Travelers
Famous Travelers of the Silk Road
The travelers who crossed the Silk Road were a small, unrepresentative, but extraordinarily influential minority of the people who lived along it. Most of…
The travelers who crossed the Silk Road were a small, unrepresentative, but extraordinarily influential minority of the people who lived along it. Most of the men and women of Central Asia spent their entire lives in a single oasis. Long-distance travelers were merchants, envoys, missionaries, pilgrims, and the occasional captive, and their numbers at any given moment were tiny: even at the height of the Mongol Pax Mongolica, perhaps only a few thousand people each year crossed the entire corridor. Yet their accounts, sometimes preserved in canonical works of literature, became the basic source material for the history of the network, and the routes they traced remained the standard ones for centuries. The more I read the primary sources, the more I think the standard histories overestimate how unusual these people were — they are unusual in having left accounts, not in having travelled.
This article surveys the most famous of these travelers. For the broader pattern of cultural exchange that they enabled, see cultural exchange along the Silk Road. For the chronological setting of their journeys, see the history of the Silk Road.
Zhang Qian: the opening
The first great Silk Road traveler in the historical record is Zhang Qian, dispatched by the Han emperor Wu in 138 BCE to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu. Zhang’s mission was a diplomatic failure: he was captured by the Xiongnu within a decade, held for ten years, escaped, and eventually returned to the Han court with a more accurate picture of Central Asia than any Chinese had possessed. His report, preserved in the Shiji of Sima Qian (chapter 123, the “Account of Dayuan,” if you want to check), described the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, the markets of Bactria, and the riches of the Iranian plateau. The Han response — military campaigns that pacified the Tarim (the four garrisons at Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang, established around 111 BCE), the opening of the Hexi Corridor, and the establishment of the western garrisons at Dunhuang, Khotan, and Kashgar — made the overland network possible. Zhang Qian himself is a more interesting figure than the standard account allows; the report is plainly his own, not Sima Qian’s, and you can hear the man behind it.
The Buddhist pilgrims
The Buddhist monks who traveled between India and China left the most extensive literary record of the early Silk Road. The earliest clearly documented Chinese pilgrim is the third-century monk Zhu Shixing (朱士行), who travelled to Khotan to fetch a copy of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā; but the written tradition really begins with Faxian, who left China in 399 CE and travelled through the Tarim, the Pamirs, and the Punjab before returning by sea twenty years later. Faxian’s account, the Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Foguo ji), is the first detailed Chinese description of India and Central Asia, and it is far more honest about the dangers of the road than most of the pilgrim texts that came after.
We are, in a sense, hostage to the travelers who wrote things down.
The most famous of the Chinese pilgrims is the Tang monk Xuanzang, who left Chang’an in 629 CE to fetch authentic Buddhist scriptures from India. The political situation in the Tarim Basin was unstable, and Xuanzang traveled without imperial permission, often through hostile territory. He crossed the Pamirs, passed through Samarkand, and reached the principal Buddhist center of the age, the Indian monastic university of Nalanda, where he studied for several years under the monk Śīlabhadra. He returned to Chang’an in 645 CE with hundreds of Sanskrit texts, which he spent the rest of his life translating into Chinese under imperial patronage; the translation bureau at the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Chang’an is the place to see what this looked like in practice. The account of his journey, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Datang Xiyu ji), is one of the foundational documents of Chinese geography and Buddhist history, and his legend grew into the basis of the great Ming novel Journey to the West — a transformation that, in my view, has done Xuanzang a considerable historical disservice.
The Yijing, a slightly later Tang monk, traveled the same route in 673–695 CE by sea in both directions, and left an account of the Buddhist communities of Srivijaya and the Indian subcontinent, with the useful detail that he was robbed on the way home and had to start collecting manuscripts a second time. The Japanese monks Ennin (in the 840s) and the Korean monk Hyecho (in the 720s, whose Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India is the more readable of the two) extended the tradition to the eastern end of the Buddhist world. The accounts left by these pilgrims are the principal source for the Buddhist Silk Road, and they are also unusually rich descriptions of social and economic life along the routes — a fact that the standard surveys, which treat them as religious literature, tend to underplay.
A personal note
A reader who works through every traveler in this article will end up with a skewed view of the network, because the travelers who left accounts were not the typical travelers. They were diplomats, pilgrims, and merchants of unusual wealth. The ordinary donkey driver, the Sogdian caravan guard, the Buddhist nun on her way to a distant nunnery — these were the typical travelers, and they left no accounts. The historical record is biased toward the people who could afford to be remembered.
Further reading
- Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Brill), the relevant entry. Old but unequalled for the western Islamic world.
- Encyclopaedia Iranica (Columbia), the relevant entry, for the Iranian sphere.
- An article in the most recent volume of Silk Road Journal or Journal of Asian History.
- A primary source in translation (named in the article above).
- One recent monograph — see the suggested works in the other entries in this series.