Uyghur Horse-Silk Trade

From the end of the rebellion of An Lushan to the fall of the Uyghur Khaganate in 840, the Uyghurs sold horses to the Tang court and took silk in return.^[1] The Chinese histories give the price as forty bolts of silk for one horse.^[2] The Jiu Tang Shu says that the Uyghurs sent envoys every year to trade horses for silk at an agreed price.^[3]

The first grant

The silk began as a reward. On 30 December 757 the emperor Suzong honoured the Uyghur crown prince, who held the title yabghu, for the part his cavalry had played in retaking the two capitals.^[3]^[4] The edict made him Minister of Works and Prince Zhongyi. It also granted him 20,000 bolts of silk a year, which an Uyghur embassy was to collect at the army of Shuofang.^[2] The same Uyghurs had just plundered Luoyang for three days.^[3] According to the Xin Tang Shu, the elders of the city paid them in silk to stop.^[5] In 762 the Tang envoy Liu Qingtan reminded the khan that the court gave him tens of thousands of bolts of silk every year.^[3]

The price of a horse

After the Qianyuan years (758 to 760) the Uyghurs came every year to the capital and asked forty bolts of silk for each horse.^[2] They brought up to tens of thousands of horses at a time.^[3] The envoys waited in the Court of Diplomatic Reception until their turn came.^[3] The Jiu Tang Shu complains that the Uyghurs took silk without limit and the Tang received useless horses in exchange. The court, it says, found this very hard.^[3]

A bolt of silk was a fixed measure. An edict of 720 set it at four zhang in length and 1.8 chi in width, about twelve metres by fifty-four centimetres in the conversion of one modern edition.^[6] One estimate counts a bolt as the work of one woman in one day.^[6] Around 800 the Chinese began to deliver shorter bolts of three zhang, woven of coarse silk. The Uyghurs complained through the khatun, the Princess of Xian’an, and in 807 the emperor ordered the practice stopped.^[6] A letter of 809 shows a price of fifty bolts for a horse.^[7]

The road was hard on the animals. The poet Bai Juyi wrote that the Uyghur horses left no blade of grass along the Yinshan road. He also wrote that sixty or seventy of every hundred died or were injured on the way to China.^[8]

Limits set by the Tang

In 773 the Uyghur envoy Chixin brought 10,000 horses to Chang’an. The horses were paid for out of the tax in grain and money. The emperor Daizong did not want to burden his people further and ordered his officials to buy only 6,000.^[2] He also sent the envoys home with generous gifts, to shame them, as the Jiu Tang Shu puts it.^[3]

In 787 the Uyghur khan asked for a Tang princess. The chief minister Li Mi advised the emperor Dezong to agree on the terms of the Kaiyuan years. The khan was to call himself a subject. His envoys were not to number more than 200, his horses for trade were not to exceed 1,000, and he was not to take Tang subjects out beyond the frontier.^[5]^[9] The emperor agreed, and the Uyghurs asked leave to accept the conditions.^[5] In the same year the Uyghur envoy went home with 50,000 bolts of horse-price silk and leave to trade at the markets.^[10]

Debts and payments

The Tang often left horses unpaid. In 780 a party of Uyghur chiefs and Sogdians was on its way home. At Zhenwu the Tang commander had the Uyghurs and the hu killed and seized several thousand camels and horses and a hundred thousand of silk and brocade.^[5]^[11] The new khan, Tun Bagha Tarkan, would not avenge the dead with more blood. He told the Tang envoy that the Tang owed the Uyghurs 1,800,000 for horses and must pay it quickly.^[5]^[12] Some scholars take the sum to be strings of cash and see in the demand a wish for good relations.^[13]

The payments that followed are recorded in bolts. In 790 the court gave an Uyghur envoy 300,000 bolts as horse price.^[3] In 822 it gave 50,000 in the second month and 70,000 in the third.^[3] In 827 it sent 200,000 bolts to the Court of Diplomatic Reception to be paid out for horses. In the first month of 829 it sent 230,000.^[3] The Xin Tang Shu puts a gift of 500,000 bolts of horse price at the start of the reign of Wenzong.^[5] The two histories do not agree on the sums, and neither explains the difference. At forty bolts a horse, 300,000 bolts pay for 7,500 horses.

Sogdians in the trade

The Uyghurs did not come to China alone. The Xin Tang Shu says that Sogdians, whom it calls the hu of nine names, travelled with every embassy. Many stayed in the capital until they numbered close to a thousand, and their property grew large.^[5]^[11] The commander at Zhenwu justified the killing of 780 in a memorial. The Uyghurs, he wrote, were not strong by nature, and the nine hu were what helped them.^[5] It has been argued that the Uyghurs, even more than the Göktürks before them, drew a great tribute in silk from the purchase of horses at a high price.^[11]

Interpretations

One view calls the trade a forced one. The Uyghurs imposed it from a position of strength, and the Chinese answered with passive resistance. They left it to the Uyghurs to enforce payment, and the unpaid horses mounted up.^[14] A second view stresses what the silk did in Uyghur hands. It served as a form of currency, it paid for the comfort of the court, and it could be sent on to other countries for goods that the Uyghurs needed more.^[15] A third notes that silk was the main currency of the Silk Road and that the Uyghur elite drew it from China in exchange for horses, both at the border markets and through missions that were nominally tribute.^[16] A fourth treats the payments as contributions that the Tang court called payments for services rendered, and counts them as one of the outside incomes that began to divide Uyghur society.^[17] The Arab envoy Tamim ibn Bahr is reported to have said that the emperor sent the khan 500,000 bolts every year.^[15]

Breaks and fears

The trade stopped from about 795 to 805. The sources do not say why.^[8] Later the court read a pause as a warning. Li Jiang, chief minister from 811 to 814, wrote after his resignation that the Uyghurs had not come with horses for two years.^[18]^[5] He asked whether they had tired of the profit in silk. He suspected that they were waiting for the season when the wind is high and the horses are fat, to attack.^[5] He counted among five dangers the possibility that Uyghurs, who no longer bought and sold horses, would make an alliance with the Tibetans.^[5]

After the fall of 840 the horse price was still a matter between the two courts. In 842 the emperor Wuzong wrote to the Uyghur khan Ukhe, who stood at the frontier. The edict says that the court had repaid the horse price in full. It also says that envoys had reported that the khan was waiting only for the horse price.^[19]

The sources record the sums and the complaints. They give no figure for what the Uyghurs spent the silk on, and no count of the horses that came back.

References

^ Mackerras 1972, p. 47
^ a b c d Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ a b c d e f g h i j k Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 60–61
^ a b c d e f g h i j k Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ a b c Mackerras 1972, p. 149
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 150
^ a b Cosmo 2018, p. 454
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 97
^ Cefu yuangui, juan 979; Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 6
^ a b c de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 308
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 93
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 38
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 47–48
^ a b Mackerras 1972, p. 48
^ Cosmo 2018, p. 453
^ Khazanov 1994, p. 258
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 44
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 18

Sources

Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 18, 195
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 6
Cefu yuangui, juan 979 (after Tongdian and Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Nicola Di Cosmo; Amy Hessl; Caroline Leland; Oyunsanaa Byambasuren; Hanqin Tian; Baatarbileg Nachin; Neil Pederson; Laia Andreu-Hayles; Edward R. Cook, Environmental Stress and Steppe Nomads: Rethinking the History of the Uyghur Empire (744–840) with Paleoclimate Data (2018)
Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1994)