The greatest long walls in Central Asia were built and abandoned long ago, blasted away by wind and sand until they became nearly indiscernible. They protected a region so desolate and so dangerous that the wall builders finally moved on with hardly a backward look, leaving behind only garbage, abandoned homes, and the desiccated vestiges of farms and orchards deprived of life when the irrigation ditches filled with sand. In this forsaken land, where the settlements were hardly more than way stations for travelers moving swiftly on, there was little to defend except a route that passed through hell. But a route is something worth defending, or at least this one was, and so hell was provided with a wall, establishing a secure corridor between distant peoples, linking them rather than keeping them apart.
The Chinese, who thrust a wall west into Central Asia in the second century BC, were establishing an exclusive club. The new fortification connected China to clusters of walled cities that were connected to other clusters of walled cities that were connected to still other clusters of walled cities. The wall enabled trade and communication over unprecedented distances, but only by excluding the nomads of the steppe. Many years later, the withdrawal of the wall’s defenders would be the first move in a retreat that would one day render China remote and inaccessible to the West. By the time of Christopher Columbus, the corridor that the wall had made possible was already long forgotten, necessitating the search for a sea route to China. Of the wall itself, only the ruins remained, awaiting rediscovery by a different breed of explorer, searching for a China that no longer existed.
* * *
The Hungarian-turned-British archaeologist Aurel Stein undertook his journeys some four hundred years after Columbus. He was the product of a vigorous and optimistic age, born into that plucky generation of explorers who in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries famously scattered around the world’s deserts, mountains, and polar regions in search of knowledge or adventure. That generation numbered among its members Livingstone, Burton, Peary, and Shackleton, along with many other celebrated names, and quite a few less familiar ones, too: there was Lady Richmond Brown, plunging into the jungles of Panama; P. T. Etherton bicycling toward the “Roof of the World”; Rosita Forbes preceding Lawrence of Arabia into a Sahara then deadly to outsiders. These were the enthusiastic founders, joiners, and heroes of the Royal Geographical Society, the Russian Geographical Society, and the somewhat more democratized National Geographic Society, all of them infected with a mania for the foreign and unexplored. They were, even the best of them, mostly unprepared for their missions, more interested in adventure than science, and better endowed with courage than training. Stein was exceptional, a gifted polyglot capable of carrying out groundbreaking historical research even in extreme conditions.
Stein spent some forty-five years exploring Asia, and when he died at the age of eighty-one, he was still looking forward to a fresh campaign. Perhaps no one before or after ever exposed more virgin territory—lands then uncharted, ruins undiscovered, and languages unread. Stein’s expeditions took him all over Western and Central Asia, up and down mountains and across every sort of inhospitable terrain. Enchanted by the promise of revealing the Central Asian past, he ventured beyond the familiar world of the old walled cities into the wastelands beyond, and there he found the greatest of all walls, stretching for miles along a wasteland more forbidding even than the harsh steppe to its north. That anyone had ever established a route through such a place was testimony to the pluck and determination of a far earlier generation.
Stein discovered his wall in an abandoned region of the old Silk Road where it snaked around the fringes of the Taklamakan desert. It took more than a touch of mania to go there. The Taklamakan is, even today, a forbidding place, as untamed now as it was a hundred years ago. Here was a wasteland among wastelands, a great oval of dune and doom that the Indians knew as the Great Sand Ocean and the Chinese knew as the Sea of Death. Taklamakan, the Turkish name, is perhaps the most straightforward. It translates to “go in and you won’t come out.” Good enough advice for most of us, but for Aurel Stein, it was more like a dare.
In his memoirs—and Stein was as indefatigable a writer as he was an explorer—the archaeologist spared only a few words to testify that the harshness of the Taklamakan exceeded that of better-known deserts in Arabia, America, or biblical lands. Those others were mere pretenders, in Stein’s estimation, “tame” deserts as opposed to a “true” one. Even the mountains around the Taklamakan were more or less hostile to life, except for a few months each year when some vegetation struggled to viability at high altitudes.
In 1906, Stein set off into the land then commonly known as Chinese Turkistan with a ragtag crew of men, mules, and eventually camels. He described his team as follows: Rai Ram Singh, a crack surveyor from India; Naik Ram Singh, soldier and handyman; Jasvant Singh (“so reliable and gentlemanly in manners”), who cooked for the others but whose high caste prevented his cooking for Stein; and Stein’s own cook, unnamed, “a Mohammedan Indian about whose qualities, professional and personal, the less said the better.” It wasn’t a large force. Mostly there was Stein, a one-man geographical society, who spoke every modern language, read every ancient language, drew every map, searched every ruin, and recorded every find.
The Taklamakan made for harsh travel. Stein conducted his Central Asian campaigns in the heart of winter because he found it easier to transport water in blocks of ice. The frozen desert yielded no supplies, and rations were precious. Even the camels received only half a pint of foul-smelling rapeseed oil every other day.
The crew traveled by day. At night, Stein huddled by a lamp to record his daily finds. He suspended his note taking whenever the ink froze, the temperature having dropped six degrees below freezing, as it inevitably did on its way to much colder levels. Of this brutal cold, Stein once recalled there “was little to complain of,” and he later remarked that these expeditions had been “the happiest memories of [his] life.” At the very least they must have been better than the expedition in which he lost several fingers to frostbite, these things being relative.
The Silk Road of Stein’s day was bereft of traffic. Civilized folk had long abandoned Chinese Turkistan, and for that matter, the barbarians had, too. But the ruins of ancient settlements remained, perched on what looked like tiny mesas, the product of violent winds that had blown away all the land except the dirt directly underneath the buildings. Around these strange formations, Stein discovered the frozen remains of a lost world. Tree-lined avenues survived only in the desiccated trunks of poplars and fruit trees that the former inhabitants had once coaxed to life through irrigation. In the ghostly residences themselves, Stein found ancient wooden writing tablets, tossed aside by treasure hunters who’d come before him. Sometimes he chanced upon documents in rubbish heaps, still reeking after two thousand years. Stein spent days sifting through the detritus with numb fingers. Every evening, he stayed up late, wrapped in furs, deciphering the ancient texts while the thermometer plunged below zero.
Stein’s initial discoveries revealed a close connection with India, but as he progressed farther north, Chinese finds began to predominate. At one abandoned Chinese camp, the wind had produced an awesome effect—leaving intact the massive walls but scooping out everything inside them to a depth of twenty feet. There, Stein found the first of many mummies, freeze-dried for eternity. Soon afterward, he spotted a line of Chinese watchtowers, each spaced three miles apart. Between them lay the sometimes faint traces of a long wall.
This last discovery, more than the cold, gave Aurel Stein goose bumps. How do you lose something over a thousand miles long? Put it in the Taklamakan. Stein had discovered a wall so ancient and obscure that even the Chinese had lost track of it. Here in the Sea of Death, a world away from the rivers of the heartland, Chinese conscript laborers had been transported, and here, as elsewhere, they had worked themselves to the bone in a foreign and inhospitable land. They had established forts and frontier towns, but they hadn’t been able to make a go of it, and they’d left.
* * *
Poking the edges of the Taklamakan, the westernmost of China’s great walls is surely the strangest. The Chinese constructed the wall out of great bundles of reeds, placed horizontally in alternating layers with the ubiquitous tamped dirt. By the time of Stein’s discovery, the reed bundles survived in the same dehydrated state as the poplars and the mummies. Wind-deposited salts and minerals had nearly petrified the remains. In some places, the wall still rose several meters, although in other spots Stein could hardly distinguish it from the ground beneath his feet. The watchtowers made for helpful guideposts. They had once been coated with layers of white plaster, frequently reapplied in a losing battle against the sandblasting of the wind.
Stein recognized that he had stumbled on a discovery too great for his tiny party. For the first time, he was forced to make a wide detour to the only surviving settlement near the region, the so-called Town of Sands (walled, of course, even in the twentieth century). There he hired a small corps of indolent opium addicts and, reinforced by this ragtag band, set out once more across the frozen Taklamakan.
The days spent tracing the path of the reed wall across the empty landscape were particularly evocative for Stein. “No life of the present was there to distract my thoughts of the past,” he recalled. Tramping across the desert, he gave free rein to his imagination, conjuring visions of long-dead Chinese soldiers and their crafty foils, the Huns. He could see the line of the wall most clearly in the evening when the setting sun lay low in the sky, casting shadows that revealed structures that had been almost entirely flattened and smoothed away by the wind. It was also at that time of day when he could most clearly see the well-worn track that ran parallel to the wall, the footprints of endless patrols of soldiers who once guarded the border. Occasionally, Stein chanced upon mounds of reed bundles carefully laid aside for producing smoke signals. He uncovered trash dumps just beneath the surface gravel, and in these dumps, writing. The documents had been written on slips of wood or bamboo. They were records of a mundane sort: brief reports, orders, private letters, school exercises, and the like. But they firmly established what Stein had suspected from the start—that the great reed wall was the work of China’s Han dynasty.
* * *
Stein’s discoveries thrilled students of geography and history, but he was not the first explorer to brave the Taklamakan. A far earlier traveler, arriving from another direction and with very different aims, had preceded him. The earlier explorer had brought back knowledge, too, but his findings had done something more than titillate academics, Boy Scouts, and readers of National Geographic.
The sponsors of the ancient expedition, the Han, were, in many ways, the formative dynasty of China. Having risen to power in 206 BC, during the overthrow of the dynasty established by the First Emperor, they brought stability to a young and still-divided nation. Han emperors centralized the governance of the state and fixed Confucianism at the center of Chinese education and culture. Behind the crumbling walls of the First Emperor, they also oversaw China’s first great era of innovation in science and technology.
The First Emperor’s Long Wall had done little to discourage the aggressiveness of the Huns. It had, however, created a frontier zone that could absorb Hun raids, allowing the older cities of the south to study history, mathematics, or Confucianism in relative security. Had the Long Wall succeeded? It depended on where you lived—or whom you asked. In the histories that were produced under the new rulers, the First Emperor was reviled. Han historians belittled him for his tyrannical ways, his alleged barbarism, his antipathy to scholars, and his walls. But the Han themselves were not exactly beyond such criticisms. The founder of the new dynasty, Liu Bang, once urinated on a scholar’s hat. He rebelled against the First Emperor only after having failed to prevent the escape of convicts drafted to work on the First Emperor’s tomb. Subsequently, the new dynasty adopted the strategy of the First Emperor and become builders of walls.
The new dynasty’s fortification program started with the cities. The Han rebuilt city walls all around their empire, establishing a model for Chinese urbanism that persisted for the next two thousand years. In 169 BC, they also began colonizing the old wall zone in earnest, relocating slaves and criminals to highly fortified frontier towns. The new homes seemed endlessly distant to the ancient Chinese, part of a region long regarded as inhospitable wasteland. The wall’s peasant custodians, miserable lot, sang folk songs about their plight:
If a son is born, mind you don’t raise him!
If a girl is born, feed her dried meat.
Don’t you just see below the Long Wall
Dead men’s skeletons prop each other up.
More than two centuries after its construction, one Chinese author observed that the songs of the Long Wall were still being sung. By then the Han had given the people new walls to sing about.
The new walls were largely the project of Emperor Wu—an active and long-reigning monarch (r. 141–87 BC) who, in many ways, resembled the First Emperor. Like his predecessor, he became tyrannical and, in the end, obsessed with immortality. He consulted magicians and made extravagant pilgrimages in the hopes of cheating death. He, too, fretted for the immortality of his kingdom, and this led him to repair the hated Long Wall. Wu ordered new lengths of tamped dirt to link and augment the surviving segments. Early in his reign, he also dispatched the mission that would inadvertently change the course of history and lead directly to the wall discovered by Stein.
* * *
Wu’s ambassador, the diplomat-explorer Zhang Qian, would have fit in well with the gallant company of Stein and his fellow adventurers. Sent off to the wastelands to make an alliance with a barbarian tribe that Wu hoped could assist the Chinese against the Huns, Zhang pursued his mission with the single-minded determination of a man who knew well the fate of those who failed at tasks assigned them by the emperor. Venturing beyond the old Long Wall onto the turf of the Huns, he was captured and held captive for ten years, but when he escaped, he simply resumed his mission, Hun bride in tow. By the time Zhang finally made it back to China, having lost all but one member of his original ninety-nine-man entourage, Wu had probably written off the venture as a loss. The ambassador had been captured twice and had loitered in between, hanging around a bit long, satisfying his curiosity for foreign cultures. He didn’t return with the hoped-for military alliance, but the news he did bring was far more valuable.
Zhang’s travels hold a special place in Asian history, comparable to the voyages of Columbus in the annals of the West. Like Columbus, he eventually went on three missions, each time exponentially expanding what was then known about the outside world, but the most important discovery was the first. He had learned that the Chinese were not, after all, alone in a world of hostile barbarians. He had found civilization on the other side of the wasteland.
The newly discovered peoples had never read the works of Confucius. They didn’t subsist primarily on rice-based agriculture. They resembled the Chinese neither in appearance nor in language. The freeze-dried mummies discovered later by Stein and others in the Tarim Basin reveal the Central Asians encountered by Zhang to have been a towering fair-haired race, more like the hated steppe barbarians than the Han Chinese. None of this mattered. Race, language, and even customs were insignificant. For in a far more essential way, the Central Asians were just like the Chinese: They were workers, not warriors. They built walls.
* * *
Zhang had discovered a civilization every bit as old as China itself, a world whose walls and writings dated back over two thousand years. In Central Asia, isolated outposts of civilization bloomed like flowers in the desert. Great rivers descended from the mountains and crossed the arid landscapes, making settled life possible. Those rivers permitted oasis cities to form, much as the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile had spawned urban civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
In time, the oasis cities would become stops along the fabled Silk Road—Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand—magical names evoking lost splendors, and it is easy to become seduced by visions of their splendid minarets and dazzling bazaars, yet behind the exotic veneer of Central Asian civilization lay another reality: a hardscrabble existence of raids, destruction, cities built upon the ruins of cities, and walls built upon the ruins of walls.
Situated directly south of the steppe, the Central Asian oasis cities occupied some of the most dangerous real estate on earth. They owed their survival to walls. Most cities featured multiple layers of fortifications, with high citadels and walled lower towns. Expansion was no easy thing. Rather than extending perimeters that were already too large to defend, cities exploited vertical spaces. One-story homes grew to two and then three stories. When the buildings could go no higher, the top floors were made to project over the streets. The inhabitants of the legendary Silk Road oasis towns, sited on the edge of limitless open land, had no view of the sky, much less the horizon.
Staggering efforts went into fortifying the oasis towns. At Ghardman, the townspeople dug a moat so wide that an arrow shot from the bank couldn’t pass over the walls. Medieval Sawran had no fewer than seven lines of walls. Similar fortifications date back to the very origins of Central Asian civilization, as can be seen in the massive Bronze Age walls of Gonur Depe North, built when the invaders from the steppe still rode chariots.
Outside the city walls, nowhere was safe. At Bayhaq, steppe raiders once made it impossible for farmers to tend to their fields for seven consecutive years. The suburbs, such as they were, contained only castles and fortified manor houses. Even villages were walled. In the ancient region of Bactria, centered on the Balkh oasis, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world lay in the plain between the Amu Darya River and the Hindu Kush Mountains. Bactria was wiped out by steppe invaders in the early second millennium BC, and this marked the first of twenty-three times Balkh would be destroyed by the nomadic tribes who made camp along the banks of the river. Twenty-three times brought to ruin!—such was the rhythm of Central Asian civilization. Occasionally, nomads camped in the remains of the cities.
Alexander campaigned into Central Asia. Did he provide the cities with an iron wall against Gog and Magog? The hyperactive young king rarely remained in one spot long enough to build anything. However, after his death, Alexander’s successors provided Central Asia with its first long wall against the steppe. The Greek wall formed an impressive obstacle, heavily buttressed with forts, turrets, and bastions. As old as the First Emperor’s Long Wall, and perhaps a bit older, it traversed valleys and mountain ridges and included the so-called Iron Gates (dozens of passes are so named) at Darband (another common name) in the region of modern Uzbekistan.
Zhang had seen it all—Samarkand, Bukhara, Balkh—the entire walled world of Central Asia. His reports galvanized Han China. The emperor listened intently to Zhang’s tales of exotic plants and animals, including horses that sweated blood. Most intriguing were the reports of nations that dwelled in fortified cities. They were said to be adept at commerce but “poor in the use of arms and afraid of battle”—standard characteristics of the walled and civilized. Zhang described “large countries, full of rare things, with populations living in fixed abodes and given to occupations somewhat identical to those of the Chinese people.”
People who lived like the Chinese? Now that was welcome news. In a flash, China’s alleged isolation was swept away. The Chinese had retreated behind walls only because they knew the world to be hostile and barbarian. Now they knew otherwise. Wu sent great expeditionary forces to open a lifeline to the newly discovered brethren in the fraternity of wall builders. At the time, only massive armies dared cross the terrain of the Huns, so Wu endeavored to make the route safe for travelers. He ordered the construction of a new wall—the reed-and-dirt wall discovered by Stein—to defend China’s thin link to the civilizations of Central Asia and beyond.
* * *
There had never been anything like Wu’s wall. It extended the old Chinese Long Wall into a desolate region, far from China, in which no one actually lived. But Wu understood that the edge of the Taklamakan was critical. If he could shield that region by walling off the Huns to the north, he could establish a safe route to China’s newly discovered Central Asian brethren in the fraternity of wall builders. The Silk Road was born.
Wu’s wall marked the first large-scale attempt to solve a problem as old as civilization itself: how to bridge the gaps between the clusters of walled cities. For more than two thousand years, those gaps had been deadly and terrifying, the impetus for many a panicked flight, such as that described by our skittish Egyptian in the first chapter. Now travelers could pass safely by the edges of Hun territory, taking a route that for the first time connected the wall builders of the ancient world. The impact of the new wall was immediate. Traders and ambassadors from as far as Rome could reach the Chinese court, exchanging drugs, dyes, jewels, coins, perfumes, and glassware for China’s coveted silks. Along the way, the traders sometimes picked up religions—Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism—and passed them on, along with a few key technologies and, of course, germs, the worst of which carried bubonic plague into the walled cities and nearly depopulated them altogether.
Diplomatically, Wu’s wall had made possible a link between China and another ancient state, itself only recently formed. In this distant, Western empire, governed from Italy, no rulers had yet produced anything comparable to the old Long Wall. Perhaps they just needed to hear a few travelers’ tales of the wonders of the East. That was soon coming.