Stirring, as it surely does, in the imaginations of those for whom the search for luxuries is often as much an adventure as an indulgence, justifiable visions of the silk and fine cotton fabrics, the spices and herbs, the gemstones and precious metals, the pearls beyond comparison, and valuable woods, it offers the greatest of sensual rewards for travel in expectation and anticipation.
Today, hundreds of thousands of the more adventurous, curious and better heeled of international tourists swarm along the route across Central Asia, first described by Marco Polo, the 13th/14th century traveller and merchant from Venice. China, of course, was the aim of his travels, not least because he almost certainly knew that, for perhaps two thousand years, it had been the source of many of the luxuries demanded by an ever-increasingly wealthy and demanding European population.
The mansions and palaces, forts and temples, ancient churches and mosques, the visible, the touchable, stir and stimulate imaginations of that great and ancient heritage.
This Central Asian route is, today, often referred to simply, as though definitively, as “The Silk Road,” but as Zhang Xianyi, the former Ambassador to Bangladesh of The People’s Republic of China put it so succinctly in his memoir celebrating 35 years of diplomatic relations between China and Bangladesh, “In the long river of history, there were three Silk Roads.”
The Northern Silk Road, as he calls it, started, as, being Chinese, he would say, in the central region of ancient China, and extended into Europe. The second he describes, is certainly the one with which Europe is more familiar today, the Maritime Route. But this maritime Route also has a fairly ancient history. Zhang describes it as being pioneered shortly after the Northern Silk Road was opened, with its connections to the Indian subcontinent from Bactria, through Afghanistan, down to the lands of the Indus.
In his fascinating memoir, however, Zhang dwells considerably on what he calls the Southern Silk Road. As he says, this route is, in fact, widely believed to be the earliest route between China and the lands of India, dating from at least the 4th century BCE; it was also, as we shall see, the route to the Ganges delta, for which there is plenty of evidence as an international trading centre, open to trade from south east Asia, all the way west to the growing empires of Europe.
In his own work, “Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan,” published by Colombia University, New York in 2008, Professor Bin Yang, now of The National of Singapore, shares Zhang’s view.
He cites archaeological evidence, such as the presence of money cowries from the Indian Ocean in 3rd century BCE tombs in Yunnan. But he also shares the same documentary evidence as Zhang Xianyi of reports of the 2nd century BCE emissary of the Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian.
Bin Yang amplifies that evidence, by reporting that Qian travelled, first, to Yunnan to examine the trading routes there into ancient India. Reluctant to disclose the truth, and being subjected to further Imperial taxation and interference, Yunnanese traders claimed to use the more conspicuous route across the Tibetan plateau to Bactria. A difficult, and arduous, route over mountains, across great ice fields, and through barbaric territories.
It was, however, the route that Qian then took after leaving Yunnan, arriving in Bactria, in the north of today’s Afghanistan, north of the Hindu Kush mountains.
In 122 BCE, Qian returned to the city that today we know as Xi’an, then known as Chang’an, capital of the western Han Emperor, Liu Che.
His report is quoted in the work, Shiji, by the Western Han Dynasty historian, Sima Qian, “When I was in Bactria, I saw bamboo sticks from the Qionglai Mountain (in today’s Sichuan Province) and cloth made in the Shu area (also in Sichuan Province). When I asked the locals where they got such articles, they replied, ‘Our merchants go to buy them in the markets of India. India lies many hundred miles southeast of Bactria. The people there live much like us. The region is hot and damp. The inhabitants ride elephants when they go into battle. The kingdom is situated by a great river.’”
Qian commented that if Bactrians could get Shu articles from India, then India could not be so far away from Shu. He went on to comment that since the route from Shu ( Sichuan) to Bactria is across the high plateau of Tibet, which he described, as well he might from personal experience, a “risky route,” the Sichuan via India to Bactria route was probably the better one.
In all this, we need to remind ourselves that Qian’s journey took place some two hundred years later than the curious diversion of Alexander the Great into India, and his march across North India, that only stopped, and turned into a retreat, at the borders of Gangaridai, the contemporary kingdom of the Ganges delta.
We already know, from archaeological evidence emerging from, amongst other places, the ancient Brahmaputra bank side city at Wari Bateshwar, amongst, in all probability, others, that there was a rich and flourishing trade with Arab, Egyptian and Greek and Roman merchants in the Ganges delta.
There seems, in fact, little doubt that Chinese silk was not the least of the trades through the delta, a supposition confirmed in the mid first century CE Roman publication, the trading handbook for merchants, “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” that notes that amongst the cargoes available in the Ganges delta was “raw silk, from an inland city called Thina, listing, also, a number of other cargoes available.”
The trade in the Ganges delta was also, fifty years earlier than the Periplus, confirmed by the great Greco Roman scholar, Strabo, an associate of Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor, when, in his great work, Geographia, he writes of the ‘merchants who sail from Egypt, even to the Ganges...’
This, then, explains and substantiates the existence of trade with China, through the lands that are now Bangladesh, for thousands of years. A trade that brought, first traders, then philosophers; a trade that certainly financed great cultural advances, not least Sanskrit, and the great new religions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism.
And, with it all, to visit, experience, touch and feel, the mansions and palaces, the forts and temples, ancient public buildings and ancient mosques, and the emerging, sunken cities, also to bring to life for tourists, the rich and ancient heritage of these extraordinary lands that are Bangladesh.
The great mystery remains, why, if the history of Bangladesh encompasses the origins of one of the world’s great tourism icons, and quite probably the earliest, is Bangladesh apparently unwilling, or incapable of capitalising on it to attract the most sophisticated, best educated and wealthiest of international tourists?
The remote regions of Central Asia have benefitted enormously in job creation and foreign currency with no noticeable socially negative effect, and there is no great secret involved in securing the same for Bangladesh.
The historic wealth generated by the historic trade brought such great invaders as the Pathan, the Mughals and the British and other Europeans to the lands of Bangladesh. Together, the diverse peoples of Bangladesh, and the traders, visitors and conquerors have woven the rich tapestry that is modern Bangladesh.
Beautiful, much of Bangladesh may be, though, in truth, scarcely comparable to the breathtaking beauty of other nations. But the history and the cultural heritage of Bangladesh is, simply like no other, and rests on one of the earliest, and most significant, centres of international trade in the history of the world.
