Zhang Qian Goes West

On the morning the travelers set out from Longxi, there was nothing ahead but wind and grass.

More than a hundred people formed a long line. Pack horses, water skins, dry rations. At the head of them all walked a man holding the emperor's envoy staff, the only travel pass the whole party had. His name was Zhang Qian. Their direction was west.

Where the west ended, no one in the capital could say. No one at court had ever held a single map of those lands.

The task itself was simple. Somewhere out there lived a people called the Yuezhi. They had left their old homeland and kept moving, and now no one knew where they had stopped. The mission was to find them. When the call for a volunteer went out through the capital, Zhang Qian stepped forward. He was then only a young official serving at court.

With him went a man named Ganfu, a Xiongnu by birth and a superb archer. On days when food ran low on the road, he was the one who shot birds and animals so the whole party could eat.

The year was 138 BC.

For the first stages there were still villages and wells. Then the villages thinned out. Then they were gone. Only dry grass, stones and a flat horizon remained. This was the land of the Xiongnu, people who lived on horseback and moved their herds with the seasons of the grass. They knew every trail better than anyone.

The party was stopped. Then it was held.

The Xiongnu did not harm him. They let him live among them, and time began to pass in a way no one had expected.

Winters on the steppe came and went, year after year. Then they gave him a wife. The two of them had a child together.

More than ten years went by like that. The baby born in a tent all that time ago must have grown tall by then.

Through all those years, there was only one thing he would not let go of. The envoy staff he had carried out of Longxi stayed by his side. No one there could read it, and no one needed to look at it. But as long as it was in his hand, the task he had been given was not finished.

Then one day, he left.

This is the hardest part of the story to understand. He had a roof over his head, a wife, a child and a settled life. And still he slipped away quietly with Ganfu. He turned to face the very direction he had been ordered to go more than ten years before.

After dozens of days on the road, he reached a land called Dayuan. Scholars identify it with Ferghana.

Dayuan astonished him. People there grew grapes and pressed them into wine, a wine that could be kept for dozens of years without spoiling. The horses there were a fine breed. When they ran hard, their sweat came out with a red sheen like blood. So people in that country said the horses were descended from heavenly horses. These horses loved a fodder plant called alfalfa.

The people of Dayuan trusted him and sent him on to the land of Kangju. Kangju sent him farther still, all the way to the Great Yuezhi.

He had found them. After more than ten years, he stood before the very people he had set out to find.

But they did not want to go anywhere anymore. Their new land was wide and fertile, their life had settled, and they no longer wished to talk about the past. He stayed in that region for more than a year, traveling as far as Daxia, and argued again and again without success. Daxia was an old Chinese name for Bactria.

Daxia had a large walled city called Lanshi. Inside it was a crowded market selling every kind of goods.

Zhang Qian walked past that market. Then he stopped.

On one stall lay a few bamboo staffs and a bolt of cloth.

He looked closely. He knew that bamboo. It grew in Qiong. And that cloth was woven in Shu. Both were goods from home. Yet home was thousands of miles from where he stood.

He asked the seller where these things came from.

The answer came casually, as if he had asked something everyone knew: our merchants buy them in Shendu and bring them back. Shendu was an old Chinese name for India.

To the seller, it was an everyday matter. To the man listening, it turned everything upside down. If cloth from Shu was in this market, then a road already ran from his home to here. It was a road with travelers, with traders and with places to rest, and it had been running for a very long time. Only the court he had set out from had no idea it existed.

He had been sent to find a people. He found a road.

On the way back he chose a different route, and he was held again for more than a year. This time he got away by luck. There was unrest in the region, and in the middle of it he quietly left.

He did not go alone. He took his Xiongnu wife with him, and he took Ganfu, who had walked beside him since the very first day.

And at last the day came when they reached the capital.

More than a hundred people had set out. Thirteen years later, only two of them came back.

Thirteen years was long enough that people at home must have thought him dead. Yet he came back alive. Beside him were his wife and his traveling companion.

What he brought back was not gold or silver. He brought back names.

Dayuan, Kangju, the Great Yuezhi and Daxia were lands he had reached himself. Shendu and several other great lands nearby he knew only by hearsay. He reported on every place one by one. He told what people grew there, what animals they raised, and what their markets and walled cities were like. A region that had been a blank space now had a shape, names, and roads leading in.

Later, grape seeds and alfalfa seeds came back with the envoys who followed him. They were sown in good fields, and they really grew.

The strangest thing is that he did not stop. A few years later, he led another party of 300 people west once more. No one knew better than he did what lay out there. And still he went.

The road he traveled back then had no name. Only later did it take the name that almost every family has heard by now: the Silk Road.

The name makes it sound as if someone took the trouble to build it. In truth, no one built it at all. It was only market linked to market and village linked to village. Goods changed hands stage after stage, and the road grew longer and longer across deserts and mountains.

In Vietnam, silk is a familiar thing too. Vạn Phúc is a silk-weaving village in Hanoi. There, in Hà Đông, the looms have clattered from one generation to the next and still have not stopped. The soft, cool silk that slides between your fingers today is the very kind of goods that people once carried across several deserts to reach the far side of the map.

If only one scene from those thirteen years is kept, let it be this one. It is noon in a strange market in the city of Lanshi, among people haggling in a language he does not understand. A man stands still before a stall, touching a bolt of cloth woven in his own country, thousands of miles from home. And he begins to understand something. The road that led back to his homeland had been lying there all along, since before the morning he set out from Longxi.