Step Fifteen

The word "cosmopolitan" gets used as an adjective, but if we look to the original Greek, it's actually a combination of "cosmos" and "politas" - "citizen of the world". It's been appropriated as an adjective, like in reference to a city, where it can mean "Having the characteristics which arise from, or are suited to, a range over many different countries; free from national limitations or attachments." or "Composed of people from many different countries." (both OED Online)

Regardless of nitpicky details about parts of speech, I figure, when we're talking about cities anywhere along the Silk Road(s), and especially ones near the ends, we're talking about the latter definition. So when we're talking about Xi'an (Chang'an, on some maps), we're talking about a city that is ridiculously ethnically/culturally/linguistically/religiously/etc  diverse.

This was my thought process (with some help from the internet - I don't carry the Oxford English Dictionary around in my head, unfortunately) when I dug out my course outline in my attempt to write something that actually fit with the week's theme instead of just branching randomly and haphazardly from the readings.

And then I read some articles. Two really stuck out at me: Bundy's essay "Missiological Reflections on Nestorian Christianity during the Tang Dynasty" and the first chapter of a book by Edward Schafer - romantically entitled Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics. I'm going to go with a tri-layered argument refinement process here, to boil down a concrete strategy for how to deal on the Silk Road once you reach your destination.

I would like to sum up Section One, before I begin it, with the phrase: "like the new Star Trek movie!" Bundy's focus on the Nestorians' awesome survival method reminded me so much of that movie, in an abstract sense, it was ridiculous. Basically, if you haven't seen it, J. J. Abrams, bless his heart, managed to craft this movie that satisfied both the hardcore Trek nerds (tribble in Scotty's office was such a nice touch) and made a whole new fanbase of people who found it a genuinely good movie without needing to know any Trek lore at all. How does this relate to the Nestorians? They were, essentially, J. J. Abrams. They kept, as far as I can tell from Bundy's article, the basics of their religion so that the original adherents stayed cool with it, while changing and revitalizing things to appeal to the whole new fanbase that they found in China.

So, really, the Nestorians and good ol' J.J. make the point that one should adapt to the times/places in which one finds oneself - to make whatever it is that one is both something that one can fully own, and something that can be equally owned by the other people of the time/place.

In the margins of the article, next to "Step 15: IT'S JUST LIKE STAR TREK!" is the scribble "although it kinda failed the Nestorians but wtvs." And I was pretty worried - was the one awesome argument that I'd found in Bundy's article totally called into question by the fact that the Nestorians were kind of subsumed into broader Chinese culture so that we have very little information about them at all - Bundy makes it seem as though he presents the bulk of the extant material in all of 11 pages - and so that they essentially disappeared as a cultural subset?

It turns out that Schafer is very helpful in answering that question with a resounding "No!" Schafer details an elegant, slightly disorganized (so much getting lost. So many delicious little tangents.) history of Tang China with reference to commerce and luxury items and traders and stuff. It's all really wonderful and opulent and happy and "oh, so traders liked to live here..." until he starts getting into expulsion edicts and the idea of making monastics of all religions disrobe and join secular society for tax purposes and then the revolts and killing of foreign traders and it all gets pretty terrifying.

The basic idea of Schafer's chapter, in connection with my lacklustre conclusion from Bundy, is that, in Tang China, particularly during the end of the dynasty, it was less about cultural survival and more about survival. Period. The Nestorians, then, did it right - they adapted as much as they needed to in order to survive, and if that meant not being foreign, and if that meant getting rid of monastics (which Bundy maintains were the backbone of the religion), and if that meant protecting your family from overzealous revolutionaries however you could, then you did it. I think, too often, in academia we forget about the nitty-gritty, the everyday life aspect of things, and we say "Gee, the Nestorians didn't do themselves any favours!" but what we really mean is "Gee, the Nestorians didn't do us any favours!" and we don't see that, on an individual level, they survived. Dying for your faith is all well and good, but if you can preserve your religion in quiet while preserving your life as well, then, you know, I'd vote for that.

Additionally, as the latter part of the Schafer's chapter makes very clear, whatever your culture was pre-Tang-blowup doesn't matter. Even if you had a strong, non-adaptive presence, after you're gone, they'll find their imaginations are more exciting than you ever were.

It's a sobering thought, that, even if you were really radical and strong and didn't adapt at all, you might not make a mark. And I think it makes the middle point a lot more important, because if even your culture won't survive, you might as well start to think about yourself as an individual/member of a family and get on weathering the storm.

Troubling lessons of the Silk Road(s) boiled down into Step Fifteen: Adapt, and you have a chance of survival. Because even cosmopolitan cities can decide that the world is just too big to include inside their walls, and the weeds that stick up beyond the grass are the ones that get pulled out. 

Step Three

It turns out that to dominate the Silk Road, you have to be a pastoralist (nomadic herder) - at least according to David Christian. In his article "Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History", Christian argues a bunch of different things, among them the idea that the established "civilizations" on which the historiography of the Silk Road focuses were not the only peoples to benefit from the trade route, nor, in fact, were they the dominant type of people. 

But first: there was definitely more than one Silk Road. This actually makes sense to me - there are about three dozen ways to get to my dorm room from the other side of campus, and I do sometimes feel like an adventurer figuring them out. And if I were a truly methodical person (alas, I am only a pretender to the title), I would have an ongoing map where I could plot out the routes with times and obstacles and places for potential SMC students (the bandits in this scenario) to lurk. I also don't have appropriate measuring tools, and the face of Devonshire Place seems to be changing almost daily - I blame the drunken parties for knocking over the giant vases - so imagining my route exponentially longer, harder, and more dangerous leads me, in a roundabout way, to think it's rather intuitive that there be several Silk Roads. 

So, all of these trade routes were miniature, according to Christian, as in not stretching from the Mediterranean into the heart of China. There were tons of inter-relationships going on in the areas that the Silk Road on my map sprawls through - as early as the 2000s BCE! And the majority of this exchange (Christian prefers the word to "trade" because "exchange includes ideas, diseases, and the inevitable procreation) happened between the agrarian settlements and some majorly badass pastorialans.

These horse-raising folk lived in the steppes of the Urals and the Himalayas and the Altais and the Karakorums and the Tianshans and the Kunluns and the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush and all the other mountain ranges that I'm missing and traded pretty far into Mesopotamia. In fact, Christian blames them for this idea that there was one mostly homogeneous Afro-Eurasian path of development and overarching cultural structure. But more on that in Step Four. There was a definite plus, it seems, in being a nomad, even if it meant you couldn't read or write and you didn't build cities (although you apparently stopped long enough to raise wheat every so often).

What I want to know is, if, as Christian painstakingly points out, it's super hard to merge the archaeological record of the pastoralists with the historical/textual record of the agrarians, how come it only takes him 26 pages to make his the-pastoralists-win argument (among like three others that all mixed together at times)? He provides a lot of "evidence", I'll give him that, in the form of quotes from lists of products and horse-raising statistics and draws a lot of conclusions about dates based on quantities of silk in places. As logical as it sounds - heaven knows the discipline of history ignores things all too often - I just don't feel justified in being convinced. Granted, I AM convinced, I'm just trying to figure out why I am. Maybe it's my soft spot for nomadic-horse-raising-kickass-warrior-types. Maybe I kept hoping his people of the steppes included the Tibetans, who were ridiculous horse-raising-kickass-warrior-types for a decent chunk of their history. Maybe I was sucked in by the romance of these people of the steppes galloping through the hills Lord of the Rings style, on a mission to bring mountain wool to the people of the cities/towns/villages and return with metallurgical objects. 

Anyways, maybe I'm only dubious of his research - that's it, I'm dubious of his research, not his conclusions - because he quotes himself so much. He's an interesting fellow - PhD at Oxford, in Russian history. Wrote lots of books - including a history of vodka. Is now really interested in "Big History" which is essentially the story of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE from Planck time onwards (the course description says from the Big Bang onwards, but I read some theoretical physics this summer, so I know that's impossible). So I'm not sure how he's qualified to do any of that? But he's been alive for a while. Lot's of independent research. 

Anyways: me becoming disillusioned is beside the point. If we take Dr. Christian at face value, and I stick with my original thoughts on the article, Becoming a Pastoralist is an absolutely perfect Step Three along the route that my map says is the Silk Road.

Step Two

It turns out that travel on the Silk Road involved ridiculous amounts of risk.

So I'm looking at this map of the routes, and there are a bajillion tiny names of places and snaky rivers and marvelously detailed miniature mountains. And I'm getting out my List of Places and Scenery, to mark everything off with some kind of awesome colour code (because what else does one do with new hi-liters?), and I'm realizing that there's no way that ALL of these Silky Tourist Attractions can be on the map.

It also turns out that you can't just GoogleMaps the Gobi Desert. 

Anyways: risk. After finishing my finicky labeling and hi-lite-ing, I just sat there, staring at this brightly coloured map that's now pinned to my bulletin board, and I thought, "There were no hi-liters in the early centuries of the Common Era". Which is beside the point, because there were other ways to mark key spots and I sincerely doubt that the traders had to know the location of, say, Lhasa. I Googled around until I found a map that showed me where the Gobi Desert (and a bunch of other places that I had to write in) was, and, let's face it, the early-CE equivalent of Google was wandering around the traders' haunts and inquiring very carefully and with liberal donations to drinking funds. And even then, how do you trust your sources?

I'm fairly certain that Google and its affiliates have not lied to me and I am safely assured that my map is accurate enough for my purposes, so the beginning of my journey rests on a firm foundation. But if I were a would-be trader -- I would of course first have to be reincarnated as a man, but I digress -- and I were setting out for the first time, I would have absolutely no certainty as to my foundations. Granted, I'm sure I would've had people I DID trust, but who would give away the secrets to this incredibly lucrative and already well-traveled trade route?

AND THEN. Just looking at all the deserts and the mountain passes and the distances between cities where BANDITS and ROCKSLIDES and ANIMALS and CARRIER DEATH and LOSS OF TRADE GOODS and LOSS OF SANITY and DEHYDRATION and STARVATION and I-DID-NOT-KNOW-THEY-TRADED-HERE-TOO and all the other traumatic possibilities of such an extended travel (getting swindled, running out of tea, losing one's second-best desert wear so that, upon meeting tribal cheiftans, one is ridiculously under-dressed and therefore subject to all sorts of terrible treatments)...

Major disincentive to going anywhere NEAR there.

And what happens if you get lost? If you stray so far off-track that you end up in Kathmandu and have no way of communicating your way out because you didn't MEAN to go to Nepal in the first place? What if you lose your maps? Carrying this one in my head is starting to look like a better and better plan.

Step One: start a travelogue

Step Two: get some maps