Modern historians hate the idea of the silk road. Hate, hate, hate it! And they love nothing more than to disabuse people of the idea of its existence. Most are content to say something like "the silk road is an outdated historical construct; it was not one road. Rather, it was a complex network of trade routes that spanned Eurasia, from the steppes to Malacca, from Japan to Ireland, with few people making the entire journey."

These are all academic quibbles though. When someone says "silk road" you know what they mean. The historians also know what you mean (they just need to deny the existence of it to puff up the importance of their thesis on the fur exports of the Yenesei Kyrgyz tribes or whatever). The silk road is land trade between China and the west, largely involving silk. There's only so many routes it can take: the pastoralists in the steppe won't let trade through unmolested; The straights of Malacca, sojourning the bulk of the trade, isn't really what we have in mind when we say "road". This leaves just a few mountain passes adjacent to the Tarim basin to get goods through. It's an area where goods, merchants, envoys, and armies are funneled, resulting in cultural exchange.

Valerie Hansen takes this definition we know and love and runs with it, focusing mostly around oasis polities in the Taklamakan, with a few excursions to Sogdia and Chang'an. However, she has her own thesis: trade didn't happen on any meaningful scale. All these oasis states? Yeah, they just had local economies with the occasional peddler or some envoy from a forgotten satrap stopping through to make tribute to the emperor. Silk was of great importance, but was mostly used as a currency since the Chinese dynasties, most notably the Tang, paid their garrisoned soldiers with it, and it trickled down into the local economy.

Hansen deftly weaves her narrative chronologically and geographically, starting with the earliest finds we have in Niya and Loulan, and devotes each subsequent chapter to another oasis town and the wonderfully preserved, but fragmentary documents found therein. Kucha, Turfan, Mt. Mugh, Dunhuang, and Khotan are all addressed in detail as the centuries progress. The bulk of the book is dedicated to detailing what we know of these societies economies, and what little we know points to little trade. The transfer of texts and technologies was mostly done by refugees according to Hansen.It's hard to square this argument with the wealth of the Sogdians, a Persian people who settled throughout these city states and China itself. The Sogdians maintained regular communication with their homeland. This can be evinced from the famed (and cited) Sogdian letters. Tombs of Sogdians are exceeded in opulence only by tombs of Emperors. The lasting reputations of the Sogdians as wealthy merchants is apparently pervasive throughout Chinese folklore, but this is swept under the rug because there is evidence of poor Sogdians in China, as if Sogdian society couldn't be stratified. As if a large, successful population couldn't produce a few failsons.The tomb of An Jia is described by Hansen as only having carvings of diplomatic scenes, not mercantile ones. Thus he couldn't have been a merchant. Come on, you don't get a tomb with multiple panels carved by artisans without money.The hand waiving on some examples gets even more absurd. A document inventorying a foreign "Iranian lock" is interpreted as only being Iranian in style and made locally in Dunhuang, sort of like "French fries" are made in America. Seriously, this argument is put forth: a lock is apparently much too heavy to be brought on the trip, and any goods brought by peddlers and occasional envoys must have been low weight, high cost items like gemstones. As if Persian people coming from a Persian area wouldn't lock up their Persian gemstones, that we agree must have come from that area, with their Persian made lock!Hansen says anyone disagreeing with her must admit that the documents don't support large scale trade. Perhaps not, but even with the documents, it really seems she is downplaying what trade there is evidence for. My issues with the thesis aside, the book is fantastic in its detail and a complete joy to read for anybody interested in the area, the religions covered, or even trade. Anybody buying the book should opt for the version that includes the large selection of primary sources, most of which are hard to track down elsewhere.