DepthReading

THE SOGDIANS ABROAD---Life and Death in China

Summary: Iranian whirling girl, Iranian whirling girl… At the sound of the string and drums, she raises her arms, Like swirling snowflakes tossed about, she turns in her twirling dance. Whirling to the left, turning to the right, she never feels exhausted, A thous

Iranian whirling girl, Iranian whirling girl…
At the sound of the string and drums, she raises her arms,
Like swirling snowflakes tossed about, she turns in her twirling dance.
Whirling to the left, turning to the right, she never feels exhausted,
A thousand rounds, ten thousand circuits—it never seems to end…
Compared to her, the wheels of a racing chariot revolve slowly and a whirlwind is sluggish.
Iranian whirling girl,
You came from Sogdiana…


So runs a Chinese poem by the famed Tang-dynasty poet Bo Juyi 白居易 (772–846 CE), describing a Sogdian dancer at the imperial court. The Sogdian Whirl (huxuan wu 胡旋舞), as the dance was known, would become a phenomenon in China; FIG. 1. Bo Juyi’s poem describes the impact of this Sogdian cultural import, of how “officials and concubines all learned how to circle and turn.” Indeed, the dance’s influence reached all the way up to the emperor Tang Xuanzong 唐玄宗 (685–762 CE). The poem tells how the courtesan Yang Guifei 楊貴妃 “stole the ruler’s heart with her Sogdian Whirl.” You might even say that the Sogdian Whirl created a catastrophe of world-historical proportions. The Sogdian-Turkic general An Lushan 安祿山 (703–757 CE) became a favorite of Xuanzong due, in part, to his expertise in the dance, despite weighing more than 400 pounds. This not-so-tiny dancer’s rebellion against his emperor would bring the Tang dynasty to its knees. The An Lushan Rebellion, as it became known, would later be claimed as proportionally among the deadliest atrocities in human history.


FIG. 1 Flask with Sogdian Dancer. China, Northern Qi dynasty (550–577 CE). Glazed earthenware. National Museum of China.

Photograph © National Museum of China




If the Sogdian Whirl was perhaps the most visible and momentous of Sogdian exports to China during the Tang period (618–907 CE), it was by no means the only one. Since at least the early 4th century, Sogdians had been conducting business in China. For entrepreneurial Central Asians, China was a land of possibility, offering lucrative markets and jobs. Many Sogdians seized the opportunity, and found a home and a living in China in a variety of occupations—as traders, entertainers, craftsmen, scribes, translators, monks, soldiers, and military leaders; FIG. 2. Unfortunately for us, the evidence for these varied figures is patchy at best. For the non-elites, we must piece together fragments from various sources, and this is the work of the first part of this essay. For the Sogdian elites we have significantly more evidence, which is analyzed in the second part of the essay. We focus on two such Sogdians for whom we are able to construct quite a detailed picture of their biographies, lifestyles, and worldviews.



FIG. 2 This 8th-century Chinese statue is testament to the popularity of Central Asian musicians, many of whom were Sogdians, in China. China, Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Glazed earthenware; H. 58.4 cm. Excavated in 1957 from the tomb of Xianyu Tinghui, general of Yunhui, buried in western suburbs of Chang’an (Xi’an), dated to 723 CE. National Museum of China, Beijing.

Photograph © National Museum of China




Non-Elite Sogdians in China

In terms of non-elite Sogdians in China, we are perhaps on firmest ground in trade, where sources in a variety of languages make it clear that Sogdians were very active on several paths of the Silk Roads, controlling much of the trade between Central Asia and China. Their business savvy was so well known in China that various sayings accrued around it. For example, as one Tang history put it,


"When they [Sogdians] give birth to a son, they put honey on his mouth and place glue in his palms so that when he grows up, he will speak sweet words and grasp gems in his hand as if they were glued there… They are good at trading, love profit, and go abroad at the age of twelve. They are everywhere profit is to be found."



One such Sogdian trader abroad was Nanai-Vandak, whom we know of from the extremely precious cache of letters that Sir Aurel Stein discovered ninety kilometers west of Dunhuang  in 1907. Nanai-Vandak acted as an agent somewhere in Gansu Province for his partners back in Samarkand . Such textual evidence for Sogdian traders in China is reinforced by visual evidence: a Chinese tomb sculpture (mingqi 明器, FIG. 3) depicts such a trader, bearing a sack and holding an ewer of Sogdian shape. From other visual as well as textual evidence, we know that Sogdians and their descendants also served as horse trainers and grooms in China.

FIG. 3 Tomb Figurine of a Merchant. China, Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Earthenware with traces of painted decoration; H. 26 cm × W. 9.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Sallie Crozer Hilprecht Collection, 1929, F1929-6-441.

Photograph © Philadelphia Museum of Art


The Sogdians’ mercantile role required proficiency in languages, and for this reason they also frequently worked as translators for the Chinese bureaucracy as well as transmitters of religious texts. Although most Sogdians were Mazdeans in religious practice, others were Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, or Jewish, and some even became Buddhist monks. One such was Kang Senghui 康僧會, the son of a Sogdian merchant living in what is today Hanoi, Vietnam. Kang Senghui himself did not enter China by way of the west–east overland route, but instead came by sea. He, along with other Sogdian Buddhists living in and outside of Sogdiana, helped spread Buddhism in China through their translations into Chinese of the Buddhist sutras, as well as by their preaching.


Still other Sogdians came as artisans and craftsmen—among them, no doubt, metalworkers who brought new shapes and techniques to their Chinese counterparts. Almost all of these emigrés were anonymous, but we do know something of the 6th-century Sogdian artist Cao Zhongda 曹仲達, who was said to be “good at clay sculpture and in painting images of the Buddha” as well as of the “famous people of his time.” Unfortunately, it seems that none of his art has survived. Cao was particularly well known for rendering drapery so that it looked as if the clothes were “thin and transparent as if emerging from water.”

FIG. 4 Funerary Bed of An Qie. Excavated in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China; dated to 579 CE. Gilded and painted stone relief; H. 1.17 × W. 2.28 × D. 1.3 m. Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, Xi’an.   View object page 

After Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology 陕西省考古研究院, Xi’an Bei Zhou An Jia mu 西安北周安伽墓 [Tomb of An Jia from the Northern Zhou dynasty] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2003), pl. 1.




Elite Sogdians in China

If the references to non-elite Sogdian traders, translators, and craftsmen in China remain highly fragmentary, we are more fortunate when it comes to members of the Sogdian elite. For here we are able to make use of a remarkably rich form of evidence: the tombstones and epitaph stones of several elite Sogdians found there over the last several decades. These elites were interred—sometimes with a wife, sometimes alone—in underground Chinese-style tombs, either on a stone Chinese-style bed or on a stone platform placed within a stone sarcophagus in the shape of a Chinese house; FIGS. 4 AND 5.  Both beds and sarcophagi were elaborately decorated with carved, painted, and gilded scenes, typically depicting incidents from the life of the deceased as well as of the deceased (with family) feasting in paradise. Such scenes are atypical of Chinese tomb decoration but reflect the narrative quality of Sogdian art, as known from the 7th- and early 8th-century wall paintings found in Sogdiana itself, specifically at Panjikent .


FIG. 5 Sarcophagus of Shi Jun (Wirkak) and Wiyusi. Excavated in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China, dated to 579–80 CE. Stone with traces of pigment and gilding; H. 1.58 × W. 2.45 × D. 1.55 m. Shaanxi History Museum, Xi’an, China.   View object page 

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