quarters of the world.”For the Chinese, long-distance trade was seen as more
than just a way of obtaining exotic goods: it was an extension of imperial
foreign policy. One high-ranking official put it this way:
A piece of Chinese plain silk can be exchanged with the Xiongnu for
articles worth several pieces of gold and thereby reduce the resources of
our enemy. Mules, donkeys, and camels enter the frontier in unbroken
lines; horses, dapples and bays and prancing mounts, come into our
possession. The furs of sables, marmots, foxes and badgers, colored rugs
and decorated carpetsfill the imperial treasury, while jade and auspi-
cious stones, corals and crystals become national treasures.The long and involved story of Zhang Qian, Wudi’s obsession with the
Heavenly Horses, the expedition to Ferghana, and the Han war with
the Xiongnu are important to the history of long-distance trade because the
Chinese credit these events as directly leading to the opening of the Silk
Road and thus the establishment of commercial relations with the rest of
Eurasia. As Ban Gu puts it:“For thefirst time the states of the north [more
the west] then came into communication with Han. It was Zhang Qian who
had pioneered the way.”Critics of this viewfind it oversimplified, mislead-
ing, and terribly Sinocentric. The events of Wudi’s reign may have symbolic
value in Chinese historiography, they concede, but the creation of the Silk
Road was a long, laborious historical process, not a single event attributable
to one or several individuals who did something at a specific time. The
actions of Zhang Qian and Wudi at most represent China’s entrance into an
already established system that had been operational for millennia. Even this,
however, may be problematic because the Chinese can be seen as having been
a part of this system since at least the beginning of the Jade Road. And the
Jade Road itself was one part of a much larger system that has been called
the Proto-Silk Road, a chain of relays or circuit links.
Some speculation puts the origin of the Proto-Silk Road in routes going
back to the Neolithic period, but the date of 2000BCEis often used as a
convenience for designating a chronological point at which elements of these
ancient interconnections were functioning as an identifiable system. On its
western side lapis lazuli from Afghanistan had been reaching Mesopotamia
for some time, and copper seals of a particular style from Central Asia have
been found from Shahr-i-Sokhta in Iran to the Ordos region that separates
China and Mongolia. What has been proposed as the “Middle Asian
Interaction Sphere”tied Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, and Central
Asia through a network of overland connections funneling commerce in
luxury goods betweenc. 2600 and 2000BCE. On the eastern side, Chinese
silk has been found in an excavation in Bactria fromc. 1500BCEand vases
dating fromc. 1200 BCEtie Shanxi in northern China with the land of
Sogdiana (in Uzbekistan) that lay west of Ferghana. The earliest known
134 The last link