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In June of 313 C.E., while languishing on China’s northwest frontier some 2,000 miles east of his native Samarkand, a merchant named Nanai-vandak wrote a poignant letter to his business associates back home: A severe famine in the Chinese capital, Luoyang, had led to the death of some of his compatriots. Fearing that he too might perish, Nanai-vandak asked his friends to invest his savings on behalf of his “orphan” son back home.

Sadly, this letter never reached its destination. In 1907 the British archaeological explorer Aurel Stein found it with several other letters near Dunhuang, a guard post at the western end of China’s Great Wall. The letter had probably been lost in transit or confiscated by Chinese authorities.

Nanai-vandak’s letter was one of more than a hundred rare Chinese artifacts included in a 2001 exhibition on the Silk Road organized by the Asia Society Museum in New York. The exhibition’s beautifully illustrated catalogue, Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, shows that the Silk Road, which stretched from the eastern Mediterranean to China, was much more than a trade route: It was an extraordinary conduit for the transmission of ideas, artistic techniques, cultural traditions and religious beliefs.

A central role in this cultural exchange was played by a little-known ancient people called the Sogdians, who farmed the fertile valleys northeast of the Oxus (Amu Darya) River in what is now Uzbekistan. Though ruled by the Persian Achaemenid Empire (559–331 B.C.E.), the Sogdians deftly managed their own economic affairs, and commerce flourished in their great cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. In 331 B.C.E., Alexander the Great conquered Persia and then moved on to Bactria (present-day northern Afghanistan), where he married a local princess, Roxana. Alexander extended his eastern campaign to India in the south and Sogdiana in the north—bringing Hellenistic art and culture to Central Asia, where the Greek legacy persisted for hundreds of years.^a

Monks and Merchants is full of objects that testify to this legacy. For example, a small round silver platter, found in the western Chinese province of Gansu in 1988, is embossed with a scene showing the wine-god Dionysus lounging on the back of a lion and surrounded by a band of 12 Olympian deities. Probably made in the second or third century C.E. in the eastern Roman Empire, perhaps Egypt or Syria, the platter may reflect the 059Greco-Egyptian philosophy of Neoplatonism, which elevated Dionysus above the other gods. The platter was transported to Bactria, where it acquired a Bactrian inscription by the early sixth century. It later made its way to Gansu, thousands of miles from home. This platter, like poor Nanai-vandak and his letter, illustrates the peripatetic quality of life along the Silk Road.

By the turn of the modern era, Central Asia was the beneficiary of art forms from Persia, Greece and the Roman Empire, as well as from India. This panoply of artistic ideas and motifs arrived in China during the Later Han Dynasty (25–220 C.E.), thanks to Buddhist monks who often traveled with caravans along the Silk Road.

Chinese artists then absorbed and modified these foreign ideas. Another object found in China’s Gansu province, an 18-inch-high limestone stupa (a funerary mound symbolizing the Buddhist universe), bears an inscription dating it to 428 C.E. The conical upper section of the four-tiered stupa (shown below) resembles the chattravali (which looks like a stack of umbrellas) as found on stone stupas from India. However, the top is capped with a round disk incised with the Big Dipper constellation, the traditional Chinese symbol of the cosmos. In the circular tier just below the chattravali, seven meditating Buddhas and one cross-ankled Maitreya (or future Buddha) sit under arched niches reminiscent of Greco-Roman sculptural forms. Below this tier is a circular column inscribed with a passage from the Buddhist Ekottaragama Sutra (Book of Gradual Sayings), which was translated into Chinese in the fourth century C.E. On the stupa’s octagonal base, eight deities hold offerings, such as lotus blossoms. To the upper right of each deity is a written sign—a set of three horizontal lines (with some broken)—that comes from the ancient Chinese classic Yi Jing (Book of Changes). This ancient stupa is a miracle of multiculturalism.

In 1973 railway workers in another western Chinese province, 060Ningxia, came upon an ancient tomb. Dating to the late Northern Wei Dynasty (386–535 C.E.), the tomb held the remains of a husband and wife. The burial goods included a Sasanian coin—a silver drachm of King Peroz, who ruled the Persian Sasanian Kingdom from 459 to 484 C.E. The most remarkable object in the tomb, however, was the husband’s lacquered coffin, which was elaborately decorated with traditional Chinese Taoist themes of immortality, Confucian scenes of filial piety, Buddhist motifs and a Persian-style banquet scene. Banquet scenes like this one have been found painted on the walls of palaces and residences in Afrasiab and Panjikent (near Samarkand), as well as on several funerary couches and a stone sarcophagus recently excavated in central China. All were made within about a 50-year period (the late sixth and early seventh centuries C.E.), and epitaphs identify some of them as belonging to Sogdians who held the position of sabao, an overseer of the local community who served on behalf of the Chinese government.

These stone epitaphs reveal the extent to which Sogdians had become integrated into the Chinese society by the seventh century C.E. One epitaph from Ningxia concerned the sabao Shi Shewu, “Grand Master for Proper Consultation and Cavalry General of the Right Palace Guard of the Grand Sui Dynasty,” who died at age 63 in the year 609. Though born in China and thoroughly assimilated into things Chinese, he was descended from Sogdians of Kesh (Shahr-i-Sabz, south of Samarkand). Shi Shewu’s great grandfather and grandfather had also served as sabao. His eldest son, Shi Hedan, served in the Chinese army and then retired in 666 to become a regional official in charge of military affairs.

Earlier Sogdian merchants—such as our fourth-century correspondent Nanai-vandak—often found themselves fleeing the political turmoil of central China, but by the seventh century, when China was stable and prosperous, many had gained prominence in Chinese society. This state of affairs ended in 755 C.E., however, when the Sogdian general An Lushan led a rebellion against the Tang Dynasty. Although An Lushan was executed in 757, his rebellion lasted until 763. Afterwards, the Tangs lost all interest in matters Sogdian.

The cultural influences the Sogdians transmitted to China between the fourth and eighth centuries, however, were powerful and enduring. Monks and Merchants, with contributions by several experts in such fields as numismatics, Chinese and Sogdian art, and Chinese and Central Asian archaeology, is a beautiful and informative introduction to a fascinating subject.

In June of 313 C.E., while languishing on China’s northwest frontier some 2,000 miles east of his native Samarkand, a merchant named Nanai-vandak wrote a poignant letter to his business associates back home: A severe famine in the Chinese capital, Luoyang, had led to the death of some of his compatriots. Fearing that he too might perish, Nanai-vandak asked his friends to invest his savings on behalf of his “orphan” son back home. Sadly, this letter never reached its destination. In 1907 the British archaeological explorer Aurel Stein found it with several other letters near Dunhuang, a guard post […]