Wolfgang Tiemann

Migrating Media through 1250 Years

China 01 China 02 China 03 China 04 China 05 China 06

... a man named Du Hwai in a prison camp started to keep a diary. Du Hwai was one of the Chinese soldiers who were defeated and arrested at the famous battle of Talas. After ten long years of imprisonment he traveled through Tashkent, Samarkand, passed Iran and Iraq, arrived at Syria and entered a foreign ship to come back to the Chinese town of Canton. Nearly three centuries later on, the Arab historian al-Tha'alibi wrote, that some Chinese prisoners of war like Du Hwai betrayed the secret of papermaking to the Arabs in Samarkand after the battle of Talas. Al-Tha'alibi's legend survives to the present day to explain an essential point in Central Asia's political and cultural history of the 8th century to the western mind.

Samarkand is one of the most famous historical towns in Central Asia, the hugh region between the great Chinese wall in the east and Hungary in the west, the Siberian taiga in the north, Karakorum, Hindukusch and Kaukasus in the south. Devoid of any maritime provinces, Central Asia was restricted to inland transportation. Silk and spices, travellers and soldiers - they all used the traditional roads between China and Europe.

During those centuries which Europe uses to call its "middle ages", the new dynamics of neighbouring empires affected the history of Central Asia. As early as 651 Arabian armies had defeated the Sassanides in Iran, a portent of future decades of expansion. When islamic forces reached Tangier in 699, non-Arab Muslims had begun to outnumber the Arab population within the muslim countries. With the advent of the Abbaside dynasty in 754, a new capital of the empire began to grow - Baghdad instead of Damascus -, and people beyond the Oxus River in the Turkish east felt increasingly involved in the "golden age" of the emerging islamic empire with its spirit of feudal domination and its positiv impact on merchantry and science.

Old empires like Byzantium or Persia had seized to determine politics in Central Asia, and a new framework of powers grew. When the Arabs ventured north of Samarkand and Buchara, China went through a period of decline under the reign of Xuanzong, who resigned during a military revolt in 756. The power in the steppes, on the other hand, had been consolidated in the hand of the Khazars, a mixture of Turcs, Bulgars and Caucasians. Together with T'u chueh, the Uigur and the Khitan tribes they were defeated at the battle of Talas, giving room for the rise of a new Iranian power, the Saminid dynasty.

But the new emerging borders along the silk road could not really stop the "new" material of communication. Once papermaking had crossed the Chinese borders, it spread rapidly along the dynamic Muslim capitals at the silk road, the Mediterranean coast of Africa until Spain and Sicily.

The battle at the Talas river in Central Asia and that of Poitiers in France, the transition from the Umayyad to the Abassid regime in Arabia - three events defining the new horizon of the "world". Thus the year 751 appears to indicate a decisive period of medieval globalization. It established a system of civilizations that remained in effect until columbian times - and paper at the very heart of global culture.

Ausstellungen >> Paperroads >> Migrating Media... >> Near Samarkand in 751