Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Selected Works from Symposium on Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia

327 Pages·2015·81.36 MB·English

by  Dashu Qin

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World Scientific
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Published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ancient silk trade routes : selected works from Symposium on Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their
Legacies in Asia / Dashu Qin, Jian Yuan.
pages cm
ISBN 978-9814619097
1. Silk Road--Antiquities--Congresses. 2. Asia, Central--Antiquities--Congresses. I. Qin, Dashu.
II. Yuan, Jian.
DS327.25.A53 2014
950--dc23
2014031031
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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b1840 Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
Foreword
HO Min Fong
The oldest piece of silk I have ever seen was pointed out to me by my
mother. In 2009, she had taken me to the Hunan Provincial Museum, to show
me the fi nds from the archaeological dig at Mahuangdui, in her hometown of
Changsha, Hunan.
Still perfectly preserved, this silk painting was dated from the Western
Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), and was part of a tomb attributed to a noble
woman of the time, Xin Zhu, whose coffi n was decorated in the Chu style,
with swirling clouds and great dragons. Her body had been wrapped tightly
with silk cloth and overlaid with a dramatically T-shaped depiction of the
afterlife, with the Heavens, Earth and Underworld richly populated with the
spirits of each world.
But the silk painting that most fascinated my mother and I at that Museum
showed a woman simply doing exercises which looked like poses of Taiji.
“That’s how this Lady Xin Zhu got to be so healthy and respected,” I
said to Mama, only half jokingly. “You should do those exercises too!” We
laughed, and I brought her a vase at the museum shop, with the fi gures of that
silk painting imprinted on it.
After my mother died, I found that vase within easy reach of where she
had fallen, from a hemorrhagic stroke as massive as it had been sudden and
unexpected. My mother had been feisty and vivacious to the end, calling one
of her granddaughters just a half hour before her stroke, to tell her what to do
with her new Ipad 2.
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b1840 Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
But unlike the Hunanese woman who had died over two thousands
years ago, my mother did not have any strong beliefs about afterlife. Where
she has gone, where she might be now — is not painted on silk.
And yet, silk continues to be a powerful thread. It links so much — as
the symbol of the lowly worm emerging from its chrysalis to becoming a
creature with wings — silk is powerful enough for us to invest in it meanings
spanning passages of life to afterlife, of the present to the past, of the East
to the West.
The Silk Road is aptly named. Transversing from Xian (Chang-an)
to Rome, through countless transformations across over 4000 kilometres
and two thousand years, this route was the highway of not just silk, but
of technological innovations, as well religious beliefs and aesthetic values,
between the twin peaks of the two civilizations at the time — Changan
and Rome.
Too minuscule to be counted within its centuries of exchanges, my
mother still remained fascinated by the concept of “The Silk Road” as the
over-arching bridge between the disparate cultures of the East and the West.
It was a bridge that she recognized and respected, and perhaps in a small
way she felt a special kinship with because she had contributed, however
haphazardly and humbly, to being a part of that bridge, helping to link East
with West.
Li Lienfung (cid:7550)(cid:5369)(cid:2068) (1923–2011) was child of two cultures.
Born in Shanghai in 1923, she grew up within an extended family,
with a loving mother and an absent father. From childhood, she spoke three
dialects — Hunanese at home, Shanghainese on the streets outside, and
Mandarin in school. Even at the age of 13, she showed literary promise,
as her essay about walking to school was included in Mao Dun’s ((cid:11787)(cid:11566))
groundbreaking book, One Day in China (Zhong Guo De Yi Tian, (cid:1117)(cid:3373)(cid:11444)
(cid:1072)(cid:3929)), a collection of essays culled from all of China.
In 1936, during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, she and her family
moved “back” to their home province of Hunan, where she attended Zhou
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b1840 Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
Foreword
Nan Girl’s Middle School ((cid:2712)(cid:2439)(cid:4003)(cid:4480)(cid:1117)(cid:4502)) for a year before relocating with
her mother to Hong Kong. There she fi nished high school and enrolled in
Ling Nan University ((cid:4829)(cid:2439)(cid:3927)(cid:4502)). In 1938 she left her mother, who returned
to live in Shanghai, to study at Mills College in California, and then at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York, graduating with a BA in Chemistry and a
MA in English Literature (in 1942 and 1946 respectively). It was during
this period in the US that she reconnected with her father in New York, and
grudgingly grew to understand and love him.
She married Cornell schoolmate Ho Rih-Hwa (cid:1413)(cid:7189)(cid:2430) in 1946, and
shortly afterwards they were sent by her father’s company, Wah Chang, to
work in Burma (Myanmar) and then in Bangkok, Thailand. At a time when
women were not even allowed on the factory fl oor, Lienfung started a
vermicelli factory with her husband, successfully producing “glass noodles”
from mung beans — an industrial fi rst in a tropical climate. Today a modern
version of the factory, employing over a thousand workers, is still operating
as the Thai Wah Food Products, a publicly listed company in Thailand. She
was also instrumental in starting up and operating several factories making
modifi ed starch from tapioca in Thailand.
A few years after Singapore’s independence, when her husband was
appointed Singapore’s ambassador to Thailand, and later to Belgium and
Germany, Lienfung switched her lab coat for sequined ballgowns, to attend
diplomatic functions with as much diligence and aplomb as she had conducted
her chemistry experiments. During this time, she was also fun-loving as well
as a disciplinarian to her three children, and her six grandchildren, not to
mention her many nieces and nephews.
In the early 1970s, Lienfung and her family settled in Singapore, where
her husband had been born and where most of his relatives still lived. It
was within the bilingual culture of Singapore that Lienfung’s writing found
an eager audience. Always a prolifi c but a private writer, Lienfung began
writing a weekly English-Chinese column for The Straits Times, Bamboo
Green, which spanned a total of eleven years. She was also a columnist
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b1840 Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
for Lianhe Zaobao ((cid:13956)(cid:2616)(cid:7193)(cid:6357)). Among her books in English are Only a
Sandpiper and Burning at the Red Cliffs. Her books in Chinese include
Da Bao Bu Ping ((cid:6275)(cid:6369)(cid:1085)(cid:5283)) and Wan Lai Feng Ji ((cid:7306)(cid:7573)(cid:20222)(cid:5717)). As a lively
patron of the arts, she also chaired the Arts Fund, and later started the Lien
Fung’s Colloquium.
It is no coincidence that one of the most ambitious presentations of the
Lien Fung’s Colloquium was the one which took place shortly after she died.
Like many Asian scholars of the Silk Route today, Li Lienfung recognized
that cutting edge research and a deeper understanding of this Route is vested
just not in the Western scholars (and bandits!) who laid claim to it in the 19th
and 20th centuries, but in the Chinese, Indian, and Central Asian scholars
who are now able to reclaim its history and heritage.
If this particular Lien Fung’s Colloquium has helped to spearhead the
newly awakened interest to the Silk Route by Asian scholars and laymen
alike, then I think my mother would have been well satisfi ed.
Silk is perhaps the material that my mother was most comfortable with.
Not because of its sheen, or luxury, or ancient currency value, but because it is
a substance that is created by one creature, in the process of metamorphosis,
into another. Silk, like words, is a cross-cultural currency that my mother was
adept in trading in. And so, if she were to be acknowledged as a modern-day
trader of the Silk Route, I think she would have happily embraced that role.
It is entirely appropriate that this publication, focusing on the Silk
Route and published posthumously after Li Lienfung’s death in 2011, is a
culmination of so much time and energy by the members of the Lien Fung’s
Colloquium.
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b1840 Ancient Silk Trade Routes: Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia
Contents
Foreword v
Ho Min Fong
Introduction 1
John Miksic
Part 1: Textiles 19
Chapter 1: Large Western Floral Designs — A Study on Western
Styled Silk Textiles in the Palace Museum, Beijing 21
Zhao Feng
Chapter 2: Lou-lan Textiles in the Stein Collection 39
at the National Museum, New Delhi
Nirmala Sharma
Chapter 3: Tracing Ancient Networks: Linguistics, Hand-woven 53
cloths and Looms in Eastern Indonesia
Geneviève Duggan
Part 2: Ceramics 85
Chapter 4: Archaeological Investigations of Chinese 87
Ceramics Excavated from Kenya
Qin Dashu
Chapter 5: The China-Borneo Ceramics Trade Around 111
the 13th Century: The Story of the Two Wrecks
Michael Flecker
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