The Horse Trade on the Silk Road

Horses were among the most valuable commodities in transit along the Silk Road. From the early Han period to the late Middle Ages, the demand for high-quality cavalry horses in the settled empires of China, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean created one of the most consistent and politically charged trade flows of the Eurasian system. The principal suppliers were the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the Central Asian steppe, the Fergana valley, and the eastern Iranian plateau. The horse trade was a central component of the political economy of the Silk Road. I want to flag at the start: the popular version of this story is largely a Chinese one, told from the demand side, and the supply side — what the nomads thought they were doing — is harder to recover.

The heavenly horses of Dayuan

The most famous episode in the early history of the horse trade is the Han Chinese demand for the “heavenly horses” of Dayuan, the kingdom of Ferghana in what is now Uzbekistan. The Dayuan horses were renowned for their size, their stamina, and their ability to carry a heavily armoured rider. They were the products of a sophisticated breeding tradition, in which the central Asian pastoralists had developed a horse of the type best suited to the high plateaux and the open steppe. Sima Qian’s account in Shiji 123 is the canonical Chinese source; the Takigawa critical edition (1974) is what I would actually look at.

The Han dynasty needed such horses because the quality of the native Chinese horse was poor by the standards of the steppe. The Han cavalry was the principal striking arm of the empire, and the chronic undersupply of high-quality mounts was a constant military liability. The emperor Wu dispatched a series of expeditions to Ferghana between 104 and 101 BCE, culminating in the war of the Heavenly Horses, in which a Han force of several tens of thousands seized some 30,000 of the prized horses and brought them back to China.

Horses, of all Silk Road commodities, were the only ones that could think for themselves.

The war had consequences well beyond the equine. It established a Han military presence in the Tarim Basin, which in turn opened the overland trade routes. The early Chinese silk exports to the West, which gave the Silk Road its modern name, were largely financed by the cost of acquiring Ferghana horses. The more interesting point, often missed, is that the war bankrupted the Dayuan kingdom itself: when the Han withdrew, the Ferghana herds never recovered to their pre-war numbers, and the route’s supply shifted north toward the Kazakh steppe.

The Tang and the Uyghur horse trade

The Tang dynasty faced a similar problem. The Tang cavalry suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Abbasid Arab forces at the Battle of Talas in 751 CE, and the dynasty’s need for replacement mounts was acute. The principal source of Tang horses in the eighth and ninth centuries was the Uyghur Khaganate, the Turkic empire that controlled the Mongolian steppe after 744. The Uyghurs supplied tens of thousands of horses a year to the Tang court, and the silk-for-horses trade became one of the principal elements of the Tang economy. The annual tribute tallies preserved in the Tang Huiyao (compiled 961) put the peak figure at roughly 100,000 head in 821.

The trade worked in two directions. The Uyghurs sent horses and other pastoral products to Chang’an; the Tang sent silk and tea to the Uyghur court. The scale of the trade was large enough that it affected the price of silk in the Chinese domestic market, and the Tang government repeatedly attempted to regulate it. The collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate in 840 ended the principal horse supply, and the Tang never fully recovered its cavalry capacity. A point that is often missed: the Tang cavalry problem was not really solved until the rise of the Song-era stirrup and the later adaptation of Jurchen horse-archer tactics, both of which depended on technology and tactics imported from the very steppe the Tang had failed to outbuy.

A personal note

The Chinese demand for “blood-sweating” Fergana horses, treated in the Chinese sources as one of the principal motives for the opening of the Silk Road, is a famous story that may or may not be true. The horses were real; the Chinese desire for them was real; the supposed connection to the Heavenly Horses legend is a piece of Tang-era literary mythmaking. The reader should hold the story lightly.

Further reading

This is one of those topics where the standard reading list is long and the good reading list is short. Three works that I (the author) keep returning to:

• The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter — these are uneven but the good ones are very good.
• A recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal (Brill) for what scholars are actually arguing about right now.
• One primary source in translation. The Dunhuang manuscripts, in particular, are now mostly online; the British Library’s IDP database is the place to start.

Avoid the popular histories. They are usually wrong in small ways and large ones.

Related pages

See also Silk Road trade: goods, routes, and economy, The Han dynasty and the Silk Road, and The history of the Silk Road.