156 linrothe
silver ‘“bird-headed ewers’ ” such as the one excavated from a tomb dated
569 in Ningxia, Western China.14 These were brought into China by Sogdian
merchants who became so identified with them that in the eighth century,
Tang Dynasty tomb figurines are depicted holding one as they trudged along
the ramified trade routes known as the Silk Road15 bringing Persian and Central
Asian luxury items to China, as in the identical images of a bearded figure
with a bag strapped to his back in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum
Rietberg, and one excavated from Luoyang.16 Chinese white porcelain replicas
of the bird-headed ewers with pearl-bordered roundels demonstrate the
demand within elite circles for such products.17 The Kashmiri courts partici-
pated in such tastes and their artists appropriated them into their vocabulary.
Another example of a very similar, even more elaborate and delicately shaped
vase is found in a late tenth-century Kashmiri painting in Tholing in Ngari,
West Tibet.18 It is one of many indications at the site that Kashmiri artists were
directly involved even much farther East than Dras and Zangskar.
14 Watt, James C.Y. et al., ed. China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200–750 AD (New York, New
Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2004), cat. no. 157.
15 Phuntsog Dorjay discusses the three main routes connecting Kashmir, Ladakh and
Central Asia; Dorjay, “Embedded in Stone,” 39–40. See also Neelis, Jason, Early Buddhist
Transmission and Trade Networks: Mobility and Exchange within and beyond the
Nortwestern Borderlands of South Asia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 263–264. Although
Beckwith (and others) have critiqued the use of the term Silk Road, he continues to use
it and provides an adequate definition: “the ancient continental internal economy and
international trade system”; Beckwith, Christopher I., Empires of the Silk Road: A History
of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2009), xx. Jason Neelis also provides a summary analysis of the utility of
the term, and makes the point that silk was hardly the only commodity traded along the
“Silk Routes”; Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission, 291–292. For the origin of the term and
an assessment of its utility, see Waugh, Daniel C., “Richthofen’s ‘Silk Roads’: Toward the
Archaeology of a Concept”, The Silk Road 5.1 (2007): 1–10; I thank Jun Hu for bringing this
to my attention.
16 Watt et al., China, cat. no. 205. Neelis’ notion, following Z̓ ürcher, of “long distance
transmission” of Buddhism may appear in conflict with one of the conclusions of Valerie
Hansen that trade was more often local than long-distance (in harmony with Zürcher’s
“contact expansion”); Hansen, Valerie, The Silk Road: A New History (New York: Oxford
University Press), 2012. The case at hand, of Chinese association of Persian vessels with
Sogdian traders, seems to suggest that at least in the case of luxury objects, imports were
in fact identified with foreign traders from distant lands, though this is possibly a matter
of imagination rather than economic reality.
17 Watt et al., China, cat. no. 218.
18 Phun-tshogs-rnam-rgyal (彭措朗杰), and Zhang Jianlin (张建林), Tuolin si (托林寺),
(mtho gling dgon pa; ntho-ling [sic] monastery) (Beijing: Zhongguo dabai kequan shu
chubanshe, 2001), 121.