Stephen R. Mackinnon & John Fairbank invariably failed to separate fondness for the Chinese communist revolution from fondness for Gong Peng, the Asian fetish who worked together with Anneliese Martens to infatuate American wartime reporters.
(More, refer to Communist Platonic Club at wartime capital Chungking.)
Zhang Qian's Trip To Central Asia
From the mouth of a defecting Hun, Wudi learnt about the relocation of Yueh-chih (Yuezhi) Major to the west of the Huns. Hence, in 138 BC, Wudi sent an emissary called Zhang Qian, a Hun guide called Tangyifu and 100 people on a trek across the west. Zhang Qian was arrested by the Huns soon, and he was forced to live among the Huns for dozens of years and he had married and born two children. Zhang, however, did not forget about Wudi's order, and he fled with his Hun guide to the west and reached the state of Dayuan [Dawan] (Kokand?, Fergana Valley). With the assistance from Dayuan [Dawan] king, he was escorted to Kangju where the Kanju king assisted him further on his trip to Bactria, the place where the Yueh-chih (Yuezhi) Major had settled down.
Zhang Qian returned to China after another arrest by the Huns. Sima Qian and history chornicles called Zhang Qian's travel to the west by the term of "piercing the vacuum" as an eulogy of his personal verification of the West.
Hitorical Chinese records point to Chinese Turkistan as the source of jade and diamond trade (which could be a recent claim as remotely ancient records just touched on
the Queen Mother of the West and her offer of jades to the Yellow Lord [l. BC 2697 - 2599 ?] and Lord Shun [l. 2257 - 2208 BC ?], while the locality for the Queen Mother was more likely the Qilian Mountain,
south of today's Jiuquan); however, nothing particular beyond Chinese Turkistan was mentioned.
The trade on the Silk Road did not flourish till hundreds of years later. In history, there were at least two paths that could have more important roles than Silk Road 2000 years ago. Certainly, the sea routes also existed between Rome and China, by which the silk had actually been shipped rather than via the more precarious land of conflicting statelets and tribes.
The precarious nature of the Road across deserts could be see in General Li Guangli's losing 80% of his soldiers when he first campaigned against Dayuan [Dawan] (Kokand?, Fergana Valley) in 104 BC. (People who claimed nomadic propogation of horse and cavalry to China might propose a northern belt route. Should we read Chinese records, then we often encountered passages like the nomads losing 6-7 out of 10 people and cattle during some storms. A good example of the same kind of precarious nature on the steppe could be illustrated in Zhizhi Chanyu's losing the bulk of fighters during the relocation to Kang-ju territory. While Zhizhi Chanyu stationed in Jiankun territory, Sogdia king intended to attack the Wusun Statelet with the Hunnic assistance. Zhizhi Chanyu arrived in the destination with only 3000 remnants.)
Upon Zhang's return from the west, after a span of 13 years, Emperor Wudi first ordered 4 expeditions to the southwest of China to search for a route to India. This is because Zhang Qian reported that he saw Zangke (a place in today's Sichuan Province) bamboo products and Sichuan clothing which the Bactria merchants said were shipped over from India.
Wudi got in touch with Yelang Statelet and Dian-Yue Statelet etc.
This alternatively showed that there was no such thing as the Silk Road in ancient times, and that the ancient trade between China and Central Asia could only have come through the India subcontinent.
What Silk Road Contributed To World Civilization
Aly Mazaheri, an ethnic Iranian and a French sinologist, in La Route De La Soie (1983), claimed that
China needed only "Fergana stallions" from the rest of the world, while the rest of the world needed everything from China, all faciliated by the Silk Road.
Aly Mazaheri stated that at the time Persian King Sha-na-di-er dispatched last mission to Manchu Qing Emperor Qianlong [reign 1736-1795], British had taken over 75% of the trade between Orient and Occident while Russians had the other 25%.
Silk Road, in Aly Mazaheri's opinions, had lost its role not due to the discovery of sea route, but due to the newly manufactured products that had come to replace the traditional Chinese products shipped over from Silk Road: i.e., synthetic musk replacing Chinese musk; products of industrial revolution replacing Chinese iron cast ovens, iron wok, steel nails, pliers, needles, scissors, iron file, and hammers; Venice tin-coated glass replacing Chinese bronze mirrors; Swedish matches replacing Chinese fire-making sickle that Europe had utilized for 18 centuries; and Russian water-mark paper replacing high quality Chinese paper in 19th century.
Further, Aly Mazaheri pointed out that the Europeans had confusion about the identity of China by stating that Portuguese governor in India dispatched Benoit Goez on an overland trip via silk road to verify that the Khitay was the same as China, which culminated in Benoit Goez's arrival in Suzhou [Gansu Prov] in AD 1604.
First I want to debunk the fallacies in regards to the equation of the ancient Yu-shi tribe to the Yuezhi, and the speculation on the jade trade that the Yuezhi was falsely accredited with.
See Barbarians.htm for more discussions on forged statements in Guan-zi [管子] (which historian Ma Feibai pierced sentence by sentence).
Around Xin (New) Dynasty (AD 6-23), there occurred
a forgery movement by Chinese scholars, possibly with the intention of substantiating the mandate of the usurper Wang Mang's dynasty.
The classics which were proved to be forgeries
include "Guan-zi [管子]", which historian Ma Feibai pierced sentence by sentence.
Using Ma's same logic, I had found the two other books, "Yi-zhou-shu" [逸周书] or "Zhou-shu" (Zhou Dynasty [16th cen. B.C. - 256 B.C.] [abbrev. 周书] book,
not the Zhou-shu [周书] from Posterior Zhou Dynasty of the South-North Dynasty time period of AD 557-581) and "Shang[1]-shu" [商书] (Shang Dynasty [16-11th cent. B.C.] book, not Shang[4]-shu [尚书], i.e., remotely ancient book which was said to be abridged by Zuo Qiuming),
to be written in the exact same style and could be forgeries by possibly the same person.
Discarding the forgery of Guan-zi [管子] basically eliminated the whole foundation upon which the existence of the Yuezhi and the jade trade was built,
a fallacy which was widely cited in
the most recent 10-20 years, i.e., 1990s and 2000s, to the effect that the fabricated Yuezhi had lived close to the heart of China, playing the role of bearing the Aryan civilization to China.
(A recent writing on ancient forgeries at the imperialchina.org blog, which was not in the sense of political correctness till later Western Han Dynasty, is available in pdf format: ImperialChinaOrg-on-forgeries.pdf.)
I never thought the people of the Central Asia or in Chinese Turkestan were an intermediary form of human evolution, which was my basis of calling the Siberian origin of Koreans by a 'moo' point. I constantly pointed out that in the collective memory of Sino-Tibetan, that passed down by generations, the Sinitic Chinese had forgot they travelled north from today's Vietnam while claiming a walk down Mt Kunlun. Previously, I checked the historical context as well as the geo situation to find out when the east met with the west, and believed that the Hun-Yuezhi War could be the start of the contact. With new archeological findings, I would add that the proto-Tibetan Qiangs had indeed penetrated into Chinese Turkestan, to the north side of Mt Tianshan, from perhaps the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert.
Click on the below picture for the enlarged map showing the first Hunnic attack at the Yuezhi around the ancient Juyan Lake
(also known as the West Sea in Chinese classics, and later known as the
Kharakoto [Blackwater] Lake) in the 3rd century B.C.,
and the subsequent Hunnic attack at the Wusun/Loulan near Yiwu in the 2nd century B.C.,
to the east of Turpan, which triggered the Wusun migration to Ili where they further drove the Yuezhi towards
today's Afghanistan.
(See Barbarians.htm for more discussions on the Yuezhi migration timeline.)
On the modern map, there was a tiny corridor between Chinese Turkistan and China, which was the narrow strip of sand to the east of Hami.
However, this corridor could be a recent event.
There was the historical DAZI blackhole desert to the east, nowadays called by the generic name GOBI.
The ancient Mongoloid migration into Tianshan Mountain could have come north from south, i.e., the Tibetan Plateau/Ruoqiang direction to the south --though I hesitated about the
passibility of the "Liu-sha" flowing sand desert between Ruoqiang and Loulan (Lop Nur), which was another tiny corridor noticeable on the modern map.
Judging from Han Dynasty emissary Zhang Qian's change of mind on his return trip to go home along the Hami strip rather than going straight east across the Qiang-zhong or the middle Qiang nation land, we could tell that the northern strip was perhaps the most traveler-friendly.
(Could Zhang Qian change his mind in the hope of sneaking into the Hunnic territory to see the child he had with the Hun woman?)
That was Han Emperor Wudi's reign of B.C. 140-86, i.e., 140 BC and later, much later than Hun-Yuezhi wars.
Now, let's talk about human migration.
There were widespread discussions of 'Caucasoid' mummies in Chinese Turkestan, with 'Loulan Beaty' purportedly dated 2000 B.C., while the southern 'cousins' in Khotan area dated 100-300 B.C.
The timeline suggested a move from north to south, not west to east.
The 2000 B.C. Caucasoid mummies found in Loulan, in the Turpan Depression/Kumtag Desert, in-between Altaic/Tianshan Mountains and the Altun Mountain (Ruoqiang), could be the Indo-European people coming from the north of the Altaic Mountain [the Mongol Altaic Mountain of today], near the Alfanesevo bronze culture. Yuezhi could be of this group of people coming from north.
Further diggings in Loulan area, i.e., the ancient Salty Lake and Salty River (Peacock Rover), led to a site called by Xiaohe or the Little River, next to the Salty River (Peacock Rover), where Mongoloid Mummies were discovered.
It appears to me there was indeed good carbon dating on Xiaohe excavation, saying "The entire necropolis can be divided, based on the archeological materials, into earlier and later layers. Radiocarbon measurement (14C) dates the lowest layer of occupation to around 3980 ± 40 BP (personal communications; calibrated and measured by Wu Xiaohong, Head of the Laboratory of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Peking University), which is older than that of the Gumugou cemetery (dated to 3800)." The article claimed that the 'Mongoloid' mtDNA had similarity to some present South Siberian population. (For details, check http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/15 for the full article "Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age".)
The linking of this certain mtDNA in Xiaohe/Loulan area to a modern Siberian population could be said to be circumvential at best since a lot of things had happened in the past 2-3000 years.
It kind of had the same timing as the Mongoloid mummies that were discovered to the north and east of the Tianshan Mountain.
More than what was found about the mtDNA at Xiaohe/Loulan, there were mummies of Khams Tibetan type found to the further north,
at the Tianshan-Altaic mountain areas, which presented a much more convincing point that the proto-Tibetan Qiangs had indeed crossed over the strip of the sand desert near Loulan to reach the north side of Tianshan.
Possibly, the Khams [proto-]Tibetan, after reaching Tianshan Mountain Range, moved towards Hami (Qumul) to the east, where there were the Hami (Qumul) Mongoloid mummies excavated.
Note that today's Kham Tibetans were not far away from the historical Sanxingdui (three star) Excavations in western Sichuan, that was discovered by Gaway Hann (an American professor of the former Huaxi University),
a Neolithic/Bronze culture dating from about 4800 to 2800 years ago, as well as a bridge providing Southwest China's tin to the Shang dynasty
and the Zhou dynasty.
My reasoning was that the Qiangs had a dominance in the area since China's prehistory, like 5000 years ago, at least the time of the Yellow Emperor [Huangdi (l. BC 2697 - 2599 ?)], and they controlled the southern rim, southeastern rim and western rim of the Taklamakan Desert, and somehow around 2000 B.C., penetrated northward to reach the two sides of the Tianshan mountain range, while the so-called Caucasoid oases in their path, namely, the Loulan area, might have risen and fallen numerous times in history -- if they ever existed there prior to the penetration by the Khams [proto-]Tibetans.
Or the other way around, the Khams [proto-]Tibetans could be speculated to have penetrated to the two sides of the Tianshan mountain range earlier than the Indo-Europeans, and subsequently encountered the Indo-Europeans near the Tianshan Mountain, and ultimately the Indo-Europeans gradually dominated over the area and eliminated the trace of the Khams [proto-]Tibetans, pressing them back to the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert.
(See Barbarians.htm for more discussions on the ancient human migrations.)
There was a striking similarity between the Mongol attack at the Tanguts in the 13th cent. A.D. and the Hun attack at the Yuezhi in the 3rd cent. B.C.
Both took the desert road towards the Blackwater Lake.
It kind of gives you a picture how the Huns first raided to the west against the Yuezhi, forcing the Yuezhi Major to flee west while the elderly and the children, i.e., the Yuezhi Minor,
crossed the Qilian mountain to seek asylum with the Qiangs, and per Yu Taishan, continued to move on towards the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert,
towards
Khotan where the people were recorded to be Mongoloid, i.e., Hua-xia-looking, throughout China's Han and Tang dynastic records, till annihilated sometime during the Islamic invasion of the
Buddhist stronghold of Khotan or possibly during the earlier Turkic-Uygur conquest of the Chinese Turkistan.
Note the discovery of the so-called 100-300 BC Caucasoid in Khotan, which matched with the escape timeframe of the Yuezhi Minor.
(Another recent writing on Zhou King Muwang's travelogue at the imperialchina.org blog, is available in pdf format [Mu-tian-zi.pdf], exhibited the westernmost extent of the ancient Chinese kingdom to be no more than the edge of the Kumtag Desert and right at the Black Water Lake.)
This website expresses the personal opinions of the webmaster. In addition to the webmaster's comments, extensive citations and quotes of ancient Chinese classics (available at http://www.sinica.edu.tw/ftms-bin/ftmsw3) were presented via transcribing and paraphrasing the Classical Chinese language
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This is an internet version of my writings on "Historical China" (2004 version assembled by http://www.third-millennium-library.com/index.html), "Republican China", and "Communist China".
There is no set deadline as to the date of completion for "Communist China" (Someone had saved a copy of my writing on the June 4th [1989] Massacre at http://www.scribd.com/doc/2538142/June-4th-Tiananmen-Massacre-in-Beijing-China).
The work on "Historical China" will be after "Republican China".
The current emphasis is on "Republican China", now being re-outlined to be inclusive of 1911 to 1955 and divided into volumes of pre-1911 to 1919, 1919 to 1928, 1929 to 1937, 1937 to 1945, and 1945-1955. This webmaster plans to make the contents of "Republican China 1929-1937, A Complete Untold History" into a publication soon. The original plan for completion in year 2007 was delayed as a result of broadening of the timeline to be inclusive of 1911-1955. For up-to-date updates, check the RepublicanChina-pdf.htm page.
The objectives of my writings would be i) to re-ignite the patriotic passion of ethnic Chinese overseas; ii) to rectify the modern Chinese history to its original truth; and iii) to expound the Chinese traditions, humanity, culture and legacy to the world community.
Significance of the historical work on this website could probably be made into a parallel to the cognizance of Chinese revolutionary forerunners of the 1890s: After 250 years of Manchu forgeries and repression, revolutionaries in the late 19th century re-discovered the Manchu slaughters and literary inquisitions against the Chinese via books like "Three Rounds Of Slaughter At Jiading In 1645", "Ten Day Massacre At Yangzhou" and Jiang Lianqi's "Dong Hua Lu" [i.e., "Lineage Extermination Against Luu Liuliang Family"]. It is this Webmaster's hope that some future generations of the Chinese patriots, including to-be-awoken sons and grandsons of arch-thieve Chinese Communist rulers [who had sought material pursuits in the West], would return to China to do something for the goodness of the country.
***
US Interest Rate Down = 
China Exchange Rate Up !
![At the time [when China fell under the alien rule],](http://imperialchina.org/0442201b51e71777df540167-resized.jpg)
![Though, Anna Wang [Anneliese Martens], in her memoirs, expressed jealousy over Gong Peng by stating that the Anglo-American reporters had flattered the Chinese communists and the communist movement as a result of being entranced with the goldfish-eye'ed personal assistant of Zhou Enlai](GongPeng.jpg)
