Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China

Rating:
Summary: A big book: art, history, and geography
Review: Most of the items in this book were found in a single province of China a thousand miles long and fifty miles wide, next to the border with Inner Mongolia, extending to the northwest end of the great wall of China near Dunhuang. Map 2 on page 24 shows locations where objects in an exhibit that was shown in New York at the Asian Society Museum in 2001 and in Palm Beach, Florida in 2002 were originally found. There was not much jade in the collection, but the reclining ram shown on page 75, about six inches long, has some interesting color variations. A jade hairpin, less than an inch wide and about three inches long, is shown on page 115. A smaller jade hairpin is shown on page 262.

This book documents many unique features of this area of China, including a picture of the face of a massive seventy-five foot Tang Buddha in Dunhuang's Cave 130 (photo on p. 35 by Annette L. Juliano).

The most interesting natural feature in the book is Maijishan Mountain, near the city of Tianshui at the southeastern end of Gansu, shown in a picture on page 118 and described as Cornrick Mountain on page 119, with a line drawing showing the features on the outer face of the lower part of the mountain on page 135. The photo on page 134 shows the bottom side of steps, platforms, and railings built into the smooth wall of the mountain, with no supports coming down to the ground below. In fact, the picture on page 118 shows the ground so far below the connected platforms that a zoom lens must have been used for the picture on page 134 even if the picture was taken from the top of a tree. The description in the book is apt:

"Fig. 14. Maijishan is a stunning haystack-shaped mountain that rises 142 meters and is honey-combed with caves filled with sculptures, stelae, and paintings, of which 194 survive. (photo: Annette L. Juliano)."

There are at least two sculptures in this book of Buddhist disciple Kasyapa, a sandstone statue with a large round head, shown on page 200, and one from Cave 87, Maijishan stone grottoes (object number 62), an old man with drooping eyebrows and deep creases in his forehead, shown on pages 14, 137 and 180, "marked here as a foreigner by the beaklike nose." (p. 137). The bronze figure in a dervish dress on the back cover, shown and discussed on pages 254-255, also has a nose that a parrot might identify with.

The bronze horses shown on pages 38 and 39 are both showing their teeth and looking sprightly. The clay figures shown on pages 65, 88-93, 102, and 106-110, look a bit lumpy and don't show much spirit, but the conglomeration is a great preparation for the clay hens and chicken coop found in a tomb in the western suburbs of Guyuan, Ningxia, of a man and wife who died in 569 and 547, shown on page 111. The same tomb had a glass bowl that had been made in a mold in Sasanian Persia, shown on page 97, found with a silver ewer that is discussed on pages 98-100.

Chapters 6 and 7, The Merchant Empire of the Sogdians, and The Sogdians in Their Homeland, covers an area east of the Aral Sea including Samarkand and Tashkent, far west of China. Chapter 8, Sogdians in Northwest China, has a photo of a tumulus and some information about tombs, then "A rare depiction of the Zoroastrian funerary rite, the sagdid, from a marble funerary couch, second half of the sixth--early seventh century, Northern dynasties, Sui dynasty." (p. 244, Fig. 6).