My daughter was brought up roughly, a cock and horse fighter, disliked learning, and especially hated writing. In order to foster her interest in thinking with the pen, I often told her stories of historical legends in my general education classes, and her favorite was the story of Duhuan.
Even so, as the first person in Chinese history to reach Africa on record, he did not even leave his dates of birth and death. He left behind only a few passages of writing – 1,511 characters. But because of these few paragraphs, not only did he go down in history, but also several minor characters have been forever immortalized in the history of Chinese people’s overseas exchanges.
In 751 A.D., the westward expansion of the Tang dynasty was met by the Arabian empire, which was advancing eastward. The two empires fought a fierce battle in the Tanzanian region of Central Asia, and the Tang army suffered a crushing defeat. This battle is not well known in history, but it changed the fate of many ordinary people.
One of them was Duhuan, who was a possible officer in the Tang army. He was unfortunately taken prisoner by the Arabs. He came from a famous family, the Jingzhao Du Clan, of which Du You, the prime minister, and Du Mu, the great poet, were relatives. Although his exact background is not recorded in the history books, the fact that he was not killed, but treated well, and that he was good at writing and remembering, suggests that he had a certain rank and was well educated.
After his capture, Duhuan was incorporated into the Arab army as a mercenary. The Arabs were fighting all over the world and had mercenaries of all races under their command, including the Persian “Khorasan” legion. However, his specialty was clearly not storming the front lines, so he was placed in various missions for the Arab Empire – probably having mastered some Arabic and writing by this time. This became an opportunity for him to travel the three continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Over a period of eleven years, Duhuan traveled through thirteen countries whose names can be traced, reaching as far north as Jerusalem and Constantinople, and as far west as Africa, past Alexandria and as far as present-day Morocco. It was not until the summer of 762 A.D. that Dwayne was pardoned as a prisoner and freed. He immediately set sail from the Ethiopian port of Massawa and returned to the Persian Gulf, from where he traveled by merchant ship all the way back to Guangzhou by sea.
We know today that Duhuan’s legendary life depended on the book he wrote after his return to China, The Book of Journeys, detailing his 11-year journey around the world. Unfortunately, this book of legendary experiences did not attract much attention in the self-centered atmosphere of the Tang dynasty, so it was not passed down at all. But fortunately, he had a relative, Du You, who was the prime minister. Du You had read the Jing Xing Ji, and when he was ordered to edit the General Canon, which was a tool for the history of the system of chapters and orders, he excerpted 1,511 words from Du Huan’s Jing Xing Ji in the chapters on overseas countries, such as the General Preface of Xirong, the Great Food, and the Frontier Defense Code. In this unintentional move, this strange book was left intact.
It is very likely that Du Huan’s legend was not an isolated case in the Tang dynasty – that’s why it didn’t cause a stir. Why? In the Jing Xing Ji, Duhuan records that when he participated in the construction of Baghdad, the capital of the Arabian Empire, he encountered four craftsmen who were also from China, with specific nationalities and names – Lv Li and Le Hui, weavers from Hedong, and Fan Shu and Liu Guang Hua, painters from Jing Zhao.
To be sure, these artisans were not captured during the battle. The notion that captured artisans in the Tang army introduced paper-making to the Arabs after the Tanzanian war is pure speculation – who would take weavers and painters or even paper workers with them when they were fighting a thousand-mile war?
The fact that these people were able to appear in Baghdad means that, in addition to the countless foreigners who came to the Tang, there were also countless Tang people who followed the paths of others and traveled to distant lands to exchange ideas and earn a living, and in the process, much of the Chinese technology was passed on to the West. This is only logical.
The fact that these four little people, who left no footprints in history at all, were able to leave their names and confirm our suspicions about the cultural exchange between East and West is entirely due to Duhuan’s account. Du Huan’s account of the Jing Xing Ji was quoted by the Prime Minister Du You, not because he was a relative, but because it was a reliable account.
Duhuan’s writing is strongly factual – concise, objective, and free of personal feelings and speculation. For example, he describes the Muslim saying, “When a woman goes out, she must cover her face. They do not ask questions about wealth and status, and they salute heaven at five times a day. She eats meat and fasts, and kills for her virtue. There is no difference between Islam and today’s Islam, which is evidenced by the rigor and reliability of its records. His descriptions of Christianity and Zoroastrianism at the time are also extremely accurate, even documenting the most advanced craniotomy and prevention of disease by Christian doctors at the time.
What is most remarkable is that Duhuan, who was born in the Tang Dynasty, did not view the world from a condescending Huayi perspective. Because of the objectivity, meticulousness, and reliability of his writing, the great master Wang Guowei greatly admired the Classic of the Jing Xing Ji, and wrote a book called the Classic of the Jing Xing Ji, which was extracted from the General Canon.
Of course, today I do not want to discuss the significance of the book from an academic point of view, but want to say, no matter what kind of purpose and mood Duhuan was in the beginning to record his own story, we all want to thank him. In traditional Chinese culture, the status of a prisoner of war is not an honorable thing, and his travels were on missions for enemy countries. But he was not afraid to write about it, not only to tell us a legend for a thousand years later, but more importantly, to provide an extremely important example of the history of many countries, especially the history of the two Silk Roads, the land and the sea. This is the greatest significance of Duhuan and the four Chinese artisans he documented in history, and the value of their lives that they inadvertently demonstrated.
What is this value in concrete terms? Let me give you a counter example. Just after the Tang Dynasty, in the Song Dynasty, not too long after the Tang Dynasty, in the early Northern Song Dynasty, the “Taiping Imperial Gazetteer” had this to say about the Arabian region: “There is an island in the sea of Fisku, and in the northwest of the island there is a pit where meat is thrown, and a bird with a title of treasure comes out, the largest being five pounds ……”, which is a complete translation of the “Shanhaijing”. This kind of mythological mosaic, subjective speculation, is ridiculous. If the author had read the book, he would not have been so absurd. The Song dynasty was the era when Chinese overseas trade was at its peak, and its insight is even more startling.
If one extrapolates from common sense, one would infer that the number of Chinese arriving in Europe and Africa during the trading exchanges of the Tang and Song dynasties would have been far greater than just a few of them. With a population of a million people in the cities of Chang’an and Bianliang, bustling merchant travelers from all over the world, and a thousand years of prosperous trade routes, how could there be a shortage of such stories? But unfortunately, all that Chinese civilization cared about was the coming of nations, but had little interest in what nations were like.
It is not that the Chinese have not opened their eyes to see the world, but those who have seen the world have either been forced to make a living or to change their circumstances. So either they did not return, or they did not speak. The few that did speak, and those that survived, did not receive the attention they deserved – the restraint and arrogance inherent in agrarian civilization greatly hindered the understanding of the world. As open as the Tang Dynasty, there are records of as many as 36 visits to Tang by emissaries of the Great Food (i.e., Arabian), but the Tang Dynasty never sent an emissary to visit the Great Food. The only one who left a memory of his travels was Du Huan, who completed them as a captive. So the opening of the Tang dynasty was, strictly speaking, an opening, not a release.
The only official expansions of horizons were Zhang Qian’s mission to the West and Gan Ying’s to Qin, both of which failed to achieve their goals and were for military purposes. In the following years, Chinese interest in the world receded again and again, and finally they simply closed themselves off to the rest of the world. The largest wave of overseas emigration in history – to the South Seas – was also a forced exodus from the bottom of society, not an expansion. That’s why Huaxia has always faced the vast ocean, but has never had a maritime civilization.
The fact that Duhuan was able to take a ship from Ethiopia and return to China by sea shows that sea transport had become a large scale and a mature route. The same sea route was also used by Fa Xian to return from Tianzhu 350 years earlier. Why did the Chinese have to wait until six hundred years later for Zheng He’s voyage to the West to reveal their knowledge of the sea? Why is it that our own people have discovered the world so early, but are still blind to it again and again? Was the sealing of the sea in the Ming and Qing dynasties an accident of the dynasty, or was it inevitable by cultural genes?
So I don’t just use this story to educate my daughter, to encourage her to write and think more often. In fact, I’m going to use it for self-encouragement as well – because there are a lot of things that we don’t even consider describing, that are just a glimpse of common sense, but not necessarily known to everyone. Maybe years later, in the course of civilization, it will become a particularly important and shining legacy.
If you don’t believe me, look around you, many people may not see the world as well as Duhuan does today.
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