8
For knowledge, go even unto China.
(traditionally attributed to Muhammad)
Bai and his contemporaries were part of the great flowering of China’s paper culture across government, scholarship, poetry, religion and the marketplace. Their achievement marked the apogee of paper culture in China; in centuries to come, it was the Tang dynasty to which China would look back as its imperial golden age. Poets in particular found it difficult to emerge from under the shadow of the Tang greats, of whom the best-loved were Bai Juyi, Li Bai and Du Fu. There were other paper disciplines in China that would find their greatest form under later dynasties, notably landscape painting, which particularly flourished from around the end of the Tang dynasty (which came in 907) to the early twelfth century. But the Tang era would resonate with future generations for its poetry and calligraphy.
Paper, then, had established most of its pre-modern Chinese identity by the middle of the Song dynasty (960–1279). As a vehicle for calligraphy, poetry, painting, religious writings (and proselytization) and government bureaucracy, it had been thoroughly tested and found to have no serious rivals. It had other functions too, of course, from toilet roll to kites to window panes, but its major uses in pre-modern China were written and they were now largely set. Significant change would only come in the modern era; at first through some of the revolutionary periodicals and newspapers published late in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), which helped to precipitate the fall of China’s two-millennia-old imperial system and to forge an urban readership, introducing that readership to political debate and informing its members of political developments in foreign nations. Supremely, however, paper’s new role found expression in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when students marched in protest against the government of the newly formed Republic of China because it had signed the Treaty of Versailles, which handed control of the Shandong peninsula (south of Beijing) to Japan. But if the loss of Shandong was the catalyst for protest, the demonstrators had other aims too: to modernize China and usher in a new era of equality and opportunity. They aimed to rouse ‘the masses all over the country’ and 3,000 of them marched in a procession, handing out printed paper broadsheets calling on all Chinese to protest. Their protest spread through the country. In Shanghai, 60,000 workers set down their tools and left their factories.
Credit 8.1
12 Central Asia at the time of the Battle of Talas. The exact location of the battle is disputed, but was close to the present-day towns of Taraz and Talas.
The more educated protestors had read or even watched modernist Western plays – Ibsen-mania was exceptionally strong – and dreamt of emancipation from the ties of colonialism, class and sex. In May Fourth journals and broadsheets (the 1919 protests began on 4 May, a date which subsequently became shorthand for the whole movement), articles and essays were written in the vernacular. The protestors’ audience was the Chinese nation and one of their aims was the widespread adoption of the spoken language on the page. The movement had the support of intellectuals like Hu Shi (later a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature), who complained that a dead language was incapable of producing a living literature.
Another man who argued for change was Liu Bannong. Liu was one of the scholars whose influence would one day spur the introduction of simplified characters in China, a crucial step in making the Chinese script accessible further down the social scale. In 1918 Liu’s translation of the song ‘I Walk in the Snow’ was published in the influential Chinese magazine New Youth (Xin Qingnian). In the Preface to his translation, Liu said that he had tried different translation techniques, but that the Buddhist approach had helped him most:
When I read this poem in Vanity Fair two years ago, I tried first to translate it into traditional poetic forms…but failed due to the strictness of their styles. Then I used the method of translating Buddhist scripture and conveyed the sense directly…
Liu and the reformist students won their fight to modernize the language on the page. By the end of the 1920s, the phrases and constructions of everyday Chinese were officially accepted on paper. Books, legal and government papers, and newspapers now appeared largely in plain speech as Everyman trumped the Confucian. It was a trend that had begun, as Liu understood, in the first centuries AD, with Buddhist translations that used ordinary Chinese phrases and sentences to reach a broader audience. As then, words and names were transferred directly from other tongues into written Chinese. When twentieth-century revolutionaries composed Chinese translations of Western novels, academic works and poems, many turned to the old Buddhist translation methods. They were, in this sense, the heirs not just of the European modernist revolution, but of a far older, Chinese textual revolution, one which paper Buddhism had sparked.
Printed European books and Western-style newspapers started to be published and read in China in growing numbers in the nineteenth century. And with this wave of Western influence, the wheel had come full circle: China, which had first delivered paper to the world, was now reshaped by paper imports from Europe and America.
In a sense, then, the rest of this book chronicles how such a reversal was able to come about. Tang China was, admittedly, geographically larger than ever and enjoyed unprecedented influence abroad, but even the Tang’s borders remained thousands of miles from Europe and the two continents had no direct interaction. And yet it was during the golden age of the Tang dynasty that papermaking, apparently without the knowledge of the emperor’s court, finally broke loose from East Asia. The handover began, one of the greatest Muslim historians tells us, with a battle at China’s outer reaches.
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The River Talas flows from the Kyrgyz Mountains, 200 miles west of China’s modern borders, to the Muyunkum Desert in Kazakhstan, and forms a stitch across the centre of what used to be called Turkestan, the lands of the Turks (or Turkic peoples). From the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, Turkestan stretches eastwards, ending some 200 miles short of the west end of the Great Wall of China. Over the centuries, the region’s deserts, mountain ranges and trade routes have been periodically sliced up into different states and, more recently, its mines, oilfields and gas wells parcelled out between them.
In the seventh century, however, the Gökturk Empire was the sole regional power, albeit with the armies of Islam pressing in from the South. In 734, when the Turkic khan was poisoned by one of his own men, it spelt the formal dissolution of a large kingdom that had once been on the verge of empire. Even five centuries earlier Turkestan had already become the world’s crossroads, its network of highways serving China, India, Persia and the Roman empire. Silks went west while gold and wool travelled east. Precious stones, diseases, satins, religions, horses, languages, slaves, scripts and ideas furrowed across Eurasia and the Turks became the middlemen of a set of global trade routes that linked Chang’an to Rome: the Silk Road.
Yet it was a small-scale military encounter in no-man’s-land which would be hailed as the crack in the dam that had confined papermaking to East Asia for centuries. While some Chinese papers were imported into Central Asia and Sassanid Persia as luxury items in the seventh century, paper was only commonly made in Central Asia after the Battle of Talas, which took place in 751 on the banks of the Talas river. The sale of a few bundles of luxury paper was far less significant for the recipient culture than the transfer of the practice of papermaking itself. A society might be able to enjoy using expensive, imported Chinese papers on a limited basis, but paper could only become integral to a culture if the manufacturing know-how was first imported and then widely adopted.
Unlike the goods they sold, few individual merchants travelled very far along the Silk Road – instead, goods were sold on from one merchant to another. Given these constraints, the transfer of goods was far easier to facilitate than the transfer of ideas and technological processes (unless, of course, those ideas and processes were written down). Moreover, a commercial pass-the-parcel is an ill-fitting explanation for what was a rapid transfer of papermaking know-how from Greater China to Central Asia and Persia. The earliest surviving explanation for the transfer, written in the eleventh century, certainly viewed the shift as rapid – and decisive.
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For a small battle, Talas could not have been fought between two greater powers: the Muslim Caliphate and Tang dynasty China. In 750 a new dynasty claimed the Muslim empire and founded its capital at Kufa, a little south of present-day Baghdad – the Abbasid Caliphate. From Kufa, it ruled Mesopotamia, Syria, parts of the former Byzantine empire, the entire Arabian Peninsula, the full breadth of North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the former Persian empire and much of Central Asia. As its rule spread out to three sides of the Mediterranean, it spurred one of history’s greatest human migrations (as Arabs settled in conquered territories, like Syria and Persia, across the Dar al-Islam – the lands of Islam) and it produced entirely new heights of art and advances in the sciences. But the Caliphate had an equally impressive adversary to the east.
In the mid-seventh century the population of the world was less than 500 million, and China alone accounted for 50 million people. China controlled the eastern Silk Road, enjoyed good relations with its major nomadic neighbours, kept a large army, tapped into a tax register that listed more than 800,000 families (although, like China, this would splinter as the Tang dynasty progressed), and conducted trade by sea and land across East, South and South-East Asia. In China itself, a 1,000-mile canal held the country’s north and south together, bringing grain, cloth and money to the capital in a steady stream. China sat at the centre of East Asia, an image of unity, power, wealth and artistic brilliance.
In the first half of the eighth century, both China and the Islamic Caliphate made bids to control Turkestan. China used both frontier garrisons and protectorates in Central Asia, and by the 750s China was ruler of the Tarim and Issyk-Kul valleys that straddle its modern western border. It was commander of the Pamir Valley, protector of Bactria (northern Afghanistan and the regions that border it) and ruler of Kabul and Kashmir.
The armies of Islam, on the other hand, had taken much of Transoxiana and had begun to pick off some of the Chinese garrison towns too, moving into the east of Turkestan. Perhaps more importantly, much of Turkestan had been converted to Islam through a mix of force, job discrimination, tax discrimination, the choice of death-or-exile for polytheists and atheists, sporadic persecutions, the destruction of old temples and idols and an impressive preaching programme. The Caliphate’s rule was increasingly proving impossible to resist.
It was then that General Kao, the Korean-born commander of China’s western army, made an important mistake. There are different stories of how he came to capture the king of Shash (now Tashkent), an important local ruler. What is clear is that he sent him back to the Chinese capital (despite having possibly offered him a hollow pardon in return for surrender), where the king was put to death.
As a result, the late king’s son recruited the Abbasids to help avenge his father’s death. Abu Muslim, the Abbasid ruler of the Eastern Caliphate, sent his best general to fight the Chinese armies. At this point, the grieving son pushed the Abbasids to aim not for Ferghana, China’s major regional ally, but for the four cities of eastern Turkestan that gave China a vista on the whole region: Kuche, Kashgar, Khotan and Karashahr. But the Abbasids had chosen to bypass Ferghana anyway. They knew that if they could defeat the Chinese further east then Ferghana would be cut off and would also fall into their hands. They had chosen Talas.
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In 751 the Chinese and Abbasid armies met on the banks of the Talas. The river runs westwards for more than 250 miles (although less than 200 as the crow flies). It springs up in the Kyrgyz Mountains and, before it reaches the border with Kazakhstan, nearby peaks spike to over 8,200 feet on its north side and to over 6,500 feet on its south bank. Between these skyscrapers, the cracked course of the Talas Valley winds towards the desert. Yet there are patches where the valley broadens enough to accommodate thousands of men; it was on one of these plains that the armies gathered.
The Chinese had 30,000 men, according to their official histories. (In the Islamic histories, they had 70,000, but exaggeration of numbers was not uncommon in early Abbasid histories.) Twenty thousand of the soldiers were Chinese and most of the rest were Turkic. The Chinese army included men from Ferghana too, but all had travelled, on foot or by horse, for close to 200 miles. Many would have needed rest. The Abbasid army that opposed them numbered 40,000 men. It was close to an even match.
The Abbasid soldiers and cavalry were fresh and were excellent horsemen, and they were reinforced by Turks from Shash and the surrounding area. The Chinese infantry and cavalry had endurance and professionalism on their side. Their Turkic allies were the best mounted archers on the battlefield. Like the Abbasids, China’s army fought with bows, spears, swords and probably emblazoned shields. Chinese soldiers often wore boiled leather armour too.
General Kao, like his opposite number Zayid ibn Salih, was considered to be an excellent general. He had led stunning campaigns in 747 and 750, although the emperor may have been the puppeteer who ensured his success.
The battle lasted five days. As infantry soldiers alternated assaults with defensive spells, the cavalry roamed the fields, probing enemy weak points, releasing arrow showers and exploiting small victories. The meeting of Asia’s two great empires looked likely to fizzle to a truce or even to abandonment. Instead, the Karluk Turks, hitherto Chinese allies, attacked the Chinese army from the rear. The Karluks were significant local players from the area close to Lake Balkhash (now part of Kazakhstan). Karluk soldiers within the Chinese army probably switched sides at this point too. (General Kao’s betrayal of the king of Shash may have been what persuaded the Karluks to fight for the Abbasids, as the Karluks had supported his rule.) Some 20,000 Chinese soldiers were killed and General Kao had to forge a path through his fellow fugitives to escape with a few hundred men.
The Abbasids might have pushed on and exploited their victory, but they were weakened too. The residents of Bukhara had recently rebelled against their rule and there was concern that the Chinese populations of cities further east might cause problems. So the Abbasid armies returned to their Central Asian homes. The Battle of Talas is sometimes touted as the reason Islam became the religion of Central Asia. China would not make any significant territorial claims beyond modern Xinjiang for almost a millennium afterwards.
Yet in many ways nothing had changed. The Chinese had lost 20,000 men, but the four crucial cities of eastern Turkestan remained in their hands. Their failure to push into Central Asia in the centuries that followed had more to do with rebellions, divisions and invasions within the Chinese heartlands than with the defeat at Talas. As for the Abbasids, they had simply preserved the wide buffer between themselves and China’s western reach. In military terms, Talas was more a curious detail than a turning point.
But as the victors returned to the cities of Central Asia, they took captives with them as booty, many of them to Samarkand, the city once described by Alexander the Great as the most beautiful on earth. Slaves brought Chinese knowledge and skills to their new homes and masters and, according to the eleventh-century Muslim historian al-Tha’labi, among these was a process that had remained cocooned in parts of East and South-East Asia for centuries. For as the slaves settled into the cities of Transoxiana, they began to teach the Abbasids how to manufacture paper. Moreover, parts of the region would have been very receptive to the use of paper: the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist traveller Xuan Zang reported that boys in Samarkand were taught to read and write at the age of five.
There were papers in Central Asia slightly earlier than the battle (and even one collection, found in Gilgit, Pakistan, from the sixth century), but very few survive and they either represent only the hesitant beginnings of local production – or else were simply Chinese imports. The first Arabic word for paper, kaghad, comes from regional languages of Central Asia (Sogdian and Uighur). The flowering of paper culture in Central Asia after the Battle of Talas makes it hard to dismiss the theory out of hand. Coming from one of the greatest Islamic historians, it remains the best explanation we have and, even if not true in its details (as many have argued), the story’s timing and geography make very good sense. Al-Tha’labi himself was in no doubt that the battle on the banks of the Talas, that lone armed meeting of sprawling empires whose capitals lay almost 4,500 miles apart, was the spark that sent papermaking on its trail across Asia – and so around the world.