A History of the World in 100 Objects (44 page)

This is my version of a ‘Just So’ story to explain one of the greatest technology thefts of history. It is known as
The Legend of the Silk Princess
and it is presented to us in paint on a plank of wood that is around 1,300 years old. It is now in the British Museum, but it was found in a long-deserted city on the fabled Silk Road.

In the world around 700, a world of enormous movement of people and of goods, one of the busiest highways of all, then as now, ran from China: the Silk Road – not in fact one single road, but a network of routes that spanned 4,000 miles and effectively linked the Pacific to the Mediterranean. The goods on that highway were rare and exotic – gold, precious stones, spices, silk. And with the goods came stories, ideas, beliefs and – key to our story here – technologies.

This painting comes from the oasis kingdom of Khotan in central Asia. Khotan is now in western China, but in the eighth century it was a separate kingdom and the linchpin of the Silk Road, vital for water and refreshment and a major manufacturer of silk. Khotanese storytellers created a legend to explain how the secrets of silk production – for thousands of years a Chinese monopoly – had came to Khotan. The result was the story of the Silk Princess, as told in our painting.

The wooden board on which the story is painted was found in a small abandoned Buddhist shrine in Khotan. The shrine was just one in a small city of shrines and monasteries which had vanished beneath the sand for more than a thousand years and which were rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century by the polymath Sir Aurel Stein, one of the pioneering archaeologists of the Silk Road. It was Stein who revealed Khotan’s importance as a vital trading and cultural centre.

The picture is painted on a rough plank that is almost exactly the size of a computer keyboard. The figures are fairly simply drawn in black and white, with here and there touches of red and blue. It is pretty unprepossessing as a work of art, but then it was never intended to be one; this painting was made essentially to help the storyteller tell their story. It is an
aide-mémoire
. Right in the middle is the Silk Princess herself, with her large and prominent headdress. To make absolutely sure we recognize that this is the focal point of the story, a servant woman on the left is melodramatically pointing at it. The storyteller would then have revealed that inside it is everything you need to make silk: worms of the silk moth, the silk cocoons that they produce, and mulberry seeds – because mulberry leaves are what silk worms eat. Then, in front of the princess, we see what happens next – the silk cocoons are piled up in a basket and on the far right there is a man hard at work weaving the silk threads into cloth. The princess has obviously arrived safely in Khotan, and her ruse has worked. This story, plainly set out in three scenes, is a quirky document of a transforming shift of knowledge and skill from the East to the West.

We have known for a long time that the Silk Road was vitally important in the economic and intellectual world of the eighth century, but it is only relatively recently that it acquired its romantic reputation, as the travel-writer and novelist Colin Thubron knows well:

The importance of the Silk Road in history is almost impossible to exaggerate, in terms of the movement of peoples, the movement of goods, the transport of inventions in particular, and ideas – and of course in the movement of religions. Whether it’s Buddhism north from India and
eastward into China or the advance of Islam deep into Asia – all this is a Silk Road phenomenon.

The term ‘Silk Road’ was coined by a German geographer called Ferdinand von Richthofen as late as 1887. It was never called the Silk Road before then; but that, of course, then fed into it all the romance of silk itself, its beauty, its luxury.

Mysteries often generate stories to explain them, and since silk was by far the most important product travelling along this route the mystery of making it inevitably inspired its own myth. Luxurious, beautiful and enduring, silk is almost synonymous with the land that first produced it more than 4,000 years ago and monopolized it for so long – ancient China. Long before the Roman Empire appeared, silk was already cultivated in China and exported on an industrial scale. The method of its production was a highly protected secret; but secrets as profitable as this one never last, and Khotan was one of the beneficiaries.

Coming back to our painted plank, we can see a fourth figure in the story, a man with four arms holding a silk weaver’s comb and a shuttle. He is the god of silk, who presides over the whole scene, giving spiritual sanction and making sure we see the princess not as an industrial thief but as a brave benefactress. And so the fairy tale takes on the status of myth: the Silk Princess may not be quite on a par with Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, but she is firmly in the tradition of great mythological gift-givers, bringing knowledge and skill to a particular people.

The written versions of our painted story tell us what happened next: the princess gave thanks to the gods and ensured that Khotan would keep the secrets of silk for ever:

Then she founded this monastery on the spot where the first silkworms were bred; and there are about here many old mulberry tree trunks, which they say are the remains of the trees first planted. From old time till now this kingdom has possessed silkworms, which nobody is allowed to kill.

Silk production is still a major industry in Khotan, employing more than a thousand workers and producing around 150 million metres of silk a year as cloth, clothes and carpets.

(
left to right
) The Silk Princess, the god of silk, and a worker weaving silk threads

Of course, we’ve no idea how silk actually came to Khotan, but we do know that ideas, stories, gods and silk all moved along the Silk Road in both directions. The cellist and composer Yo-Yo Ma has long been involved in Silk Road studies:

I am particularly interested in how music may have travelled. We have recordings only from about a hundred years ago, so you have to look at the oral traditions, and other kinds of iconography such as what’s in museums, stories, and get a picture of how things were traded back and forth, in the realm of both ideas and material objects. The more you look at anything, at the origins of where things come from, you find elements of the world within the local. That’s a big thing to think about, but it actually is reduced to common objects – stories, fables, materials – and silk is one of those stories.

I’m using the painted panel here just as it was intended to be used – as a vehicle for storytelling. Who used it originally we don’t know, but we do know that Aurel Stein was surprised and moved by the shrine in which he found it:

These painted tablets, like all the others subsequently discovered … were undoubtedly still in the same position in which they had originally been deposited as votive offerings by pious worshippers. The last days of worship at this small shrine were vividly recalled by far humbler yet equally touching relics. On the floor near the principal base, and near the corners, I discovered several ancient brooms, which had manifestly been used by the last attendants to keep the sacred objects clear of the invading dust and sand.

It was not just the painting of the Silk Princess that these brooms kept clean – this Buddhist shrine also contained painted images of the Buddha as well as the Hindu gods Shiva and Brahma. Other shrines in the complex have pictures of Buddhist, Hindu and Iranian gods as well as very local deities. The gods that travelled the Silk Road were, like the traders themselves, happy to share accommodation.

It’s tough at the top – at least, that’s what those at the top like us to think. The long hours, the public exposure, the responsibility. In return, though, most of us would argue, they get the status and the pay – and many people, it seems, are willing to settle for that particular trade-off. But almost everyone would think twice about envying anyone, however privileged, whose regular duty was to go though an ordeal like the one portrayed here. I find it hard even to look at the image.

It is a limestone relief carving, about the size of a small coffee table. It’s rectangular and it shows two human figures. A man stands holding a blazing torch over the kneeling figure of a woman. Both are elaborately costumed, with wonderfully extravagant headdresses. So far, so innocuous. But when you look more closely at the woman the scene becomes horribly disconcerting, because you can see that she is pulling a rope through her tongue – and the rope contains large thorns which are piercing and lacerating her
.

My squeamish European eye keeps focusing on this stupefying act, but for the Maya of around
AD
700 this would have been a scene of their king and his wife together in a devotional partnership, jointly performing a ceremony of fundamental significance for their position and their power. It was commissioned by the king for the queen’s private building, and it was certainly intended to be seen by only a very select few.

The great Maya civilization collapsed not long after this stone slab was carved, and its deserted cities bewildered the first Spanish visitors in the sixteenth century. For hundreds of years afterwards, explorers travelling in southern Mexico and Guatemala came across huge abandoned
cities hidden in dense jungle. One of the first modern visitors, the American John Lloyd Stephens, tried to describe his wonderment in 1839:

Of the moral effect of the monuments themselves, standing as they do in the depths of the tropical forest, silent and solemn, different from the works of any other people, their uses and purposes and whole history so entirely unknown, with hieroglyphs explaining all but perfectly unintelligible, I shall not pretend to convey any idea.

Maya territory covered modern Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico. The first Maya cities have their beginnings around 500
BC
, just a little before the Parthenon was built in Athens, and the Maya civilization continued for well over a thousand years. The greatest cities had tens of thousands of inhabitants, and at their centre were pyramids, public monuments and palaces. Thanks to the relatively recent deciphering of Maya script, we can now read the glyphs on their monuments, which baffled Stephens, as the names and histories of actual rulers. In the course of the twentieth century the Maya ceased to be a mythologized lost race and became a historical people.

Our stone sculpture of the queen lacerating her tongue comes from the city of Yaxchilan. Between
AD
600 and 800, late in the Classic Maya age, Yaxchilan became a large and important city, the major power in the region. It owed its new eminence to the king shown on the stone lintel, Shield Jaguar, who at the age of 75 commissioned a building programme to celebrate the successes of what would eventually be his sixty-year reign. The lintel sculpture comes from a temple that seems to have been dedicated to his wife, Lady K’abal Xook.