middlemen who performed as a catalyst to bring East and West together. Both sides had cool and interesting stuff that the other wanted, so it was only natural once they both learned of each other's existence between the first centuries, straddling B.C. and A.D., that something like The Silk Road would happen. How far back does this go when all this trade started? How did it all start? Why did they use the routes they did? Who were all these Central Asian people? We know China traded silk, lacquerware, jade, and other finished goods, but what did they get in return? And what were all these other ancillary benefits of the Silk Road? Today we'll try and answer these questions and reacquaint ourselves with the Silk Road, the Sichou Jirlu. You know, that's what we call it, the Silk Road, but back in the days when all those caravans were making the trek, if you asked a local which way to the Silk Road, they wouldn't have known what in the heck you were talking about. The Silk Road first got its name from the German explorer, adventurer, scientist, geographer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. He lived from 1833 to 1905, which means the term Silk Road hasn't been around that long. He was the first to say Die Seidenstrasse in 1877, pardon my Deutsch. The biggest challenge for me has always been keeping all the various Central Asian kingdoms and civilizations straight. Which were the Turkish-influenced ones, which were the Persian, who spoke which languages, and does anyone speak that language anymore today? For example, our heroes in this episode were a Persian people called the Sogdians. We know they were Persian because of their language root. They were the essential ingredient for so much of the time that the Silk Road was at the height of its importance. It was the Sogdians, more than anyone else, who facilitated everything along the trade routes and created the infrastructure, so to speak, that allowed for the dissemination of knowledge, particularly science, religion, and all the various tidbits of information that sort of greased the wheels of progress and increased man's comfort and convenience one drop at a time. They were at the center of it all. In fact, the whole lingua franca of the Silk Road was their language, Sogdian, not Chinese. But there is no Sogdia or Sogdians, and their religion, Zoroastrianism, along with Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity, were once the great religions of Central Asia until the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Very little today resembles how it used to be. After the Battle of Talas in 751, that was it. Things were never the same again, and it was only a matter of time before all of this massive land area turned to Islam. So we have, in today's episode, major civilizations, great powers in their day that played a starring role in the history of the Silk Road, and they don't even exist anymore, and the way people moved around in Central Asia, and the way everything has played out there over the millennia, there aren't a lot of easy bullet points and factoids to make it easy to understand and keep track of who was who and what happened to them. Sogdia today, well, if you laid an overlay of their empire down over a political map in the present day, it would cover western Kyrgyzstan, most of Tajikistan, the eastern part of Uzbekistan, a smidgen of Kazakhstan, and a drop of Afghanistan. Their capital was at the legendary city of Samarkand, which was later the capital of Tamerlane's empire, and once one of the centers of the universe, Tamerlane, of course, that ultimate killing machine who did all his damage during the late 14th century, today Samarkand is the second biggest city in Uzbekistan. So this sort of illustrates the complications of the times and why it's so hard to get your arms around the whole Silk Road. The China side of it, no problem. Everything is excellently documented, but that's just one side of things. Most of the action wasn't happening in China. The overwhelming majority of the lands where the Silk Road passed through were far, far away from China proper, and like I said, passed through kingdoms that not only don't exist anymore but didn't leave much of a written record like their Chinese business partners did. We'd have to go all the way back to the Han Dynasty to start at the beginning. This doesn't mean there wasn't any trade or interaction going on prior to the Han, but it was about the time of the Western Han, 206 BC to 8 AD, that China's emperors first gave it a serious thought about what worlds might possibly lay beyond those Xiongnu barbarians on China's western border. China History Podcast 47, we looked at the ultimate adventurer, Zhang Qian, who during his travels out west, beginning in 138 BC, saw Chinese goods in distant markets. So trade between China and the lands of Central Asia was already going on. It didn't spontaneously begin with the advent of the Silk Road. These first fearless traders, perhaps from a time as early as Alexander the Great, they were the initial ones who began to create a beaten path to walk on. These trailblazers were the first to mark the rugged paths that traversed some of the most frightful terrains and climates on planet Earth. Eight months of winter from September to May, minus 40 Celsius, and in the summer, blazingly hot and inhospitable. Yeah, Zhang Qian came back and told the emperor two things, and lucky for the entire Chinese race that sitting on the throne in Chang'an at the time was a man as intelligent, fearless, educated, and visionary as the Han Emperor Wu Di. Zhang Qian reported to his majesty the shocking news that China was not the only big kid on this block. There were other civilizations out there seemingly as mighty and as advanced as the Middle Kingdom. The other thing he reported was that those people way out to the west of China, they went totally gaga for these common everyday things that China made. So Han Wu Di fulminated a while and put two and two together, and he figured out, let's see, huge distant untapped markets, great demand for the country's products, and he did some arithmetic and figuring in his head, and then the light bulb came on. And then Han Wu Di used his powers as emperor to facilitate the early growth of the Silk Road, and great wealth began to flow into China. Now he had an idea that these people of Daqin, or, you know, as Rome was supposedly called back then by the Chinese, they loved Chinese made silk garments and fabrics, and of course back then, nothing worn by the swells of ancient Rome screamed out, I'm filthy rich like silk. You know, and it wasn't just the Romans, Chinese silk was in high demand in all the major markets of Central and Western Asia. Things really took off after Zhang Qian. Before Zhang Qian, the east-west trade volume was at a slow trickle. After Zhang Qian, that's when it became a steady stream. Even though they didn't call it the Silk Road back then, it was during the Han dynasty that the maps first started to be drawn. And then over the next half millennia, from the fall of the Eastern Han, the Three Kingdoms, the Jin, the Southern and Northern dynasties, and into the Sui, the routes developed more and more. And when Tang Gaozu and Tang Taizong ushered in the Tang dynasty, that's where we entered the golden age of the Silk Road. That was the time when Buddhism was all the rage, and the Silk Road was flowing with monks and pilgrims in both directions, all playing their individual parts in, you know, spreading Buddhist culture in China. Okay, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. You know, we always refer to this fabled route as the Silk Road, but that's not entirely correct. It's not like this Route 66 type road that winds from Chang'an to somewhere in Bactria. If we really want to call it what it was, we should say the Silk Roads, plural. Chang'an, and later Luoyang, was where it all began, or ended, depending on your outlook. If you had something to sell to the China market, the Canton Fair of its day would have been the imperial capital. And these magnificent traders from Central Asia, you know, from a dozen different tribes and cultures, you know, with all their unique garments and hats and accessories, which, you know, distinguish them from one another, they just camp out there and sell whatever they had, and then load up with whatever they could, and took that several thousand mile schlep back to the lands where they came from, which could have been as far away as Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan. The road back to Central Asia began in Chang'an, and then after you left the comfort to the city walls, it was the city of Dunhuang where you had that first major fork in the road. Dunhuang is about as far west as you could possibly go in Gansu province. It's at Dunhuang where Gansu rubs up against Xinjiang province. And way back in the Silk Road days, Xinjiang was known as Chinese Turkestan. That really was the end of the world, as far as China was concerned. If China's world ended at the farthermost gate of the Great Wall at Jiayuguan, if you just walked west, if you just walked west from there maybe four or five more days, you'd hit Dunhuang. Today, Dunhuang is most famous for their caves of a thousand Buddhas, the Qianfo Dong. In Dunhuang are the Longmen and Yungang Grottoes. The caves and grottoes of Dunhuang are right up there with the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Guilin, and all these great historic and cultural sites to see in China. Tourists and Buddhist pilgrims flock there regularly. And from the 4th to the 10th century, this town was one of the great world centers of Buddhism. Today, you can see a thousand years of Buddhist art there. Its significance to Buddhism was one thing, but as far as our little story goes, Dunhuang's location is where if you were traveling in a westward direction, trying to make your way to the bowel of Central Asia, you'd come upon one of the most fearsome natural obstacles on the planet Earth, the Taklamakan Desert. Even today, you'd want to avoid that place. This place is so desolate. It's where China used to test all their nuclear bombs. Dunhuang was the last stop before you came face to face with this very unforgiving place. So when you set out from Dunhuang, you had to make your choice to go around the rim of the desert using a northern route or a southern route. Imagine a flattened rugby ball shape, if you will. That's the approximate shape of the Taklamakan Desert. One route to the Silk Road ran on the top side, and the other ran along the bottom side. And like I said, the eastern tip of that rugby ball would have been Dunhuang, and the western tip where the northern and southern routes came together again, that was in Kashgar. And then from Kashgar, that was the launching point to wherever you wish to go, west to Samarkand, or south to the regions that are now in Iran, Turkmenistan, India, and Afghanistan. The Silk Road is pretty easy to keep straight up till now, but once you embark from Kashgar, this is where the routes varied a great deal. There are four main principal mountain ranges that play a starring role in our story. These mountain ranges, more than anything else, shape the geography of the Silk Road west of Kashgar. North of the Taklamakan Desert were the Tien Shan. Shan means mountains. Next range were the Pamirs, that sort of began where the Tien Shan ended. And then the Pamirs would hook down to the south, from Kyrgyzstan down to Afghanistan. And then next was the Hindu Kush, which ran west from the Pamirs. And then last but not least are the Karakoram Mountains that run along the borders of China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. K2 is in this range. These mountains were all 5,000 to 8,000 meters high and presented traders and travelers with the ultimate in cold weather and discomfort. So all the routes people ultimately took were very much determined by how to best get around all these obstacles. The northern route was less arduous than the southern route, but it took longer to get to where all the action was in South Central Asia. The towns of the northern route were all oasis towns with names like Hami, Turfan, Korla, Kucha, and Aksu. And from there you entered what was once Sogdia, and ahead lay the Uzbek cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bokhara, all important trading centers for the entirety of the history of the Silk Road. The southern route that ran south of the Taklamakan Desert, that too was rimmed with many oasis towns, Charkhlik, Churchen, Niya, Kuriya, Khotan, known as Khotian in Mandarin. Then, once pilgrims, travelers, and traders reached Kashgar, they made their way south through the Karakoram Mountains towards what is now present-day Jammu and Kashmir, where the ancient cities of Srinagar and Leh are located. Even with the most modern and sophisticated mountain gear and thermal clothing, trekking across the Karakorams would be a formidable hike. But from the 2nd to 4th centuries, the time of the Han, Three Kingdoms, and the Jin, this was the main road. And over the centuries, these fearless men and their beasts of burden, laden with cargo, would trek through these mountains, not for pleasure or sport, but for their own livelihood. And as the years went by, they found the safest and smoothest routes. If you were a trader, you would most likely take the northern route that dumped you off in what is modern-day Uzbekistan and northern Pakistan. If you were making the journey for the sake of your Buddhist faith, you took the southern route through the southeast edge of Xinjiang, through the Hindu Kush, to the Buddhist kingdom of Taxila, which today, interestingly enough, would be in modern-day Islamabad and Rawalpindi. You might even go further west, from there to Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan to the ancient trading city of Balkh. And beyond that lay the town of Merv, or Mari, in what is today Turkmenistan. Every place had a market, and wherever there was a market, that's where you could sell your stuff. And if they weren't in it for the religion, this is what you did for a living. And they risked their life with every journey. If you made it this far, beyond the Hindu Kush or Karakorams, the worst was over. To the south lay Parthia, aka Persia. To the north lay the Caspian Sea. And the gulfs of Persia and Oman were to the south. And from these bodies of water, there were a myriad of ancient cities to go trade with to all points of the known world. And this is how the Silk Road helped to make a very big and mysterious world a little smaller. If you kept going through Parthia, through Baghdad, Damascus, and Antioch, you made it to the Holy Grail. And I'm not talking about the Holy Land. I'm talking about the Mediterranean Sea. From the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, you could sail on further to the biggest market in the world, in Rome. This was a long, hard, perilous journey. So it made no sense to be moving trinkets back and forth. Realistically, you could only manage to make one trip a year, maybe two at most if the first one went off without a hitch. So you had to maximize your profits per journey. Back then, you had to pack up your camel or donkeys or whatever with items of the highest possible value. And this is how the trade in luxury goods went on for a couple millennia. It's the same today in my business. Now, of course, we use shipping containers and send cargo using these massive container ships. But that container is a certain fixed cost. If you loaded it up with junk, selling it a dollar a piece, the value inside that container didn't add up to much. Maybe $30,000, $40,000. Well, if you're paying $4,000 for that container, $40,000 with the stuff inside means you're paying a freight cost of $0.10 per piece. But if you loaded that container up with Louis Vuitton bags and iPhones, now you're talking some hefty values, which completely dilutes your freight costs to nothing. So if you were fortunate enough to make it all the way from Chang'an to Bokhara, laden with the most precious things China had to offer, you could take a couple years off back in the home country and live as large as you wanted. And if you went to the ancient equivalent of a duty-free shop, you know, like you have in the airports of today, you'd notice all the nicest stuff came from China. China had the ultimate in luxuries. Back then, this was silk, satin, lacquerware, musk, gems, diamonds, pearls. Interestingly, they also traded in rhubarb, a luxury back then but a common garden plant today. Back in the day, if you needed a laxative, and who didn't at one time or another, you took rhubarb. That was the marilax or dulcilax of its day. And so, it was highly valued. And if you were suffering the effects of constipation back in the Tang Dynasty, money was no object and whatever rhubarb cost, it was worth it. Rhubarb was one of many precious commodities traded along the Silk Road. As a businessman and trader, it's so interesting for me to compare the merchants of ancient times to today's modern international importer-exporter. The mechanics of carrying out this east-west trade were, of course, much different. But the ideas were all the same. 2,000 years ago, merchants setting out from Kashgar still had to deal with the same issues facing today's trader. You know, shoddy merchandise, loss or theft of cargo, finding newer and better suppliers, logistics, maximizing profitability, dealing with agents, opening up new markets. A lot of the headaches of the trading business haven't changed much since those ancient times. When these traders traversed these routes through these inhospitable climes, there wasn't much along the way as far as water and vegetation went. Food you could carry with you to a certain extent, but water, which weighed a hefty eight pounds per gallon, you couldn't carry that with you. It was utterly impractical. But you and your pack animals couldn't go a week, let alone many months, without water. And you couldn't climb 4,000 feet up the mountains to go get some snow each time you needed a drink. You had to get that snow down to ground level. And how to get that snow and turn it into melt water and channel it to the routes that made up the Silk Roads? Someone actually figured out how to do this. And if not for this, forget about having any Silk Road or anything even closely resembling it. First millennium BC, who do we have to thank for this ancient engineering achievement? The ancestors of the Persians, of course. These guys were smart. Still are today. So much knowledge and innovation came from them. They invented these things. Well, they go by many names, but we call them qanats. Q-A-N-A-T. A qanat was a whole system of bringing water from the mountains to the settled lands where you could support agriculture and human life. They dug an underground horizontal tunnel that would link up with the water table. And then perpendicular to this underground horizontal tunnel would be a series of wells. And the distinguishing feature of the qanats would be these... Well, if you saw them, they look like these big molehills or these little mini volcanoes. You would just drop your bucket or whatever down these wells and you'd get as much fresh mountain water as you needed. And it could be 100 degrees where you were standing there, but the water below the surface was just as cold and crisp as it was when it melted. And along the routes that collectively we call the Silk Road were these networks of qanats that not only brought life-giving water to thirsty travelers and their camels, but still do so today. That's why these roads were always so close to the mountains. The water came from the snow caps and you had to be close to the source. Before the Silk Road was the Silk Road, it was actually the main east-west trading route for jade. Jade preceded silk as one of the great luxury items of the time. Much of the jade treasures found in museums in China and around the world traveled this route one time or another. But it was silk that gave that legendary caravan route its name. Silk first started showing up in ancient Rome during the first century BC, the time of Julius Caesar. It showed up before then, but it was the days of Caesar that silk came into its own in the west. That was China's first major export to the world. Virgil spoke of silk in his writings. He mentioned it, but no one knew for sure what it was, how it was made, and where it came from. It was fabulously expensive. In 301 AD, you had the Edict of Diocletian. This Roman emperor tried to set maximum prices on various commodities of the day. I guess you could call them price controls. Nothing on that list topped silk. The Edict of Diocletian pegged silk at a maximum price of 150,000 denarii per pound. In those days, one denarii contained three grams of silver. At today's silver prices of approximately 25 euros per ounce, and one ounce equaling 28.35 grams, that came to about 90 cents euro per gram. Therefore, three grams of silver, or a single denarius, would be worth 2.70 euros, or a little over three and a half dollars. So you do the math. 150,000 denarii times three and a half bucks, that's over half a million dollars per pound of silk, or 400,000 euros. Now, this is all, of course, based on today's inflated silver prices, which, you know, of course, were much higher than back then. But I think you get the picture. Silk was not a commodity enjoyed by the hoi polloi. You had to be in the 3rd century AD equivalent of the Forbes 400 to enjoy the luxurious feel of silk against your bare skin. Gaius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder, who famously perished in 79 AD when Vesuvius blew its top, said of the Chinese and their famous export, They are famous for the woolen substance obtained from their forests. After soaking in water, they comb off the white down of the leaves, and so supply our women with the double task of unraveling the threads and weaving them together again. So manifold is the labor employed, and so distant is the region of the globe drawn upon to enable the Roman maiden to flaunt transparent clothing in public. The Ceres, or silk people, though mild in character, yet resemble wild animals, in that they also shun the company of the remainder of mankind and wait for trade to come to them. The Xiongnu, they love silk. And for all the years that the Chinese were paying them off to keep them at bay, it was a huge strain on the treasury. 25 BC, the Chinese sent 20,000 rolls of silk out west to the Xiongnu. On top of this, they also sent 20,000 pounds of silk floss or raw thread. And then when you added it all up, it came to 10% of the entire China annual revenues. So China paying these guys off to leave them alone was economically not sustainable. And that's why Han Wudi and later emperors had to ultimately take military action. The Xiongnu had been a pain in the butt to China since even before Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Nobody could beat these guys. And they simply came in from the west and at will just harass the heck out of the Chinese. But like most people, even down to today, they liked comfort and luxury when they can get it. So the Chinese kept them at bay the old-fashioned way, the same way all rich and powerful countries do. They paid them off. Sea travel wasn't as practical back in the first century BC. And considering China's geography, well, you couldn't just trek directly west across the Himalayas. That was totally impractical. You had to stay away from the Gobi and Taklaman deserts in the north. So they didn't have Google Earth back then. So they had to figure it out the hard way. Now, if you look at the topography, you go on Google Earth, pretty much the only practical overland routes linking Rome with China were the many subroutes that collectively we know today as the Silk Road. That was truly the only overland way to move back and forth. And it all got found out naturally through the amazing process of natural selection. These traders all figured out the best ways to get from point A to point B. And a whole network of towns, cities, trading centers, and markets that fed smaller markets, who fed the nooks and crannies of the least populated mountain villages. The whole thing developed starting in the Han and reached its zenith during the Tang from 618 to 907. After Zhang Qian, when it was learned that there were all these cities out there, the Silk Road was able to connect all the dots to all these famous ancient and historic cities. And the bottom line, the moral of the story is, this is how East and West were able to connect. And after all this trade got ramped up, not only merchants, but scholars, scientists, artisans, cooks, and, you know, well, almost everyone going in two directions. Merchandise, foodstuffs, animals, machines, fine arts, stories of amazing feats, new ideas, religion. The more developed and safer these routes became, the faster the new ideas and information could flow. All the knowledge of mankind had, up to that time, been sequestered in pockets all over the known world. And it was in all these nodes along the network, these places like Samarkand, Bukhara, Chuchan, Kashgar, Dunhuang, Damascus. Those were the hothouses where all this knowledge seemed to accumulate and was synthesized and developed and organized. And, you know, more and more people would pass through these places and take some of this new information with them and share it back home. It was only a matter of time that people would begin to travel the Silk Road just for the sake of learning and finding out new ideas. All these years, the Chinese had jealously guarded their secret papermaking technique. They tried and they tried, but once the Silk Road was in full gear, it was like the internet of its day. Nothing was a secret anymore, and wouldn't you know it, boo-hoo, all these civilizations from the West all started learning and copying China's papermaking secrets and, you know, would steal other kinds of Chinese intellectual property. What kind of trade was going back and forth between China and the West? Well, we know China exported silk, lacquerware, and jade, but also quite a bit of grain, textiles, and metalware was shipped too. And like I said, if the goods traded were made in China, enough said. It was a guarantee of sorts that it was of the highest quality, the finest materials, and the most intricate workmanship. And these hardy and fearless Western traders, you know, from Central Asia, they soon enough figured out what it was that they had that the Chinese wanted. Horses and donkeys were a major item. The markets for these kinds of horses from Central Asia was insatiable. They really were the iPhone 4s of their day. Heavenly horses, they called them. I discussed them in the Zhang Qian episode. The civilian and military applications for these Central Asian horses were innumerable. Besides these prized horses, there was also a quite a market for rhino horn. Yeah, somehow this secret of the amazing powers of rhino horn got out and was embraced by all Chinese males of a certain net worth. And now, 2,000 years later, rhinos in Africa and India are facing extinction due to the market demands of the medicinal powers of their horns. And if that's not enough, the Chinese early on in the history of the Silk Road, they got wind of the beauty and wonders of ivory, and what a fabulous substrate it made for the ultimate in carved objet d'art. So elephants, rhinos, sort of like McDonald's was to the humble cow, so was the Silk Road to these two creatures who have, from time immemorial, been such a marvel for mankind to behold. It didn't stop there. Tortoise shells, feathers of exotic birds, hides of ferocious wild animals, and even live animals. Ostriches, lions, tigers, giraffes, you know, whatever. Big markets in China for this too. And just think about it for a second. Even today, in the 21st century, shipping a panda FedEx from Sichuan to, you know, wherever in the world, even today, you really got to think this one out and plan it down to the smallest detail. Imagine back then, 1,000, 2,000 years ago, trying to get a rhinoceros from the jungles of India to the court at Chang'an. Even if you just tied it down for the whole journey, you still had to feed it, water it. And if one single rhino got there alive, I wonder how many perished in previous attempts. There were, of course, also many innocuous things like fruits, foodstuffs, spices, textiles, and whatnot that were also imported into China. Zhang Qian famously was credited with introducing grapes to China. And it was with the introduction of many of these new spices and foodstuffs that Chinese food became what it became. Imagine Chinese food without things like sesame or peas or onions, coriander, cucumbers. And the Chinese people, of course, they took to onions and voila, a new market was born. And then after the Chinese figured out how to grow onions themselves, well, the local market was able to be supplied. And then the price of onions would plummet. And then the common people, the 中国老百姓, they could now enjoy this once exotic food that was only found in the region around Bactria. You know, there's so many stories like this, how the Silk Road helped in many ways, small and big. Other high-value items exported to China from out west included silverware from Persia, glassware from Syria, amber that had come all the way from Scandinavia, and all the exportable luxuries that Rome could offer. You know, Chinese today love their Prada, Ferragamo, and Gucci. But made in Italy was also a big thing back in the Silk Road days. Coral, brassware, purple cloth, all hot in China. And this is, you know, especially true during the Tang Dynasty, long after Rome had fallen. We've learned from second-century Chinese literature that there came this amazing invention from the Arabs or perhaps the Persians, no one's sure, that was carried from west to east along the Silk Road. And it had quite an impact on Chinese society. In Chinese, we call it a 椅子. In English, it's called a chair. It's only in the Tang Dynasty paintings where you finally see for the first time people sitting in chairs that have backs on them. You look at all those old Han Dynasty scroll paintings, hey, life was very low to the ground prior to this great innovation that the Silk Road brought to China. You already had a pretty well-established elite during the Han Dynasty sufficient enough to create a market for luxury goods. But by the time of the Tang Dynasty, rich people who could afford these once unaffordable luxuries were a dime a dozen. So the market was vast. And this just fueled the Silk Road trade like never before. And if you walk down the streets of Chang'an back in the times of Tang Xuanzong and Yang Guifei, you'd see them all cooling their heels before the long trip back. Parthians, Sogdians, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Arabs, you name it. And this Silk Road culture, it has so fascinated mankind for so long. And even today, where you can be anywhere you want in the world in less than a day's time, even today, especially here in America, these places seem so far away and distant. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. This region has inspired writers and adventurers for centuries. Wow, I'm just getting warmed up here. I wrote something like 15 pages of notes and I still have four books unopened with little page flags in them that I was going to reference. And we've hardly even got started. I'm only on page four of my notes. And here we are, like almost 40 minutes into the episode. And it's already time to call it a day. So I titillated you with how Buddhism tied in with the whole Silk Road. Believe me, that was the main route between China and India. The number of Buddhist pilgrims dwarfed the number of traders who traversed the Silk Roads. I didn't even get to the incredible journey of the monk Xuanzang, Sir Aurel Stein, and his discoveries at Dunhuang. No time for that in this episode. So despite everything I've blabbered on about this past half hour, we hardly even scratched the surface. There's much more to this epic. So that will have to remain fodder for future episodes. I hope that entices you all to hang in there for a while. We'll come back and look at all these subtopics of the Silk Road another time. And Andis and Wuxi, I know you're muttering under your breath. Oh, here he goes again. But I'm going to say it anyway. I saved it to the end. So whoever is here just for the history and nothing else, hit that stop button. We're done. We'll see you next week. Maybe. I have to attend a few meetings in good old Shenzhen this week. So I'm taking that cafe flight tonight to Hong Kong. And like last time, I will take any number of convenient methods of transport from Hong Kong airport to Shenzhen. And in a semi-conscious fog of jet lag, I will do what I have to do for three days, and then I will come back. And so, all my smart and good-looking listeners, if more than seven days goes by again, and for the second time, there's nothing new here at the China History Podcast, as John Lennon said in your blues, girl, you know the reason why. Thanks to John in the Wolverine State, Michigan, USA, I've gone back and taken care of some cosmetic work on the podcast settings. I don't know why I listened to him, but my former guru told me to spell out the whole word without abbreviations, China History Podcast, and then the episode number and the title. Well, I noticed when I did it this way, all the visible spaces used, you know, to display the episode on an iPod or in the iTunes store were all wasted and filled up with these useless words. You can't see the title of the episode. And I've been meaning to fix this for some time, but I was thinking, nobody's complaining. But John emailed me and I figured I better prioritize that. So that's all fixed. Thanks again, John. Go General Motors. You can re-download the files if you want to go to that trouble. I did. So everything's now just like it used to be. CHP, you know, whatever, followed by the title. And so now that I've reached the end of this podcast, I'm going to retitle this episode, The Early Years of the Silk Road, rather than just, you know, the plain old Silk Road. What can I say? My eyes were bigger than my stomach, and I bit off more than I could chew, thinking I could cover this whole massive topic in one single episode. Who was I kidding? We'll come back and revisit the Silk Road, because believe it or not, a whole lot happened also after the Tang Dynasty. I mean, we didn't even mention Marco Polo. I just did. And so from Claremont, California, this is Laszlo Montgomery wishing you all a pleasant farewell and a fond adieu from the China History Podcast. Join us next time, whenever that may be, I hope it's not too long, for another presumably exciting episode of the China History Podcast.