This week, I selected the first exploration pack.
The Tang Dynasty (618-907) covered most of China during its rule. Their territory also expanded into northern Vietnam, which was also occupied by other ethnic groups (separate from the Tang) and is when China became a major world power. Two main rivers were pivotal to the Tang; the Yangtze river allowed for rice to be a staple in the peoples’ diet and farmers grew wheat and millet along the Yellow River.
Tang emperors were assisted by officials who were trained in classical Chinese through wu jing – the core of the Confucian tradition. During the Tang rule there were two rebellions, which were suppressed, but the government lost great amounts of power and couldn’t maintain control over their whole territory afterwards. In the early days of the dynasty, there was unrest and rebellion, but it was easily put down and the Tang Dynasty embraced other cultures and religions during this time period. However, the territories that arose because of the rebellions eventually led to the downfall of the dynasty and modeled themselves after the Tang Dynasty. Soon, most of East Asia had adopted Tang practices.
The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, which was located along the Silk Road, had long been neglected. It had once been a place where people painted Buddhist scenes. Around the year 1900, a religious practitioner took up residence there and discovered the library cave of Dunhuang.
In the Indiana Jones video, Wang Yuanlu, who discovered the library cave of Dunhuang, devoted his life to the temple and “spent next to nothing on his person or private interests”. Wang sold many of the 40,000 scrolls he discovered in the cave (40,000!) to the British, the French, and historians and anthropologists from many other countries. He didn’t care about preserving the scrolls for China and their historical and cultural importance, and sold them to raise money to restore the temple so he would be welcomed into the afterlife.
The trip along the Silk Road, as described by the Valerie Hansen reading, was dangerous and the punishment for embarking on the journey (and leaving the country) during the 7th century was severe. The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang traveled the route to India in order to translate the original Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures and texts into Chinese. It took 17 years and was full of many near death experiences. The Silk Road trade has always been assumed to be supported by trade of merchants from countries along its route, but in reality it was mostly supported by the spending of the Tang government and the presence of the Chinese troops. “The Tang government injected vast amounts of both cloth and coin into the local economy”.
The reading, “The Real World Legal System in the Turfan Documents” is about how people went about regarding legal issues and how they agreed to resolve them and the storing of records, specifically populations of households. “Women’s Lives at Dunhuang in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries” suggests that as long as three years of marriage pass, married couples should live together happily for the rest of their lives and be buried together. If the marriage doesn’t succeed and they don’t live together happily, they will be enemies.
Bibliography
D’Haeseleer, Tineke. “Tang China (618-907).” In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the Global
Middle Ages, edited by Erik Hermans, 161-188. Arc Humanities Press,
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Hansen, Valerie. The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800. Second ed. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Justin Jacobs, Indiana Jones in History: From Pompeii to the Moon. “Episode XV: The
Guardians of Dunhuang”
Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road: A New History with Documents. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017.
