Khotan Carpets And The Lost Legacy Of The Silk Roads

KHOTAN, East Turkestan; Dec. 4, 2010 -- In the center of the Asian continent is one of the world's most isolated places.

It is a huge region – larger than Western Europe – and has a millennia-old carpet weaving tradition. Yet even today it is little known in the West because it is so remote.

The place is known historically as East Turkestan and, today, comprises China's eastern-most province, Xinjiang.

From any direction, East Turkestan is hard to reach.

Its heartland, the Tarim Basin, is ringed on three sides -- north, west and south -- by mountain peaks up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) high, or about half again the height of Europe's Mont Blanc. That walls it off from Central Asia, Pakistan, and Tibet.

On the fourth side, a vast desert cuts it off from China proper to the east.

But over the millennia, this remote place attracted waves of settlers from all directions. And it was the pivot point of the Silk Roads, where the route from China branched south to India, north to Central Asia, and west to Persia, Anatolia, and Europe.

The history of fused cultures can clearly be seen in East Turkestan's rugs and is what makes them both so fascinating and sui generis.

One example is the rug from the town of Khotan shown at the top of this article. At first glance, it looks vaguely Islamic, vaguely Chinese, and vaguely Indian. In fact, it is all three.

Here is a map of the Tarim Basin, showing Khotan (here spelled Ho-t'ien) at the center of the Tarim Basin's southern edge.

Khotan and all the other major towns of the region are oases fed by mountain rivers that disappear into the Taklamakan desert at the basin's center.

Appreciating East Turkestan's carpets means peeling back layers of history, perhaps to about 1,500 to 1,000 BC. That is when historians believe the earliest agrarian settlers began penetrating into East Turkestan which, at the time, was dominated by Turkic nomads.

The settlers were Indo-Europeans who were members of the same peoples of greater Persia whose wars with the Turkic nomads are chronicled in Persia's epic poem, the Shahnameh. They lived in the oasis towns and adopted Buddhism from India while the nomads roamed over the mountain slopes.

Here is a picture of another Khotan carpet. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The medallions are called Ay Gul, or "moon" motif, and are arranged in a pattern reminiscent of the three lotus seats on which Buddha flanked by two Bodhisattvas is represented in temple art. The border recalls nomadic felt carpet traditions.

Just when weaving began in East Turkestan is unknown. But Western archaeologists have dated the earliest pile carpet fragments found in the Tarim Basin to about the third century AD. The fragments were found at Buddhist sites excavated by Sir Aurel Stein in Niya, an oasis east of Khotan, around 1900.

During their history, the Buddhist oasis towns would be repeatedly overrun by powerful Turkic nomadic confederations, notably the Hsiung-nu (or Xiongnu) in the second century BC. But the nomads were content to levy tribute without changing the towns' culture or their role as middlemen for the Silk Roads.

Similarly, China, which increasingly dominated the oasis states from the second to fourth centuries BC, had no interest at that time in colonizing or in spreading Chinese culture to them, unlike today.

Instead, the Chinese were interested in maintaining garrisons to guard their Silk Road trade and assure their own imports of jade, which the mountain rivers bring down to the Tarim Basin. Whenever the rival Tibetan Empire displaced the Chinese, it too left the oasis states largely independent.

The first real changes came about with the waves of Turkic conquests which began in the ninth century as huge new confederations of nomads mobilized for the westward migrations that would change the face of Eurasia.

As the Turkic tribes adopted Islam, they also forced the conversion of the Buddhist oases, imposed their language, and created East Turkestan as we know it now.

But if the conquests and later settling of the region by the Turks, and definitively by the Uigur Turks, brought new religious and cultural influences, it did not mean the end of the old artistic ones.

Rug expert Hans Bidder writes in his landmark book Carpets from Eastern Turkestan (1964):

"Iconoclastic Islam which spread into the oases from middle of the 10th century was indeed able to subdue the religious art of Buddhism, but the new faith proved incapable of gaining any hold upon individual arts and crafts which had their roots in the traditional customs and economic existence of the oases.

"The old carpet weaving craft in Khotan, for example, whose precious fund of designs had been influenced by ten centuries of Indo-Grecian art, freely continued its own path of natural development."

Here is another Khotan carpet, this one in a "coffered gul" pattern.

Bidder writes that "the coffered gul design, so characteristic of Khotan, dates back to either the Gandhara-Buddhism period, or to an even earlier epoch." (Gandhara, stretching from Kabul to Peshawar, reached its height under Buddhist kings from the 1st to 5th centuries AD.)

He observes that the rosettes in the coffer boxes may be a floral "Khotan modification of a Turkoman Gul," while the border – with its curious multi-colored disintegrating design is Indian-influenced.

Another major influence in the design of many East Turkestan rugs was undoubtedly the patterns on Chinese silks that passed up and down the trade routes.

East Turkestan's carpet trade flourished through the middle ages and into the early modern era as the courts of Turkic rulers patronized the carpet workrooms of the oases. The carpets also found markets in India, Persia and Central Asia as part of the Silk Road trade and absorbed new influences from them in exchange.

But when China occupied the whole of East Turkmenistan in the 1750s, things changed radically. The Chinese court had little interest in pile carpets beyond receiving them as diplomatic gifts and Chinese homes made no use of them at all.

Worse, East Turkestan's incorporation into China cut its economic connections with the west. Commercial weavers who previously imported dyes from India were cut off both from their supplies and their best route for connecting to the fast growing rug market of 19th century Europe.

Here is a photo of one of the most common East Turkestan patterns. It is a carpet woven in Yarkand with a pomegranate-vase design. This and other designs were also woven in the best known of the oasis towns, Kashgar.

Those carpets from East Turkestan which did make their way west usually did so via the mountains into the Russian Empire and on to Central Asia's great carpet market in Samarkand.

By the time they reached Europe, they were generically – along with other Central Asian rugs – termed "Samarkands" and their identity was lost.

Similarly, if they went to Europe via oriental arts dealers in Beijing, they were called Kanju after one of the provinces they passed through on their way to the Chinese capital. That name, too, told nothing of their real origin.

Today, after decades of an isolated and then re-opened communist China, the weaving industry of East Turkestan is so weak that it offers little for carpet enthusiasts.

Commercial workshops are as likely to produce knock-offs of Persian carpets as copies of the region's own designs. If traditional carpets are woven for home use in any numbers, they are rarely seen or remarked upon by travelers.

But the fact that weaving still exists at all in a place so long forgotten by the world's carpet markets is something of a miracle.

Considering how many millennia and changes East Turkestan's weaving culture has already survived, it would be wrong to count it out now.

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Khotan Rugs: Samuel's Antique Rug Gallery


Khotan Rugs: Doris Leslie Blau's 'Samarkand' Gallery

Oriental Carpets And The Legacy Of The Silk Roads

SAMARKAND, February 14, 2010 -- The Silk Roads, those great trading highways of the ancient world, had a huge influence upon carpets.

So much so, that discovering carpets and carpet culture inevitably leads to discovering the unique world that the Silk Roads created.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the map of the Silk Roads corresponds almost exactly to the map of today’s carpet belt, the countries with a long and still living tradition of producing oriental rugs.

The main trading networks of the Silk Roads stretched across western China (today’s Xinjiang province) to Central Asia, where they either turned south to India or continued straight ahead to Persia, Anatolia, and the Mideast.

At the shores of the Mediterranean they stopped, but boats extended the trade to many ports of southern Europe as well.

What held the Silk Roads together, from time immemorial until they were bypassed by trans-oceanic trade beginning in the 15th century?

The obvious, but incomplete answer, is commerce. And for the markets at the poles of the trade, as in eastern China, southeast Asia, or Europe, that was probably the sole stake.

Eastern China, for example, was throughout most of the history of the Silk Roads the world’s greatest export economy. It produced enormous quantities of ceramics and silk and its export business, organized by independent traders, was a major source of tax revenue for the court.

But where these exports items were headed as they moved in vast camel trains across the empire’s western horizon was of little interest to most Chinese.

Just how much so can be judged from an epic poem written in China in the 3rd century BC. This was about the same time Alexander the Great was firmly linking the West to the Silk Road by expanding his empire to Central Asia.

The poem is “18 Songs of the Nomad’s Flute” and it tells the story of a Han princess who was forcibly abducted by Turkic-Mongol Hsiung-nu (or Xiongnu) nomads and taken north beyond the Great Wall.

Lady Wenji, who was also the daughter of one of the most famous Confucian scholars of the time, was forced to marry one of the nomad chiefs and remained among the barbarians for 12 years.

But she appears to have found nothing of value among them even as she has two sons with her husband and wonders “how could I have become bound to my enemy in love and trust?”

When finally an embassy comes from China to offer ransom for her release, there is no question which choice she will make. She returns to civilization even at the cost of parting from her children and suffering the eternal melancholy the songs describe.

The pictures above are from illustrations for “18 Songs” painted sometime in the 13th century.

But if Lady Wenji’s story became a pillar of Chinese classical literature, the image it gives of the barbarians beyond the Great Wall was only half true. In fact, the nomads and the Chinese were bound together not just as enemies but also as trading partners.

The trade relations between the nomads and China is well explained by Stewart Gordon in his 2008 book “When Asia Was the World,” which describes Asia in the millennium from 500 to 1500 AD.

The nomads, he notes, raised horses that were in constant demand by the Chinese elite and the army and they raised cattle that was essential for sedentary agriculture.

The picture here is of a young Chinese nobleman on horseback, around 1290.

In exchange, the nomads bought the grain and silk produced by China. They also bought iron for horse trappings, elegant cloth for courtly robes, and steel for weapons.

As a result of the trade, the semi-nomadic chiefs not only wore robes of Chinese silk, modeled their own elite life on that of China’s rulers and imported rice as a high-status food, they also adopted many Chinese artistic techniques, including painting, for their court culture.

This porcelain depicting a “Westerner,” or nomad, on a camel is from China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Similar ties between steppe peoples and their sedentary neighbors repeated across Eurasia – from the frontiers of India, and Persia, to the Arabian peninsula. The symbiotic relationships laid the basis for a stable cross-continental trading network that served everybody’s interest.

Over time, the Silk Roads transported goods of almost every conceivable type, from silk to spices to new plant dyes to medicines to industrial products. The industrial products not only included Chinese ceramics but Damascus steel and blown glass from China, India and Persia – the world’s three great glass-making centers in 1,000 AD.

That was at a time when, as Gordon notes, “glass-making had been entirely lost in Europe for centuries and would not be recovered for more than two centuries.”

But if commerce was the raison d’etre of the Silk Roads as far as most people in the manufacturing centers were concerned, it was the cultural exchanges that ultimately became the most important dividend for the people along the Silk Roads themselves.

Over the centuries, these exchanges were so great they created a shared Silk Roads culture that can still be seen in much of the weaving and other art of the region today.

In tracing the history of Asia from 500 to 1500, Gordon describes the cultural exchanges as taking place in two great successive waves: first Buddhist and, then, Islamic.

Both religions were “universalizing,” coming from outside and spreading across huge areas of the Silk Road network by recruiting on a basis of personal commitment rather than ethnicity or region.

At the same time, both religions encouraged people to travel for spiritual development and encouraged rulers to build rest-houses, pilgrimage sites, and colleges (monasteries or madrassas) to facilitate their quest.

Shown here is the complex of three madrassas on Registan Square in the center of Samarkand. The oldest (Ulugbeg Madrassa) dates to the 15th century, the newest to the 17th.

Thanks to these shared religious networks, ideas and artistic styles traveled as easily along the Silk Roads as commercial goods did between bazaars.

Gordon notes that by the Islamic period a man trained in Shari’a law in one state could find employment as an administrator in another.

And court painters “corresponded, viewed each others' work, and moved to find patronage across a network that stretched from Spain to southern India.”

As an example of court painting, here is a book illustration by the most famous court miniaturist, Kamal ud-Din Behzad (or Bihzad), who died in Tabriz in 1535. It clearly shows the influence of Chinese landscape painting in the background.

The evolution of much of the Silk Road region -- think today’s ‘carpet belt’ -- into a shared cultural space was hastened by two other factors: migrations and conquests.

The world being what it is, the increasing riches of cities along the trade routes both gave rise to empires and tempted conquerors from afar.

Just a few of the results were the Seljuk Turk empire extending from Central Asia to Anatolia; Genghis Khan’s empire covering most of Eurasia; and the Timurid empire stretching from Persia to Central Asia to northern India.

These vast empires united very diverse areas which ordinarily were isolated by geography. As Gordon notes, Genghis Khan ruled both steppes and large areas of agricultural China. The Mughals ruled both sides of the Himalayas.

If the shared culture of the Silk Road world could be given a single name, it would be this improbable sounding string of hyphens: Turkic-Mongol-Persian.

But the fusion was real, powerful, and long-lasting. And it helps explain much about what otherwise would be inexplicable in carpet history.

Just one example is the cosmopolitan style of the classical Persian court carpets of the 16th century. In them, Chinese-style cloudbands mix with Islamic calligraphy and Persian legends. All of them together is the legacy of the Silk Roads.

(The term “Silk Road” is a recent, elegant name for a network that needed no name in its own day. The term was coined in 1870 by German geographer Ferdinand van Richthofen, the uncle of the Red Baron.)

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Related Links:

Silk Road and China Trade


Wikipedia: Silk Road