Some residual doubt always lingers as to whether the learned contributors
to this list know what they are talking about, but the needle is now over
into the red zone, the light is flashing, and the baloney-detedctor alarm
is making loud, horrid noises. The reason, this time, is that someone, I
forget who, it doesn't matter, really, mentioned offhandedly and inter-
alia-listically, something about "Arab interference in the Chinese silk
trade," which nobody noticed.
What the Arabs did was, basically, conquer Persia. The Silk Route, land
version, was managed by Sogdians, Central Asian Iranians, from the Sassanid
Empire through Afghanistan up to Kucha, where they exchanged goods with
Kucheans (Tocharians) who carried the Persian goods (including Byzantine
or European exports if any plus specie) the rest of the way to Changan in
North China. The silk went the other way. This is a gross oversimplification,
of course, as branches of the Silk Route ran as far west as the Caucusus
(due to a scheme hatched by the Gok Turk qaghan to deal silk direct to
the Byzantines in the 540s via Lazica, which is now in the Republic of
Georgia, more or less, and is called Abkhazia today).
The Persians also carried on the sea trade with China. This
reached its pre-Islamic peak in the sixth century. At that time,
resident Persians and Indians in Guangzhou bought up the silk, which
they shipped to Sri Lanka and sold it to other Persians for final
shipment to Persia, Aela (Elath-Aqaba, in Byzantine Palaestina III),
or Byzantine Egypt. The Persians made a very great deal of money this
way, and made evem more after 571 by conquering Yemen. It was much
cheaper in principle, to send the silk by ship than by camel, but
the legal Byzantine customs duties were steep, and the fact that
the Byzantine state was at this time corrupt even in its own terms
raised the costs that much more. by *smuggling* the silk into the
Byzantine empire, on the other hand, the Persians not only cut costs,
but managed to trade profitably with their enemy even in time of war,
which was most of the time. The Persians were sending so much silver
home from South Arabia they claimed to have found a silver deposit
which the South Arabians themselves never knew about.
The events of the 630s, whcih abolished the Persian-Byzantine border
by eliminating both powers, conquered as they were by the Arabs, should
have greatly stimulated world trade had everything else been equal,
which it was not.
It is important to know that, during the sixth century, North China
and South China were politically spearate. They were, in effect, in
competition. The Southern Empire dealt directly with the Persians,
who were present in Guangzhou in considerable numbers and were known
to the Chinese as *Posu*. The Southern Empire's successive political
regimes were lax, slack, and crooked. Possibly, they did not know
that the Gok Turks, who created unified political control over
Central Asia in 552, did not like the Persians very much.
What happened after the Arab conquest of Persia was, at first,
that what had been Persian trade routes became Arab trade routes
insofar as, or to the extent that, Persians, who either converted
to Islam or did not, though increasingly did, were subjects of the
Arab Caliphate. The people who carried on the trade with China were
the same as before, except in that they now increasingly spoke Arabic,
albeit using Persian loan words for matters nautical. The Chinese of
Guangzhou called the Arabs *Dashi*, who were conceptually differentiated
from *Posu*, though not in practice.
What actually occurred, during the first half of the Tang Dynasty,
that is, until the heroic Arab repulse of Chinese imperialist aggression
in 751, was Chinese expansionism, hegemonism, and great power chauvinism
directed against the Arabs, though hardly exclusively. For exemple, the
Tang government gave asylum and diplomatic support to Sassanid pretenders
after the death of the last Persian monarch, Yazdigerd III, in 651. In
662, for example, the government of emperor Gaozong intervened on
behalf of the Sassanid prince, Peroz. In the first half of the eighth
century, the Tang expanded across Central Asia, almost to the very
doorstep of the Persian, subsequently Arab, frontier. It was, in
part, Umayyad complaisance in the face of the apparent Chinese
menace which in part precipitated the Abbasid Revolution (747-750).
In 758, during the reign of Suzong, the *Dashi* and the *Posu*
sacked Guangzhou, according to the Tang dynastic history. The Arab
histories do not mention it. It is not known whether this was part
of the Arab-Chinese war which began with the Arab victory over the
Chinese march on Samarkand at the Battle of the Talas River in 751.
In any case, by 758, the Tang government had a crisis much closer
to home, in North China, to worry about, in the form of the seizure
of power by General An Lushan and his successors, which unleashed
a civil war lasting until 763. After this, the Tang were permanently
cut off from West Asia by land. Guangzhou was reopened to Arabs and
Persians in 792.
Oh, it's not true, by the way, that the Chinese were "immune to
capitalism." They came down with a bad case of it in the eleventh
century, and nearly died of it in the fourteenth. But they fought
it off, as they did the Bubonic Plague, at the same time. Resistance
to the Plague appears to be longer-lasting, more efficacious, than
that to capitalism, though everybody's come down with the latter
at this time. As your mother said, "Don't touch that! You don't
know *whose* germs are on that thing!"
Daniel A. Foss