A Han envoy’s captivity opened the Silk Road west
Zhang Qian (died c.114 BC), a Western Han diplomat serving Emperor Wu, was among the first official Chinese envoys to bring back reports on Central Asia, including the last Greco-Bactrian rulers and Parthia. Thirteen years as a Xiongnu captive did not stop him, and his journeys helped open Silk Road trade.
From Chenggu, just east of Hanzhong in Shaanxi, he came to Chang’an between 140 and 134 BC as a court Gentleman. The nomadic Xiongnu then held today’s Inner Mongolia and dominated the Western Regions. In 138 BC the court sent him, an officer who knew the Xiongnu, west with ninety-nine companions and a captured Xiongnu guide, Ganfu, to recruit the Yuezhi of modern Tajikistan as allies.
Crossing Xiongnu land, he was seized and held for thirteen years, taking a Xiongnu wife and fathering a son. He eventually slipped away with Ganfu and his family, skirting Lop Nor and the northern Tarim oases to Dayuan in Fergana and then the Yuezhi. They bred fine horses and grew alfalfa, but had settled too comfortably to want war. After a year there and in Bactria he took the southern Tarim route home, was captured again, and escaped two years later amid chaos after the Xiongnu ruler died. Of more than a hundred men, only he and Ganfu returned, in 125 BC.
His reports, quoted at length by the historian Sima Qian, described Dayuan as some seventy walled cities of rice and wheat farmers who made grape wine, and praised its tall ‘blood-sweating’ horses; Dayuan’s refusal to hand them over later provoked two Han campaigns. The Yuezhi, he wrote, had been driven from between the Qilian range and Dunhuang and now ruled north of the Oxus over Daxia, a leaderless Bactria of petty chiefs where he found Sichuan cloth. He was the first Chinese writer to describe the one-humped camel.
He also heard of Shendu, or India, a hot land where warriors rode elephants, and of Anxi, Parthia, with hundreds of cities; Mesopotamia he knew only by hearsay. A second mission to reach India through Sichuan failed, and in 119–115 BC he was sent to court the Wusun.
Source: Zhang Qian
