Zhang Qian: The Envoy Who Opened the Silk Road — Sleep Podcast

From The Slow Ages · 1:01:22

Show by Sleepy History

In the second century before the common era, a young palace attendant named Zhang Qian raised his hand when the emperor asked for one volunteer to ride through the heart of his enemy's empire and find an ally nobody had ever seen. Of the hundred-odd men who rode out with him, two came back — he and his archer. What he carried home, besides his bamboo staff, was the west itself: the countries, the distances, the heavenly horses, the thousand markets, the coin with the dead king's face on it. Tonight we walk with him across the grass ocean of the Xiongnu, through ten years of captivity in which he never let go of the staff; over the Pamir into the Ferghana valley and its vineyards; down into Bactria, where Greek cities were still standing long after Alexander; and home to Chang'an, where his report chiselled open the void and set the Silk Road turning. We also walk the road itself — the silk at Palmyra, the frozen barrows of the Altai, the Sogdian letters still folded in their watchtower — and mark honestly what the histories cannot tell us. Slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About 62 minutes. Sources (a selection): Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), chs. 110, 111, 116, 123, trans. Burton Watson; Ban Gu, Hanshu, with A. F. P. Hulsewé, China in Central Asia (Brill, 1979); William H. Nienhauser Jr. (ed.), The Grand Scribe's Records, vol. IX (Indiana UP, 2010); Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford UP, 2012); James A. Millward, The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2013); Susan Whitfield, Life along the Silk Road (UC Press, 2015); Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies (Cambridge UP, 2002); Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier (Blackwell, 1989); Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton UP, 2009); Michael Loewe & Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1 (Cambridge UP, 1986); Bryan K. Miller et al., Antiquity 92 (2018); N. V. Polosmak et al., The Twentieth Noin-Ula Mound (INFOLIO, 2011); W. B. Henning, "The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters," BSOAS 12 (1948); Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders (Brill, 2005); Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Brill, 2007); John E. Hill, Through the Jade Gate to Rome (BookSurge, 2009); Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb).

More episodes of The Slow Ages

More episodes

PodSearch is a free, independent podcast search engine. Read about PodSearch, the privacy policy or contact us.