Susan Whitfield Life Along The Silk Road Analysis

Christina Mendoza
World Civilization
April 11, 2015
Life Along the Silk Road
Analysis

Susan Whitfield’s Life along the Silk Road, gives an incredible story of the varied history of the Silk Road and contributes to great events throughout world history. The book recounts the stories and the lives of ten individuals who lived along the Silk Road in different eras and movements. The tale of ten different individuals: a merchant, a soldier, a horseman, a monk, a nun, a princess, an artist, a widow, a courtesan and an official, all construct a different walk of life that gives to the overall richness of the historic Silk Road between AD 750 and 1000. The region covered in the book corresponds to modern day eastern Uzbekistan, western
China, Mongolia, south to the Himalayas and including Tibet. Today that region is largely occupied by Turkic peoples, mainly the Uighur, as well as Chinese colonists and is more Islamic than not.
In the time period covered by the book it was more Indo-European in character, mainly Buddhist, and a great deal more cosmopolitan, with many towns and cities home to Turks, Indians, Chinese, Tibetans, and Mongolians as well as followers of Manicheism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and shamanism. An abundant source of information for this book and indeed much of the scholarship done on this region and era comes from the documents uncovered in a small Buddhist cave complex outside Dunhuang, now in Gansu province, China. The Silk Road raises notions of interesting goods, exotic desert sanctuaries and the busy markets of ancient China. However, the Silk Road was also a channel of technologies, diseases, the arts, raising ideas and even style and customs. Spread across nearly 4,000 miles, the Silk Road
stimulated the course of history and shaped civilizations in Europe, Arabia, Persia, India, and China. In Whitfield’s book one of the fascinating themes in relation to World History is the various international trade along the Silk Road during and after the An Lushan Rebellion in Chang’an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty in 755-763.
(27) Whitfield points out that trade was indeed a major reason for travel along the Silk Road but not only for traded goods but also the trade of diverse customs and ideas. During the merchant’s tale we are introduced to the life of Nanaivandak who is from the city-state Samarkand of Sogdia which currently corresponds to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. He travels along the Silk Road to sell specialty merchandise from Central Asia and buy enough silk to bring back to West Asia. As the merchant Nanaivandak was a follower of Mani, this chapter included an insightful synopsis of Manicheanism which also reflects on the movement of conversion between religions such as Zoroastrian, Islam and Manicheanism. (32-37) In the Courtesan’s tale, Whitfield recounts the story of political turmoil mixed with an individual’s fate. A woman named Larishka from Kucha travels to Chang’an to work as an entertainer and experiences the unruly An Lushan Rebellion directly. “Kuchean dancers were as renowned as their fellow musicians for their skill and were snet by the Kuchean court to Samarkand and Chang’an as representatives of the best of its culture.” (140) As an older woman back in Kucha, she tells of her past and how she encountered life-threatening moments when
Chinese soldiers pursued Chang’an foreigners and watched her friends being killed. Along with traded goods, Susan Whitfield brings out the Chinese demand for foreign-born entertainers, musicians, courtesans and merchants. Besides silk, paper and other goods, the Silk Road carried another commodity which was equally significant in world history. Along with trade and migration, the world's oldest international highway was the vehicle which spread Buddhism through Central Asia. The transmission was launched from northwestern India to modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan), China, Korea and Japan. Buddhism not only affected the lives and cultures on those regions but also left us with a world of wonders in arts and literature and is a major source for Susan Whitfield’s, Life Along the Silk Road. As with the rise and attraction of many great movements there is also decline. As Whitfield presents Chudda a Kashmiri monk in the Monk’s tale, “by the ninth century most of north India, home to Buddhism, had been conquered by Turkic and then Hindu dynasties and Buddhism was in decline.”(115) Along with religion and specialty goods, in this chapter we learn about the demand for medicinal practices that monks could provide ad well as the rise in specialty doctors.