Khotan (Yutian 于阗)

[Travellers | Cities | Routes | Trade Goods | Themes]

by Paul Lunde

The Kunlun mountain range that rises south of Khotan and Yarkand is the principal source of the jade so prized in China since early times. It was found in the beds of two spring-fed rivers that lost themselves in the sands of the Taklamakan desert, the Karakash, ‘Black Jade River’, and the Yurungkash, ‘White Jade River’. The pale green to white jade found in the riverbeds was highly prized in China from remote antiquity, and was thought to have magical protective powers. Deposits in the Yellow River and other Chinese sites were early exhausted, and by Han times (202 BC-AD 220) the Kunlun mountains were the principal source of the jade so prolifically used in Han royal burials.

It was in the Kunlun range that according to legend King Mu (r. 976-922 BC) of the Zhou dynasty was said to have reached the Jade Palace of Huang Di, The Yellow Emperor, founder of Chinese civilization, and there met the ‘Queen Mother of the West’. The semi-mythological travels of King Mu, despite their wondrous details, nevertheless show that contacts between China and the cities that skirt the Tarim basin go back at least to the beginning of the first millennium BC, if not earlier.

Khotan was an oasis town on the edge of the fearsome Taklamakan desert. It was a stage on what came to be known as the ‘Southern Silk Route’, the road to Balkh, ancient Bactria, and from there to India, Mesopotamia and the west. Bactria had been conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BC; its strategic position as the hub of trade routes that led west, north, south and east explains the wide dissemination of the influential hybrid artistic culture that took form there, and which greatly influenced the iconography of the Buddhist frescoes and sculptures found at Dunhuang in the 19th century. Khotan too was heavily influenced by Greco-Indian, Parthian and Mediterranean influences emanating from the vale of Peshawar in what is now Pakistan, leading, first under the Kushan dynasty, to the artistic style known as Gandhara, widely disseminated from the 1st to the 6th centuries AD.

Khotan is not mentioned by name in the account of Zhang Qian’s thirteen year mission to the Xiongnu and Yuezhi (Yueh-chih, 138-125 BC) preserved in the Shiji of Sima Qian, but he certainly returned with valuable reports on the political and economic situation of the Tarim region. It is beyond doubt that already in Zhang Qian’s time the overland routes from Han China to western regions were being exploited by Sogdian and other merchants.

Emperor Wu of Han drove the Xiongnu from the Tarim basin in 115 BC. By the first centuy BC, Khotan and the surrounding area was a major Buddhist centre, and had probably long been so. The Xiongnu succeeded in recapturing the region in 6 BC, but the Chinese general Ban Chao (Pan Ch’ao) finally defeated them in 73 AD. Khotan became a wealthy city, producing excellent silk and of course jade, and thanks to extensive irrigation works, cotton, fruit and grain.

The old city of Khotan, called Yutian (Yu-t'ien) by the early Chinese sources and Yotqan by Persian and Arabic sources, lay some five miles from the modern town. The ancient Indian name was Kustana, meaning ‘breast of the earth’. The oldest dated Buddhist monument was built in 269 AD, but Buddhism almost certainly reached Khotan not long after the reign of Ashoka (ca. 269-232 BC). Sir Aurel Stein, the first to excavate the site, found documents in a number of different Indo-Aryan scripts and languages, including Tocharian, showing the extraordinary cultural mix in the cities along this stretch of the Silk Route. Khotan remained a centre of Buddhist worship and learning until at least the 11th century AD, resisting the advance of Islam in Central Asia longer than many of its neighbours.