Border Markets

The Göktürks first appear at the Chinese frontier as traders. The Zhou Shu says that under Bumin his people grew stronger. They began to come to the frontier for silk and floss, wishing to open relations with China.^[1] One rendering has them come to buy the silk.^[2] An older one has them come to sell it.^[3] In 545 the Western Wei sent them an envoy, An Nuopantuo, a hu from Jiuquan.^[1]

Silk as payment

Under Taspar Khan silk reached the khaganate as payment more than as trade. The Northern Zhou, allied to the khaganate by marriage, gave it a hundred thousand pieces of silk every year.^[1] Göktürks in the Zhou capital, clothed in brocade and fed on meat, often numbered in the thousands.^[1] The Northern Qi, afraid of raids, emptied their treasuries for them as well.^[1] Taspar told his followers that as long as his two sons in the south were dutiful, he need never fear want.^[1] In 573 he sent an envoy to the Zhou with horses. In 574 he sent horses again.^[4] Their value was only a fraction of the value of the Chinese presents.^[5] The payments were made in silk, and money or gold seldom entered them, unlike the payments on the Byzantine frontier.^[5]

The Sui markets

In a letter dated in the year of the dragon, 584, Ishbara Khan wrote to the Sui emperor. He said that the sheep and horses of his country were all the emperor’s, and that the silks of the emperor’s country were all his own.^[6]^[7]

Under Tulan Khan the chiefs of the Göktürk tribes sent the Sui ten thousand horses, twenty thousand sheep, and five hundred camels and five hundred cattle.^[6] Soon afterwards they sent envoys to ask for markets along the frontier, where they could trade with China. The emperor agreed.^[6] The Sui Shu places the request in the year after the embassy of Rudan Tegin. That year is 588. The Cefu Yuangui enters Rudan’s jade staff under the seventh year of Kaihuang, and the ten thousand horses, the twenty thousand sheep and the camels and cattle under the eighth.^[8]^[9] The emperor granted permission “soon” after the tribute. The same account counts it as the first of the permissions that had to be renewed again and again.^[10] A second dating gives 594. One translation of the Sui Shu sets the embassy of Rudan in 593 and the request in the year after.^[11]

The Sui Shu’s biography of Pei Ju tells the next stage.^[12] Early in the reign of the emperor Yangdi, the peoples of the Western Regions came in numbers to Zhangye to trade with China. The emperor put Pei Ju in charge of the trade.^[12] Pei Ju questioned the foreign merchants about their countries and wrote a book of three chapters on the Western Regions.^[12]

The ambush at Mayi

Pei Ju also used a market against the Göktürks.^[12] He told the emperor that the Göktürks were simple and easy to divide. Many cunning hu among them, he said, were guiding them.^[12] The worst of them was Shishu Huxi, a favourite of Shibi Khan.^[12] Pei Ju sent Huxi word that the emperor had brought out precious goods at Mayi and wished to trade with the people of the frontier. The first to come, the message said, would get the best.^[12]

Huxi told Shibi nothing.^[12] He drove all his herds before him with his people, racing to be first at the market.^[12] Pei Ju’s soldiers ambushed him below Mayi and killed him.^[12] The emperor wrote to Shibi that Huxi had deserted his khan and had been killed as a traitor.^[12] Shibi knew what had happened and stopped coming to court.^[12] In 615 he besieged the emperor at Yanmen.^[12]

The Tang market of 624

After the fall of the Sui the Göktürks raided the Tang frontier year after year.^[13] In 624 Ilig Khan made peace and withdrew in a heavy rain that had slackened the bows.^[13] He then sent an envoy asking leave to come to the Beilou pass and open a mutual market. The emperor could not refuse him.^[13]

Interpretations

Drawing on the inscriptions, some scholars argue that the Göktürks received silk, cotton cloth, grain, gold and silver goods and farming tools from their settled neighbours.^[14] They got them either through regulated trade in the Chinese cities and special frontier zones, which China used as a means of restraint, or through raiding.^[15] China, they add, traded abroad only reluctantly and for political reasons. The Sogdian merchants were drawn to the nomads, who had the military power to force the Chinese markets open.^[16]

Others put the horses, not the raids, at the centre. The Göktürks of the sixth century had more livestock than their own herds needed. Their gifts of “the products of their land” were horses, sheep and camels, for which the courts paid in silk.^[17] Where the sources name no goods, the numerals that follow the gift suggest horses.^[18] The khan’s letter of 584, with its sheep and horses on one side and silk on the other, then states the barter the Göktürks wanted.^[19] When the silk came late or in small amounts, the khans resented it and raided. The court, afraid, then paid more.^[20] The raids and the requests for markets come from the same motive. War and trade are not opposites.^[20] The court, for its part, took the gifts for tokens of respect. It did not need the horses in that number, and it saw in the silk the price of peace.^[21] At times it withdrew permissions it had granted and forbade the sale of iron and of silk to foreigners. It gave way again when the Göktürks came armed.^[22]

In the Cefu Yuangui’s lists of tribute the Göktürk embassies between about 545 and 616 number nearly a fifth of those of all other foreign peoples together.^[23] The count is rough, since the lists leave out some embassies.^[24]

The market was a concession that the Chinese court granted at its own pleasure. Pei Ju showed that it could also serve as a trap.

References

^ a b c d e f Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 16
^ Julien 1864, p. 329
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 5
^ a b Sinor 1990, p. 307
^ a b c Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 74
^ Cefu yuangui, juan 970
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 136
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 136,141
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 81–82
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 67
^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Golden 1992, p. 152–153
^ Golden 1992, p. 153
^ Golden 1992, p. 144
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 138,141
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 138
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 139,165
^ a b Ecsedy 1968, p. 141
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 139,142,144
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 141,145
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 143
^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 172

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 5, 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 67, 84
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Cefu yuangui, juan 970 (after Tongdian and Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Stanislas Julien, Documents historiques sur les Tou-kioue (Turcs) (1864)
Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Ildikó Ecsedy, Trade-and-War Relations between the Turks and China in the Second Half of the Sixth Century (1968)
Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)