Loulan

Loulan was a walled town on the Salt Marsh, the Lop Nor, at the eastern end of the Tarim.^[1] The Han once sent the marquis of Zhuoye against it. He arrived first with seven hundred horsemen and captured its king.^[1] The campaign is dated to 108 BC.^[2]

Between the Han and the Xiongnu

The Han Shu shows Loulan standing between two powers. After its king was captured, Loulan sent one son as a hostage to the Xiongnu and one to the Han. The country lay at the far eastern edge of the oasis kingdoms, nearest to China, on the road past the White Dragon Dunes, where there was neither water nor grass. Its people had to guide the Han envoys, carry water and food for them and escort them in and out. Officers and troops often plundered them. Wearied of this, the kings found it inconvenient to deal with the Han. They again served the Xiongnu as eyes in the rear. They repeatedly stopped and killed Han envoys.^[3]

The Han Shu tells the end of the kingdom as a murder. Fu Jiezi, sent by the general Huo Guang, came to Loulan with gold and silks, saying that he would give presents. He drank with the king. When the king was drunk, he led him aside and had two strong men stab him from behind. Then he told the king’s nobles that the Han would set up the king’s brother Weituqi, who lived in China. The Han did so. They gave Weituqi a seal and a lady of the palace for his wife, and renamed the kingdom Shanshan.^[3] The year was 77 BC.^[4]^[2] Weituqi feared a son of the old king, who was still alive, and asked for Han settlers at Yixun, a fertile town of his country. The Han sent one officer and forty men to farm there.^[3]

Loulan and Shanshan

The Han Shu entry on Shanshan says that the kingdom was originally called Loulan. It gives its seat as Yuni, 1,600 li from the Yang Pass.^[3] The two names did not mark one place. After 77 BC the court sat at Yuni, which is identified as Charkhlik, south-west of the Lop Nor. The walled town in the Lop desert went on under its old name.^[5]^[6] A ruined town lies north of the dried-up marshes of the old Lop Nor, just west of 90 degrees east and at 40 degrees 31 minutes north. It is thought to occupy the place of the old kingdom of Loulan.^[5] Slips of wood found there carry dates from AD 263 to 330. The dated papers are of AD 270 and 312.^[5]

The garrison

At the beginning of the fourth century Chinese garrisons still held the kingdom. Loulan was a cosmopolitan town with communities of Indians, Chinese, Sogdians and surely Bactrians.^[7]^[5] Several of the Ancient Letters were probably addressed there. Letter II was to go through Loulan on its way to Samarkand.^[8] The Chinese frontier companies of the region bore names such as “who devour the hu”.^[9] The companies of that name in the published slips belong to the Han frontier line north of Dunhuang, of the first century BC to the second century AD. They are therefore older than the garrison of Loulan.^[10]

The slips of the garrison give a closer view. Its stores held 395 spades of the Hu, newly received, and small iron saws of the Hu. Individual Hu appear by name, and one of them paid tribute in silk.^[11] A ration list names three native soldiers of Gaochang.^[12] Several slips are addressed to the chief clerk of the Western Regions, or name him.^[13] A draft of a letter by one holder of the office, Li Bo, whom the Jin Shu names about 324, was found at the same site.^[14] A fragmentary letter on paper says that someone traded at Dunhuang, with 20,000 coins.^[15]

In 330 a delivery of grain went to a hu from Sogdiana. The document is the latest Chinese document found at Loulan.^[16] The slip was first read otherwise. The first edition has the recipient as a hu named Lou. A second line reckons ten thousand, with two hundred coins remaining.^[17] The reading as a Sogdian, a Sute hu, is the later one.^[16] The slip is dated to the eighteenth year of the Jianxing reign name, which had officially ended in 316.^[17] One explanation has the small post in the north of the Lop Nor, left to its own resources, keep the name because word of its end never reached it. A second has the name continued locally by the Liang.^[18]^[16]

After Loulan

The town was given up between the second third of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth. Some scholars put the end in the second third of the fourth century, others at the beginning of the fifth. The advance of the desert round the Lop Nor is the probable cause.^[19] In the years 627 to 649 a leader from Samarkand, Kang Yandian, settled in Shanshan with other Sogdians and founded towns south of the Lop Nor.^[20] One of them was called Grape City, because he planted vines inside the walls.^[20]^[21]

References

^ a b Shiji, juan 123
^ a b Herrmann 1910, p. 103
^ a b c d Han Shu, juan 96
^ Chavannes 1913, vii
^ a b c d Chavannes 1913, iv
^ Herrmann 1910, p. 100–104
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 46
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 47
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 57
^ Chavannes 1913, x
^ Chavannes 1913, p. 168,186
^ Chavannes 1913, p. 194
^ Chavannes 1913, p. 162,182
^ Chavannes 1913, iv,182
^ Chavannes 1913, p. 188
^ a b c de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 68
^ a b Chavannes 1913, p. 182
^ Chavannes 1913, p. 182–183
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 122–123
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 123–124
^ Laufer 1919, p. 222

Sources

Shiji, juan 123
Han Shu, juan 96 (after Shiji)

Literature

Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Édouard Chavannes, Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein dans les sables du Turkestan oriental (1913)
Albert Herrmann, Die alten Seidenstrassen zwischen China und Syrien. Beiträge zur alten Geographie Asiens, Bd. 1 (1910)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)