New book examines the Silk Road's pivotal role in shaping the fate of rulers, dynasties and the nation as a whole, Zhao Xu reports.

Galloping horses and their mallet-wielding riders — these are the images that adorn one of the walls within the burial chamber of Li Xian (655-684), a prince of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Li had the good fortune to have been born while the empire was at the height of its power and influence, and the bad luck to have been entangled in a political struggle much fiercer than the battle on the polo field that entertained his afterlife.

Viewers of the mural see it as showcasing a typical leisure activity enjoyed by the Tang social elite, which, not unlike many other aspects of their life, had been heavily influenced by foreign elements that were imported via the Silk Road. Yet the picture is not complete until one casts a glance toward the opposite wall, where a group of envoys, their identity indicated by their distinct appearance, can be seen socializing with their Tang hosts. Together, the athletes and the spectators tell a story discernible only by someone who has studied the Silk Road and its travelers in depth.

"The polo court was a key place — apart from the palace — where the Tang emperors gave an audience to visiting envoys. It was where diplomacy was conducted and the potency of the empire put on visual display," says Wen Xin, assistant professor of Eastern Asian studies at Princeton University and author of the book The King's Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road, published by Princeton University Press.

"There was also a polo field in Dunhuang, where a delegate sent out by the Tang court would routinely deliver the royal edicts to the local governor," continues Wen, who has used Dunhuang, a Silk Road juncture under the rule of the central government during the Tang Dynasty — and, later, the Northern Song period (960-1127) — but was run with a high level of autonomy, as a focal point to construct his narratives.

The path to peace

In the 10th century, Dunhuang fought two major wars with Uygur-controlled Ganzhou (modern-day Zhangye in Gansu province), about 600 kilometers to its east. The first one, which Dunhuang started around 910 and lost the following year, came partly as a direct result of the fall of the Tang Dynasty.

"News traveled fast along the Silk Road. Emboldened by Tang regime's demise and apparently unimpressed by its immediate successor, the short-lived Later Liang Dynasty (907-923), in 910, Zhang Chengfeng, the then governor of Dunhuang, founded his own state 'the Golden Mountain Kingdom of Western Han (Xihan Jinshan Guo)' and declared himself 'son of heaven'," says Wen.

Overridden by his ego, Zhang brought Dunhuang to war with Ganzhou in pursuit of land and glory, only to find the city besieged by his adversary. But to Wen, what was illustrative of the role the ancient Silk Road played in what he dubs a "global medieval" period was a letter of petition from the Dunhuang people to the ruler of Ganzhou at that critical moment.

Allegedly written by the city's "ten thousand commoners", the letter invoked the common history between Dunhuang and Ganzhou — the unconditional service of both parties to the Tang emperor, and how, before the war, "the eastern road was open and the heavenly (Tang) envoys were never impeded".

It's worth noting that both Dunhuang and Ganzhou were Tang territory, before they were lost to an expanding Tubo regime while Tang grappled with internal unrest in the second half of the eighth century. Songtsan Gambo (617-650), the Tibetan founder of Tubo, was once conferred a high-level feudal title by the Tang court after marrying one of its princesses.

Lasting for about half century, Tubo control started to dissolve following the assassination of its last leader in 842. Between 848 and 851, a local strongman named Zhang Yichao routed the Tubo army in both places.

"Upon his military victory in Dunhuang, Zhang Yichao immediately dispatched a delegation — in fact, several delegations — to inform the Tang emperor that Dunhuang (known then as Shazhou) was once again part of the empire. They were on the road for three years. And that was the beginning of Dunhuang under the Zhang family rule," says Rong Xinjiang, a celebrated Silk Road scholar and a mentor to Wen during his time as a student of history at Peking University.

That rule ended with Zhang Chengfeng's fiasco and his subsequent replacement by Cao Yijin who, upon coming to power, immediately restored Dunhuang to its previous status as a component of, if not the Tang, then another northern-China based power entity.

"By announcing its inclusion in a bigger empire, which its neighbors had been part of, or had forged close bonds with in their own ways, Dunhuang effectively signed itself up for stability and a share of the Silk Road," says Rong.

Family ties

When Cao Yuanzhong, son of Cao Yijin who ruled Dunhuang between 944 and 974, appeared in a fresco in one of the Dunhuang caves, he chose to be seen in a hat and a robe that seems to have been directly borrowed from the royal wardrobe of a contemporary Northern Song emperor.

Both the Dunhuang governor and the Northern Song emperors accentuated their minimalist style with belts decorated with Khotan jade — luxury items on the Silk Road that worked their way into "a shared culture of kingly dress" to quote Wen.

The long journey of the jade — from Khotan to Dunhuang and, ultimately, to the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng in modernday Henan province — also belies the persistent effort of one particular ruler of Khotan — Visa Sambhava — to reconnect with the "heavenly empire", from which his territory had been cut off more than half century prior.

These included forging closer ties with Dunhuang by marrying the daughter of Cao Yijin and, rather extraordinarily, adopting for himself and his successors the surname of the Tang royal family, Li. Visa Sambhava, or Li Shengtian as he chose to be known, declared himself "a Tang imperial descendant", a claim substantiated by the marriages between Tang princesses and his royal ancestors, one of whom, in the eighth century, famously chose to settle in the Tang capital of Chang'an after arriving there with his Khotan soldiers to help put down a revolt that lasted for eight years.

"While commoners depended on the road for material necessity, the kings and officials relied on it for legitimacy," says Wen. That explains why Zhang Chengfeng, whose war with Ganzhou wrecked "the eastern road", was blamed by his own people. If peace was sought and obtained in the name of the road — the Ganzhou ruler withdrew his army upon receiving the letter of petition — war was fought in its name, too. According to Rong, somewhere between late 924 and early 925, barely 13 years after Dunhuang's defeat, Cao Yijin, whose rise to power was propelled by that defeat, initiated another military campaign against Ganzhou.

The reason for taking such apparent political risk was cited in a popular song believed to have been performed during New Year celebrations in Dunhuang. "For several years, the road to the east was obstructed/rendering us fish in a small pond," the song goes. In other words, Ganzhou, situated to the east of Dunhuang, had blocked the way to northern China and severed the city from the road that meant oceans for them.

This time, likely with huge popular support, Dunhuang prevailed over Ganzhou. "Envoys from the inner land (northern China) newly descend upon our western garrison/and the Son of Heaven congratulates our righteous army," continues the same song, which opens with the sentence "Hexi is the old land of the Han family" — the Hexi Corridor being part of today's western China to which Dunhuang and Ganzhou both belonged.

According to Wen, one of the largest known groups of travelers ever recorded on the Silk Road was a delegation from Khotan to the empire of Han (206 BC-AD 220), and included 1,074 members. Taking the region under its wing and installing a tributary system with itself at the center, the Han Dynasty saw its symbolic power and binding force invoked in times of contention, seven centuries after it had ceased to exist.

It was the same with the Tang, says Rong. "For the populace in both northern China and the Hexi area, the empire's rallying force persisted long after its collapse. Those who recognized it, the Khotan ruler Li Shengtian for example, actively sought alignment with whatever power seemed to have emerged out of the shadow of the Tang. He was among the first rulers along the Silk Road to congratulate the founder of the Northern Song Dynasty and pledge his allegiance."

These facts have led Wen, toward the end of his book, to view the history of "Hexi" as an integral part of larger Chinese history, providing a crucial point of reference not intermittently, but continuously.

"With an open communication channel for both materials and information maintained by post-Tang Silk Road travelers — diplomatic and otherwise — between Khotan and Kaifeng, the Hexi area continued to hold up a mirror to the Chinese heartland during a time of political fragmentation," he says.

For proof, sources deemed hugely important to the study of the Tang, Northern Song dynasties, and the time in between, had been discovered in the Library Cave of Dunhuang.

Reflecting on the different way Zhang Chengfeng, the governor of Dunhuang, and Visa Sambhava had acted following Tang's fall, Wen says they shared at least one thing.

"Instead of trying to break away from the powerful regimes in northern China, both had presented themselves, rhetorically, as their successors," he says, pointing to Zhang Chengfeng's naming of his regime as "the Golden Mountain Kingdom of Western Han", referring to the first half of the Han Dynasty, associated with the opening of the Silk Road leading to Chang'an, the capital city of both the Han and the Tang dynasties.

In one of the Dunhuang caves, Visa Sambhava, a man of seeming modesty and practicality who ruled Khotan for over half a century between 912 and 966, is depicted in a portrait that fulfills all imagination one could have about a Chinese emperor. "King of kings of China" was how his son and successor was referred to in local documents. The title is likely to have started with him.

"What was 'China'? The image and the claim, observable only in the Dunhuang documents and murals, may point us towards an answer," says Wen.

Contact the writer at zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn