He leers drunkenly at us with his close-set eyes and arched eyebrows, absurdly long, drooping nose, and earlobes that stretch low, punctured with gaping holes. He is grotesque, comic, slightly menacing—an ancient clown of the Far East.

We are in Nara , southern Japan. It is the temple of Hōryūji, a treasure house of great importance, where once lay preserved a world of precious objects gathered from across Asia during the 6th to 9th centuries. Here was a Silk Road cabinet of curiosities: instruments, statues, precious woods, textiles.

But we are interested today in a single mask made of Paulownia wood; Fig. 1. For it is believed that this mask may be the farthest sighting east of an elusive character that scholars have been seeking for over a century—the Sogdian abroad.

Sogdians and the Silk Road

Ever since the German cartographer and explorer Baron von Richthofen coined the term “Silk Road” (Seidenstraße) in 1877, we have been fueled by dreams of a transcontinental trade route linking Asia and Europe, “East” and “West.” To a certain extent, the idea of the Silk Road is the product of the modern mind, keen to find precedents and a genealogy for our interconnected, “globalized” contemporary world. We delight to find ancient goods that have crossed continents and cultures: an Egyptian glass beaker found buried in a chamber in central Afghanistan, a Central Asian silk in a European cathedral. We revel in the traders and travelers that crossed those continents, collected and shared knowledge, moved between worlds. It comforts us that the ancients were not so different from us after all, or perhaps that we are not so different from the ancients. Such stories provide us tools to elucidate, even justify, the way we live today and the values we hold—the thrill of the exotic that fuels our sense of cosmopolitanism.

The discovery and deciphering of caches of Sogdian documentsMarc Aurel Stein Learn more about explorer and archaeologist Sir M. Aurel Stein at the beginning of the 20th century was a great boon to scholars engaged in this quest. For in the Sogdians we seemed to have found the Silk Road people par excellence: cosmopolitan, well-traveled, mercantile, syncretic in their practices and beliefs. Over the last hundred years, and increasingly in the last thirty years, scholars have attempted to hunt down traces of the Sogdians around the world. They have had spectacular success in Central Asia and China, where the discovery and excavation of multiple sites have uncovered city layouts; religious, administrative, and personal documents; wall paintings; metalwork; ossuaries and stone sarcophagi. These concrete artifacts of Sogdian culture have allowed us to build a picture of Sogdian life across a central tract of the Silk Road. But what of farther afield? Can we find traces of the Sogdians along the entire span of the Silk Road, from Nancy to Nara, Bangkok to Belgium?

This is no easy quest. We are dealing with a culture that never exerted great political power beyond its homeland. Sogdians abroad were largely a class of merchants, craftsmen, and entertainers. These are the kinds of people who do not write histories and do not have histories written about them. With one or two notable exceptions, they are nameless. In historiographical terms, we would consider them “subalterns”—subordinate people of lower social position rather than the usual “great men”—kings, generals, sages—who dominate history. Any attempt to trace the extent of the Sogdians’ global reach must thus rely on stitching together the brief references to them found scattered through foreign chronicles, analyzing material evidence from across Eurasia for signs that an object may have been Sogdian in origin, and searching for the representation of Sogdian figures in artworks made by other hands.

Such a quest is going to be incomplete, tentative, speculative—and exciting. There is something exhilarating about the hunt for a lost people: a kind of rescue history. First, let us start by piecing together the textual and material evidence for Sogdians and their culture beyond Central Asia and China, in order to understand the potential extent of their trade and influence. Second, we will consider the representations of Sogdians in foreign artworks to gauge how far they spread, if not in physical presence, at least in image and reputation.

The Textual and Material Evidence of Sogdians Abroad

These inscriptions were uncovered following the building of the Karakorum Highway in the 1960s and 1970s, which made previously inaccessible areas of Pakistan reachable for archaeologists. Such evidence even suggests that the Sogdians had “an effective monopoly of the trade” within the triangle of Sogdiana, India, and China. Alongside these inscriptions, we also have scattered accounts of Sogdian traders traveling farther into India and settling there. One account from a Chinese source regarding a Sogdian Buddhist monk, whom we shall meet shortly in Vietnam, described him as coming from a family of Sogdians that had spent “many generations” in India.

If we want to continue traveling through South and Southeast Asia, we must now follow a different course: the maritime spice route; Fig. 6. The great scholar of pre-Islamic Central Asia Frantz Grenet has made a strong case for the existence of Sogdian merchants in Vietnam and Sri Lanka. For Vietnam, we have a 5th-century source in the form of a Chinese collection of biographies of Buddhist monks. This collection tells of a 3rd-century monk named Kang Senghui 康僧會, whose family had spent “many generations” in India along with other Sogdians before his father settled the family in Tonkin , in what is now Vietnam. The family name Kang is instructive. It was a name used for those families coming from “Kangju,” which by this time was largely understood to mean the area of, and around, Sogdiana.

For Sri Lanka, our source is a hundred years later, in the 5th century. Here, we have a text by a Chinese pilgrim, Faxian 法顯, which notes that “Sapo” traders could be found in Anuradhapura  in Sri Lanka. While Sapo does not conclusively refer to Sogdians, we have another source that supports the claim that Sogdians were living in Sri Lanka: a biography of Amoghavajra, an influential 8th-century teacher of Tantrism in China. This work describes Amoghavajra as being born in Sri Lanka to a North Indian father and a mother from a “Kang family.” As we have already seen, Kang most likely refers to Sogdiana, and these two sources together are strong evidence for Sogdians settling in Sri Lanka.

Having followed textual and material evidence of Sogdians as far east as we can, it is time to retrace our steps and then head north from Sogdiana, up and into the Great Steppe. From Kazakhstan and Xinjiang  this immense plain stretches east to Mongolia and Manchuria, and north and west to Russia and the Caucasus. Were the Sogdians able to take advantage of this vast economic and cultural zone to their north?

We can indeed find traces of the Sogdian past in archaeological and written evidence of the 6th to 9th centuries. There the Sogdians emerge as successful middlemen between the Chinese and the nomadic powers to the north of Sogdiana. With the establishment in the mid- to late 6th century of Turk rule over most of the Eurasian steppe, the pace of trade across Eurasia increased. The Sogdians were well placed to capitalize. One key commodity traded between the steppe and Sogdiana was slaves, and we have written evidence that Samarkand  was a center of slave trading between the northern steppe and other parts of Central Asia.

Heading north, we know from archaeological excavations of burial sites of nomadic elites living on the steppe that mirrors, textiles, and metalwork imported from Central Asia were valued items. However, it is not easy to tell if such objects were gathered as the spoils of war, as diplomatic gifts, or via trade. It is thus tricky to isolate the role of Sogdians as makers or traders of such goods. Traveling east along the steppe, all the way to Mongolia, we can also just catch a glimpse of the Sogdians as prominent horse traders and craftsmen, some working at the Turkic courts there. The trade in horses was, in the 8th century at least, the major commerce of the region. While we have very little evidence of the trade in practice, we can infer the Sogdians’ presence because the northern Ordos region was known as the “Six Sogdian Prefectures,” in both Chinese and Turkish.

If the steppe to the far north of Sogdiana bears witness to the far-flung journeys of Sogdian merchants, craftsmen, and goods, what can we find of such journeys west—in Persia, the Middle East, and Europe? Perhaps surprisingly, we find very little trace of the Sogdians to the direct west of Sogdiana, in what is now Iran. What could largely explain this is that the Sasanian empire reigning over the region would not want Sogdian traders to have access to lucrative western markets in place of their own Sasanian traders. A near-contemporary tells an illustrative story of Sogdians approaching the Sasanian king in the third quarter of the 6th century, seeking approval to sell silk there. The king bought the silk and then burned it in front of them.

The Sogdians in this instance were not attempting to sell Sogdian cloth but working with their Turkic allies, trying to dispose of surplus silk that the Turks had received in tribute from the Chinese. The Sogdians’ reaction to the episode was to suggest to the Turks that they try instead to trade directly with the Sasanians’ enemies, the Byzantines. Although little came of this particular proposal, the incident demonstrates important points: the role Sogdian merchants could play as diplomats and middlemen, and the protectionist stance of the Sasanians toward their trade borders (a policy confirmed by other sources). Thus trade routes that bypassed Sasanian Iran were developed; Fig. 11. The importance for the silk trade of transit through the Caucasus not only during the Sasanian period but long afterward finds physical testimony in the major finds at the burial sites of Moschevaja Balka  in the northwest Caucasus.

During the first half of the 8th century, most of Sogdiana fell to Muslim armies. This opened up the trade routes between Transoxiana  and the Central Islamic Lands. Boris Marshak has argued that the tradition of Sogdian craftsmanship continued to have an influence on silver produced in Khorasan  and Transoxiana. He has even connected two silver dishes now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg with al-Mamun, one of the sons of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, when he held the princely land grant (known as an apanage) of Khurasan in the first decade of the 9th century. As Étienne de la Vaissière has emphasized,

The Arab conquest, very gradual as it was, did not immediately shatter Sogdian society. The traditional Sogdian elites were still largely in place at the beginning of the 9th century, and continued to rebel. The military apogee of the Sogdian noble class was without doubt under al-Ma’mūn and his successor al-Mu‘taṣim (833–842, AH 218–227).

Paramount among the Sogdian military at the Abbasid court was Afshin Haydar, heir of the ruler of Ustrushana, and his palace was among the largest of all the constructions at the Abbasid palace-city of Samarra , north of Baghdad. Afshin Haydar was accused of owning idolatrous, bejeweled statuary and an illustrated religious text, although whether these objects were Buddhist is not clear. He made a double defense: that he had inherited the manuscript from an ancestor, and that in any event, the judge himself owned a copy of the animal fables Kalila wa Dimna. We can infer that the judge’s copy was illustrated, and we find an intriguing connection in artistic echoes between Sogdian wall paintings of the late 7th century and manuscripts of a later date produced in the Middle East. In the Sogdian city of Panjikent , for example, archaeologists have uncovered wall paintings illustrating stories from the Indian Panchatantra, a cycle of animal fables first written in Sanskrit; Fig. 12.

These pictures are divided into small panels that run around the lower part of the hall and portray a cast of talking wolves, monkeys on the backs of tortoises, and lions being tricked by hares and tumbling into pools of water. Formal, thematic, and stylistic echoes of these illustrations also appear in Arabic manuscripts of the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods; Fig. 13.

In the 1950s came what seemed a major breakthrough—the discovery of a supposedly Sogdian inscription on the back of one such textile from the cathedral in Huy, Belgium; Fig. 15. The key word in the inscription was, according to the Sogdian linguistic expert W. B. Henning, “Zandaniji”—a term used by the 10th-century historian Narshakhi to describe textiles produced in Zandana , a site in Sogdiana close to Bukhara . Dorothy Shepherd, who discovered the inscription, was justifiably excited: “By great good fortune, unique in the annals of the history of textiles, an inscription with the name Zandaniji has come to light on a textile that, perhaps, may therefore be assigned to this famous center.”

Shepherd’s excitement was ill-founded, though, and set off a fifty-year wild goose chase as scholars applied the label “Zandaniji” to an ever-growing corpus of silks. The first issue with this identification was a recognition that medieval accounts of Zandana’s textiles referred to cottons, not silks. But the real problem was more startling. It turned out that the “Sogdian” writing on the back of the Huy textile was not Sogdian at all—it was Arabic! That Arabic makes no mention of Zandaniji; Fig. 16.

The mistaken identification of the Huy textile does not, however, rule out Sogdiana as the site of production of these Central Asian textiles in Europe. The fabrics were clearly produced in a region that could draw on West Asian technology and design conceptsSogdian Textiles along the Silk Road , as well as Chinese taste in colors and perhaps dye materials. The historical region of Sogdiana certainly fits the bill for this. But until further technical and stylistic research is carried out, the origin of these Central Asian silks must remain an unanswered question.

Representations of Sogdians in Foreign Art

All the textual and material evidence taken together makes a strong case for the physical presence of Sogdians, many doubtless lured by trade, in various locations far from Sogdiana. The evidence also suggests that goods produced by Sogdian craftsmen or traded by Sogdian merchants made their way over large areas of the Eurasian landmass. Our final type of evidence for Sogdians abroad is the representation of them in artworks found in various sites across Asia.

Two problems arise, however. One is that, although these funerary figures are clearly exotic, none are expressly identified as Sogdian. Rather than intending them as specifically Sogdian, the Chinese artisans and public might have regarded them as generic “Western” figures. In categorizing them as Sogdian, we should rely more heavily on proof than presumption. The second issue is that the Sogdians in Sogdiana represented themselves in quite different fashion. In frescoes from Panjikent, for example, Sogdian banqueters are shown as tall, perhaps distortedly pale, with wasp waists and delicate facial features, and often beardlessBanqueting in Sogdiana Learn more about banqueting in Sogdiana—the complete opposite of the paunchy, rambunctious, Falstaffian characters we often characterize as Sogdians. Are we in danger of falling into a fallacy equal to the mistaken identification of Zandaniji textiles?

Fortunately, there is now firm evidence of how Sogdians had themselves depicted in pre-Tang and Tang China. Archaeologists in the last twenty years have uncovered, among many others, the sculpted tombs of two Sogdians in Xi’an —Shi Jun 史君 and An Qie 安伽, two prominent leaders, or sabao, of the Sogdian community in China. Let us compare the central figure in a scene on his couch, Fig. 18, with one of the chivalric banqueters from the fresco in Panjikent, Fig. 19. Both are portrayed enjoying a banquet, but the figure from Panjikent is slender, whereas An Qie has what we might term a “full figure.”

Yet An Qie was not uniquely corpulent, as a similar figure, in similar pose, occurs on an “anonymous” couch reportedly found in Anyang; Fig. 20. The stark difference in representation might be explained by a disparity in class and image. At Panjikent the figures may be seated, but they wear their swords proudly, and clearly belong to a class of knights whose chivalric prowess in hunt and battle was illustrated in several other frescoes from Panjikent and Afrasiab (now in Iran).

The Sogdian sabao, on the other hand, were leaders of merchant communities, for whom an ample girth was a sign of worldly success. Some of the feasting in the scenes on the couches may have had a ritual or postritual association, but drink, food, music, and dance were evidently expressions of joie de vivre among these expatriate Sogdians. In a community that brought fancies and fashions from the West to the Tang capital, these reflected a broader cultural trait among the Sogdians. As the earliest classic history of the Tang, the Tang Shu 唐書, succinctly states, “The people [of Samarkand] are addicted to wine, and like to sing and dance in the streets.”

A historical embodiment of this Sogdian penchant for abandon was the Tang-dynasty general An Lushan, who, according to Edwin Pulleyblank, was born of a Sogdian father ( the surname An referred to BukharaThe Nine Sogdian Surnames Learn more about the Chinese names for Sogdian families in China) and a Turkic mother. An Lushan’s rebellion almost toppled the Tang regime, but fact, fiction, and fantasy have combined to create a legend of a man. In Pulleyblank’s words, he was “an enormously fat man with a talent for buffoonery” and who became a favorite of the notorious imperial concubine Yang Guifei. After receiving a gift of “Western twirling girls” from several Sogdian cities including Samarkand, Emperor Xuanzong so delighted in the Sogdian Whirl dance that both Yang Guifei and An Lushan learned to perform it. With An Lushan, facts turn into a swirl of often ribald legends. Was he—a man said to weigh at least 400 pounds—really “adopted” by Yang Guifei in a spoof ceremony that involved his being dressed in an oversized diaper? It does not matter, for legends can be even more formative than facts.

The image of the Sogdian in China went from the exotic and the entertaining to grotesque caricature and the essence of moral corruption at the heart of the Tang court. The Tang figurines of an ensemble of Sogdian musicians lurching on top of a camel were synecdochic of the Silk Road caravans that brought not only riches from the West but an aura of abandon; Fig. 25. The bronze statuette from Gansu of a Sogdian dancer was a pasquinade—hatted, high-stepping, hook-nosed; Fig. 26. It is this caricatural image of the Sogdian that was to reach the eastern edge of the Old World, Japan.