Category: History

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Why talk about the Silkroad in China?

Birgitta Hoffmann

This autumn our Silkroad course is going to visit a slightly unusual element within the Silkroad studies – the transport within China.
Why would this be so interesting? We all know, that the land route enters China at the Gansu Corridor by passing through a gate in the Great Wall. From there it moved on to Xi’an/Changan, the ancient capital of China. We also know that Guangzhou on the Pearl River is the oldest of the China Sea harbours that carried the Maritime trade on the Silk Route to and from the Harbours. Guangzhou is even far enough in the South that it acts as China’s Monsoon Trade harbour.

So far this is very easy and hardly surprising. The question is what happens then?
Xi’an/Chang’an ceases to be the capital of China in the late Tang period, when the capital moves East beyond the passes first to Luoyang, then to Kaifeng. Very soon afterwards you hear of other capitals, with Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou being probably the most famous sites.
If we assume that the high luxury items of the Silkroad trade were destined particularly for the court, these changes of capitals and the creation of multiple capitals, when China disintegrates over centuries means that a trade route ending in Xi’an is of little use to anybody.

Other problems are the imperial monopolies: Silk, salt and tea are legally only available through the imperial government. But the place where tea is grown and the place where the harbours are, are in the Tang period at the opposite ends of the Pearl River and a long way from Chang’an.

We also have to consider the massive distances involved: From Guangzhou to Kaifeng is 1500km with another 700km to reach Beijing. Shanghai is 900 km away, Dunhuang another 2000 km. None of these routes is easy, often crossing mountains, sometimes deserts and several huge rivers. Creating a viable road network was a century-long project which started with the Qin emperors and was added and adjusted as time and money permitted or demanded. Heavy, bulky or fragile goods were always at risk on the roads, whether transported by horses or by carts and thus not really useful to the Silkroad trader of fragile luxury items.

In response the Chinese developed a very efficient use of waterways. With long rivers like the Wei, the Pearl River and the Yangtse East-West transport was possible, if the various hazards to navigations could be mastered, but what if you needed to travel North-South or needed to cross between river systems, for example, to take the pottery from Jingdezhen or Changsha to Guangzhou?

In this course we will take a look on how these transport problems were mastered during the different dynasties and what this meant for long-distance traders who wanted to obtain goods from the interior of China but weren’t necessarily interested in travelling there themselves or even not permitted to do so.

The Silkroad course on China starts on Thursday 3 October.
Places for the course or for individual lectures can be booked from this webpage here or via Eventbrite here.

 

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Roman villas in Gaul and Germany: the homes of the invaders and fashion victims?

Birgitta Hoffmann

After spending a year looking at the amazing estate centres in the Mediterranean, 10 weeks talking about the villas in Gaul and Germany might seem somewhat of a letdown. So why do it? For starters,  they are by far the most common Roman site type in the area and the closest parallels to the villas we find in Roman Britain. The rural farm with its yard and little bath house is for much of Gaul the definition of what it means to be living in the Roman NW provinces.
And like the farms in the American Midwest, there is at times a certain repetitiveness in their design and aspirations. But they also document, how Rome transformed and frankly reconstructed the Iron Age landscapes after the wars of Julius Caesar and later the Civil War of the 69/70 CE. The result are thriving landscapes in the hinterland of Gall0-Roman Towns and later Roman forts.

The joy of these is, however, the diversity and the variety of research that has been conducted on them. Every region has their own idea of what a villa estate should look like, which might reflect the type of agriculture that was practised and perhaps even more interesting is the question how fast you see the development of different levels of wealth. The picture is the reconstruction of the Roman villa of Borg in Germany. It is without a doubt the villa of a member of the financial elite, but it comes from the area of the Treveri, where you see these large villas quite early, so where does the money come from? And who are the owners? In the territory of the Helvetii (in modern Switzerland), you have a landscape that was evacuated in the late Iron Age and then resettled leading to some villas that are best described as palaces or the centre of a small town, rather than a rural site, but there are plenty of pointers that suggest that in many cases these large villas were in the hands of the local elite and increasingly we find that these sites continue  Iron Age settlements.

But we also find areas like Cologne where many of the villas may have been in the hands of retired Roman soldiers (who at this point are likely to have been born in Northern Italy and the South of France). How does this differ from the ‘Romanised villas’ in Switzerland? And are there local people who refuse to live with underfloor heating and mosaics and why?

It is not surprising that these 200-year-long traditions of rural living come in many areas to an abrupt halt during the third century. The surviving sites change, but how do you continue to farm in the face of an unpredictable military and political situation and if you are one of the lucky rich ones, who may be working closely with the court at Trier, how do you adapt your villa to document this in the face of your neighbours?

As you can see, a lot of material and questions to cover and as to mosaics and the art – let’s just say, it is amazing what can survive a long way from Rome.

If you are interested, you can find further details about the course here.

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MANCENT Blog: Hail, bright Cecilia!

Rosemary Broadbent

Living through a pandemic, surviving a long period when the performance of music in public practically ceased, and the terribly sad experience of seeing a great Gothic cathedral church devastated by fire . . sound familiar? This actually describes the experience of the young Henry Purcell, born one year before the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and living through the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. No fewer than eighty-six churches were destroyed, but the greatest loss was Old St. Paul’s, a hundred feet longer than Salisbury Cathedral, and outstripped in the height of its spire only by its counterpart in Lincoln. Purcell’s life was short but prolific – so short that he will have seen Christopher Wren’s St.
Paul’s rising stone by stone, but did not live to see it consecrated and brought into use. After the virtual elimination of large-scale music during the Commonwealth, it is no wonder that the musicians of London decided to set up an annual celebration of the power of music on St. Cecilia’s Day, November 22nd . Purcell wrote music for the first celebration in 1683, but our MANCENT session on October 12th takes its title and its focus from his second commission in 1692.

There must have been an element of competition amongst this tightly-knit group of musicians as each year a different composer was presented with the challenge of writing an Ode to St. Cecilia. It is no surprise, therefore, that Purcell’s second contribution, nine years on, reaches new heights of splendour and virtuosity. There will be much to enjoy in this music when we consider it together.
The organisers of the St. Cecilia celebrations in the 17th century ordained both the poet and the composer for each year’s offering. Sadly, they never succeeded in matching greatest poet of the
age, John Dryden, with the greatest composer, Henry Purcell. Dryden’s text was set by Giovanni Draghi in 1687, but Dryden’s refusal to swear allegiance to William and Mary the following year led to his disappearance from court life. It was not all loss, however, because his seclusion gave him the time to translate Vergil! John Milton had met a similar fate earlier, as his support for Cromwell and
the Commonwealth made it politic to disappear from London at the Restoration in 1660. Once again there was a silver lining, as he used his enforced leisure to write Paradise Lost.

We have to wait a long time to find an eminent British composer setting the words of an eminent poet, but our second session, on October 19th, celebrates three remarkable conjunctions: John Dryden set by Hubert Parry, Shakespeare set by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and W. H. Auden set by Benjamin Britten. Unlike many of the seventeenth-century odes, these works have remained
in the repertory, and they provide a fascinating picture of the revival of English choral music after a long fallow period. Saint Cecilia lives again, especially in the work of Benjamin Britten, who was born
on her feast day.

Details on MANCENT’s Course: Hail Cecilia can be booked here.

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MANCENT blog: A Chinese Garden in North Staffordshire

Birgitta Hoffmann

Last week I went to #Biddulph Grange Garden in Staffordshire. Created by James Bateman in between the 1830s and 1860s, who displayed many of the plants that had been collected by the plant expeditions to Asia and America that he financed in the garden Since the 1960s it has been restored and maintained by the #NationalTrust. It is a glorious exercise in creating lots of themed gardens in comparatively little space. Most people go for the glorious Dahlias, but the idea for me was to have a look at the Chinese Garden which I want to include in my day school on #China in the 19th century for MANCENT. It is one of the first attempts in Britain to create a Classical Chinese garden similar to those of the World Heritage Site at Suzhou. Given the problems of the available descriptions and limited range of images and plants that could be used, it is a truly beautiful piece of reception (strange mistakes notwithstanding), copying the main elements of the Lake, the Wilderness, and the meandering ways for contemplation, as well as the viewing terrace and even an isolated teahouse. Even the axis towards a tall feature in the distance is there (alas not a pagoda, but a monkey puzzle tree).
The relationship between China and the West in the 19th century was fraught, no doubt about it. But it is also worth remembering that in between these mountains of problems, there were people who were trying to engage with the Chinese culture and tried to understand it better.

If you want to know more tickets are still available and can be got via the website or via Eventbrite.

View from the ‘Wilderness’ and the Teahouse towards the lake.