From The Silk Road To The Railroad Iran & China

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Iranian Studies
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From the Silk Road to the Railroad (and Back): The Means and Meanings of the Iranian Encounter with China
Nile Green Published online: 19 Nov 2013.
To cite this article: Nile Green , Iranian Studies (2013): From the Silk Road to the Railroad (and Back): The Means and Meanings of the Iranian Encounter with China, Iranian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2013.855047 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2013.855047
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Iranian Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2013.855047
Nile Green From the Silk Road to the Railroad (and Back): The Means and Meanings of the Iranian Encounter with China
Downloaded by [SOAS, University of London] at 03:18 20 November 2013
In view of the recent expansion of Indo-Persian studies, the neglect of the Sino-Persian nexus is a missed opportunity to place Iranian history on a larger Asian stage. While Iranian contact with China has continued episodically from antiquity to modernity, scholars have so far focused almost exclusively on the pre-modern phases of exchange. As a contribution to developing the eld of Sino-Persian studies, this article situates two twentieth century Iranian travelers to China against the changing background of ChineseIranian exchange from the medieval to modern period. In so doing, it demonstrates the infrastructural and conceptual apparatus that enabled the modern Iranian encounter with China while asking how, if at all, twentieth century intellectuals were able to draw on a longer history of interaction to nd meanings for Sino-Persian exchange. The friendship of Iran and China is rooted in a thousand years And today an Iranian friend has come to our village The road of friendship is glittering with the splendor of the sun. The Silk Road ( jadeh-ye abrisham) is glittering.1 Introduction From pre-Islamic antiquity through the Mongol period, Iran maintained irregular but sustained contacts with China. One set of outcomes was the introduction of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and, eventually, Islam into the territories of Chinese empires, along with their accompanying literatures. Another set of outcomes saw a counter-ow of religious and cultural imports into Iran, whether in terms of Buddhism, ceramics, silk or a variety of technologies. Filtered through the cultural matrices of Central Asia and the so-called Silk Road, the forms of Islam that developed in China absorbed many Persian elements, particularly through the impact of Persian Su writings on the Chinese Islamic syllabus.2 Repeatedly interrupted and recommenced, Iranian contact with China has been sequenced
Nile Green is Professor of History at UCLA. I am most grateful to Jonathan Lipman, Masumi Matsumoto, Alexandre Papas and Rahim Shayegan for comments and suggestions. I am also thankful to the various Hui and Uighur Muslims who guided me through their mosques and other historical buildings in different parts of China.
2013 The International Society for Iranian Studies
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through distinct periods of interaction, each with their own motivations and mechanisms of exchange. Yet despite this long history of episodic contact, the balance of scholarship weighs far more heavily in favor of antiquity, with a diminishing proportion of attention given to the medieval, early modern and, least of all, the modern periods. As a contribution to promoting interest in Irans modern connections with China, this article uses two twentieth century Persian travel accounts as examples of two distinct phases of modern exchange. In order to highlight what was both recurrent and distinctive in this modern period of contact, the article rst presents a survey of Sino-Iranian interactions from the medieval to modern periods, allowing us to pinpoint convergences as well as divergences in the twentieth century. It then turns to the travelogues of Mehdi Qoli Hedayat (1863 1955), who visited China in 1904, and Mohammed Ali Eslami Nodoushan (1925), who visited China in 1975, as examples of two phases of modern Iranian engagement with China. By placing these travelers against the background of prior Sino-Iranian exchange, the aim is to show how, if at all, modern Irans intellectuals were able to draw on a premodern connected history. In this way, the article compares two periods of globalization to ask whether an earlier phase left any meaningful legacy (where practical or conceptual) for a later phase. By comparing the infrastructures of how premodern and modern Iranian contacts with China were undertaken, and assessing whether twentieth century Iranian travelers were inuenced or even aware of earlier contacts, we are also able to explore the nature of Eurasias globalization as either an incremental and continuous process or a sequence of episodic and discontinuous periods of connectivity. Finally, a critical understanding of how this relationship evolved is all the more important in view of Chinas recent emergence as Irans largest trading partner, itself part of Chinas broader outreach to the Middle East.3 Yet the concern here is less with international politics than with intellectual history through tracing the ways in which new forms of transnational mobility allowed the Iranian intelligentsia to conceptualize China, both in itself and in relation to their own country. Geopolitical considerations have certainly generated an Iranian diplomatic and business discourse about China since the modern thaw in relations created by the high level ofcial visits to China of Farah Pahlavi and Amir-Abbas Hoveyda in the 1970s and Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenai in the 1980s.4 However, even prior to these diplomatic contacts, cultural connections were being made between China and Iran. As they also did for Chinese intellectuals, the archeological discoveries of Albert von le Coq, Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin in Chinese Central Asia during the early twentieth century led a small number of Iranian scholars to realize that unknown dimensions of Iranian history were also to be found in Chinese Central Asia and beyond into China proper, even though Chinese and Japanese scholars were much quicker to take up (or at least translate) the works of Hedin et al.5 By the 1950s, such distinguished scholars as Mojtaba Minovi (1903 76) were already working on Irans medieval links with China and by the mid1970s the Pahlavi promotion of Irans pre-Islamic history saw the publication of signicant scholarly works on Sino-Persian interactions in antiquity.6 Yet, in conceptual
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terms, a simple and evocative phrase was a vital asset for both Europeans and Middle Easterners seeking to tell such a story of Eurasian exchange. This was the concept of the Silk Road. Having rst been coined in 1877 by the Silesian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (18331905), the German term Seidenstrasse gradually wound its way through other languages into English, most prominently through the 1938 English edition of Sven Hedins Swedish work, Sidenvgen (Silk Road).7 In turn, the concept of the Silk Road wound its way into Persian as variously rah-e abrisham or jadeh-ye abrisham, though the term was apparently not translated into Persian until the late 1950s or early 1960s, possibly being rst used in the inuential Iranological journal, Sokhan.8 As a Wanderwort in its own right, by the end of the twentieth century the borrowed concept of the Silk Road proved to be a productive tool for carving out the historical geography of a Greater Iran whose cultural impact was felt as far away as China. Since the 1980s in particular, Iranian interest in historical connections with China has seen the publication of numerous Persian works on the Silk Road, whether by such distinguished gures as the Franco-Iranian scholar Aly Mazahri (191491) or such local antiquarians as Homayun Amir Yaganah.9 Pointing back to the imported trajectory of the concept, in other cases writings of European and American scholars have been translated into Persian.10 Through such historiographical re-conceptualizing of the Iranian past, the Silk Road has afforded a venerable etiology for the Islamic Republics peculiar reliance on a communist and atheist nation. In view of the rapid recent rise in the usage of rah-e abrisham and jadeh-ye abrisham in Persian historical writings, by examining the writings of two twentieth century Iranian travelers to China this article aims to chart something of the history of both the term and the contacts to which it refers. Since the Persian concept of the Silk Road has become a central part of both diplomatic and cultural visions of Irans international reach, the following pages serve as an exercise in conceptual archeology by exploring whether the concept was already being used in earlier twentieth century Persian accounts of China. By comparing a late Qajar travel account of China with a late Pahlavi account, we are therefore able not only to compare the infrastructural means of their journeys across Asia, but also to begin excavating the meanings of China for modern Iran. By looking rst at the history of Sino-Persian contact up to the 1900s, we will also be able to judge whether these later contacts represented a continuously connected history or an episodic globalization that eventually if inventively reclaimed that prior era of exchange. A Brief History of Sino-Persian Exchange Without grasping something of the longer history of Iranian interaction with China, it is impossible to assess whether in its practical or conceptual apparatus, in its means or meanings, the twentieth century Iranian engagement with China represented a new phase of connection. What we will see, then, in the following pages is a three phase history of Sino-Persian. In the rst (largely medieval) phase, Persian spread widely
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in China as a result of the old overland connections through Central Asia. In the second (largely early modern) phase, Persian in China acquired a relatively autonomous existence through the breakdown in direct overland connections across Central Asia, while also losing inuence through the rise of a Muslim syllabus in Chinese. In the third (largely modern) phase, Persian was substantially replaced by Arabic through a combination of Chinese interest in Sunni reformism and more effective channels of steam and print communications with the Arab Middle East. In fact, for most of Iranian history, China was more a focus of imagination than an object of knowledge, its magnicence magnied by its inaccessibility.11 In medieval Persian literature, the mysteriousness of China afforded fantasies based on longstanding stereotypes. Above all, Chin represented beauty and idol-worship: the phrases botkhaneh-ye Chin (idol-house of China) and negarestan-e Chin (picture-gallery of China) were metaphors for exotic places and their captivating but mysterious inhabitants.12 Following the brief unication of Eurasia after the Mongol conquests, the Il-Khanid period (12561335) saw the earlier vagueness of both Persian and Arabic geographical works give way to more reliable historical writings on China, such as the sections included in the Jame al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din (1247 1318).13 In the following centuries, the most reliable Persian account of China was the Khitai-nameh composed in 1516 by the Central Asian Sayyed Ali Akbar Khitai, though the text was more widely read in its Ottoman Turkish translation than in its Persian original.14 Apart from this textually brokered contact, for the most part, the Safavid period saw a reduction in the direct communications forged under the Il-Khans. In the century after the Safavid revolution, Irans gradual Shiization meant that neither Turkic nor Hui Sunni Muslims from Central Asia or China had any great incentive to study in Iranian madrasas.15 Meanwhile the rise of the Uzbeks in Central Asia created a barrier for Iranian merchants or scholars seeking to travel into Ming or Qing domains and Shiis were still being enslaved by Central Asias tribal groups as late as the mid-nineteenth century. While the occasional Persian (and certainly Afghan) dervish and merchant may occasionally have reached Kashgar or Yarkand after their fall to the Qing after 1755, the Silk Road had long fallen into abeyance as a genuine means of exchange between Iran and China.16 However, knowledge about China in Iran formed only one dimension of SinoPersian exchange, for knowledge of Persian (if not necessarily knowledge about Iran) in China had a more robust and continuous history. Through the continuation of the cultural and mercantile connections that had rst developed in antiquity, the Tang-Song period (6181279) in China saw the development of the earliest Muslim communities in China.17 While port cities such as Canton (Guangzhou) saw early Arab Muslim settlement via what has recently been conceived as a Maritime Silk Road, the overland trade routes across Central Asia saw the arrival of Muslim merchants from Persian-speaking regions.18 Even as these culturally Persianate merchants and, occasionally, scholars intermarried with Chinese women, Persian survived to become the lingua franca of the Chinese Muslims and their interlocutors.19 But while the Persian language would survive in China through future centuries, its
fortunes had already reached their peak under the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty between 1271 and 1368, when, along with Chinese and Mongolian, Persian served as an ofcial language of administration and education.20 The second phase of Sino-Persian relations was characterized more by disconnection than exchange. While the state importance of Persian rapidly declined in the Ming period (13681644), Persian (together with Arabic) works remained an important part of the jingtang jiaoyu (scripture hall education) used to educate Chinese Muslim ulema.21 However, in the later Ming period, Persian usage began to diminish through a new movement towards creating an Islamic syllabus in Chinese, known as the Han Kitab (literally, Chinese books).22 In some cases, as with the translation of the Mersad al-Ibad of Najm al-Din Razi (d. 654/1256) and the Ashaat al-Lamaat of Jami (d.898/1492), this saw Persian works pass into Chinese, enabling them to maintain their place on the syllabus as part of the fourteen classics.23 While increasingly absorbed into the Chinese cultural arena, Chinese (or Hui) Muslims still absorbed many words from Persian into their distinguishing patois, known as Huihuihua.24 Examples of such vocabulary include ahong (from akhond, mullah), da-shi-man (from daneshmand, scholar), die-li-wei-shi (from darvesh, mendicant) and nama-si (from namaz, prayer).25 At madrasas where the Han Kitab were not taught (particularly in Chinese Central Asia), Persian works remained part of the syllabus through the Qing period (16441911), even into the twentieth century in some cases, albeit only at an advanced level which few candidates reached. Writing in 1918, the American missionary Reverend Mark Botham was able to report that the revival in learning promoted by Chinas Muslim reformists saw one Beijing bookseller keep a stock of Persian and Arabic works, numbering one hundred and twentyeight.26 Even so, the eclipse of Persian was already well underway by the seventeenth century. For the high status that the language had enjoyed in Yuan and early Ming China was not only dislodged by the rise of the Han Kitab Islamic syllabus in Chinese, but also by the revival of Arabic studies in China from the late eighteenth and, more sustainably, from the late nineteenth century, which further accelerated the diminishing of Persian in China. One impetus behind this Arabic revival came from the Muslim renewal movements founded by Ma Mingxin (1719?81), whose return to China in 1761 after years of study in Mecca and Yemen saw him introduce a new Naqshbandi school of scripturalist renewal, and Ma Wanfu (18531934), whose own sojourn in Mecca between 1888 and 1892 saw him adopt ideas from the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and found a parallel Ahl alSunna (Chinese: Aihailisunnai) movement on his return to China.27 The followers of Ma Wanfu later changed their name to al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Chinese: Yiheiwani) and through their slogan venerate the scriptures, reform the customs (Chinese: Zunjing gaisu) directed an inuential campaign against the Su texts and customs that had for centuries been so central a part of scholarly and popular Islam among the Hui. Since many of the most important Su works on the traditional syllabusby Razi, Sadi and Jamiwere Persian works, these reforms had an inevitable negative effect on Persian studies. The increasing prominence of the Yiheiwani
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enabled their anti-Persian reforms to be widely institutionalized in Chinese Muslim schools. By effectively aligning themselves to the Chinese nationalist movement after the 1911 revolution, for example, in Republican China (191249) the Yiheiwani were instrumental in directing the syllabus of many madrasas away from the Persian texts they denigrated as conduits of Su innovation (bida).28 Here was a process that Zvi Ben-Dor Benite has referred to as the Arabization of Chinese Islam.29 In view of this articles partial focus on means of exchange, it is important to recognize how the revival of Arabic in China was enabled by the new communication technologies of steam and print.30 As a result of the open-door policy of the late Qing period, the textual output of the expanding Muslim print sphere of the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia begin to enter China through the treaty ports. The effects of this print-mediated contact were tremendous for Chinese Muslims who, in developing their own Chinese language Islam during their long centuries of isolation in the Ming and Qing periods, had largely forgotten even the Arabic terms for Islam and Muslim.31 While magazines and books entered China from the productive print marketplaces of Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, India and the Dutch East Indies, such that Arabic, Turkish, Urdu and even Malay journals were translated, read and responded to by Chinese readers, researchers have so far located no Iranian magazines or books reaching China in the decades either side of 1900.32 One survey of hundreds of Muslim books published in China during the 1920s reveals a corpus of entirely Arabic texts with no Persian books printed at all.33 Thus, while an earlier period of overland Eurasian exchange in the Mongol era had seen Persian spread east into China, the later period of industrial globalization left Iranand Persianas bystanders. Industrial communications technologies did not only allow Arabic printed books to reach China. They also allowed Chinese students to travel to study in Arab lands as the impact of such Arabic journals as Rashid Ridas famous al-Manar and al-Azhars bulletin Nur al-Islam attracted Chinese Muslims to the journals home institutions. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Hui students thus went to study in Egypt, Turkey, Arabia and India, but not, as far as we know, in Iran.34 This was perhaps no surprise: Qajar Iranian institutions appear to have pursued no projects of outreach to Chinese Muslims. Other states and their institutions did. In 1904, for example, the Ottoman government dispatched books to ll a Muslim school library in Beijing and also made arrangements to send teachers, leading in 1907 to the dispatch from Istanbul of Ali Reza and Hafez Hasan to teach, via Arabic, at the Ottoman-supported Dar al-Ulum-e Hamidiyeh in the Chinese capital.35 Indian Muslims also made contact with China. These included Indian Muslim missionaries from the Ahmadiyya Movement as well as soldiers and merchants.36 As Matsumoto Masumi has noted, Muslims from India and Southeast Asia in charge of international trade often visited and stayed in the coastal cities of China such as Shanghai and Tianjin. They also carried new trends of Islamic Revival to China.37 The relative absence of Iranian merchants from these markets perhaps also contributed to the incrementally marginalized place of Iran in modern Chinese Islam. When
the American missionary Charles Ogilvie described the foreign travels of several Beijing imams in 1913, he thus mentioned their journeys to Mecca, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but not to Iran.38 Through the new connections of steam and print, educated Chinese Muslims read (and sometimes responded in writing to) imported journals, particularly such Egyptian periodicals as al-Manar, al-Majallah al-Azhar, Nur al-Islam, al-Fath and al-Irshad.39 In this way, communications infrastructures amplied the theologically reformist reorientation towards Arabic rather than Persian studies. There were knock-on effects in turn from these new Arabic links. In 1929 reformist Hui scholars at the Chengda Normal School in Beijings Tongsi Mosque founded their own journal, Yuehua (192948).40 Other publications followed and between 1911 and 1937 some thirty new Muslim journals were published in Beijing alone.41 The contents of these journals (particularly Yuehua) often comprised translations of articles from imported periodicals, but, again, Arabic and even Urdu journals seem to have been read in place of Persian ones. The cause appears to have been a combination of Egypt and Indias more effective communications links compared to Iran and of the Sunni prole of their institutions. The reading of Egyptian and Indian journals in turn created interest in the reformed teaching methods of Egyptian and Indian Muslim colleges.42 In 1931, this led to the dispatch of four Chinese students to study at al-Azhar in Cairo, followed by a further sixteen students in 1937.43 With their minds inspired by the import of printed books, the export of these Hui bodies was in turn enabled by steam travel. After sailing from Hong Kong aboard a French steamship, the rst student party stopped at Singapore, Colombo, and Aden before reaching Egypt: Iran offered not even a port-of-call on the Muslim itineraries of the steam age. As one of the students wrote in a letter published in the April 1932 issue of the Yuehua journal, After our arrival at Port Said, a telegram was dispatched to the Azhar. When we alighted from the train at the Cairo station, four men from the school were there to meet us.44 It is notable that this inuential twentieth century intellectual trafc between Egypt and China took place without any medieval antecedents, such that Egyptian Muslims (including even the scholars of al-Azhar) were astonished to learn that Muslims even existed in China. Moreover, Chinas then-uncertain population statistics enabled one of the students to claim in a personal audience with Egypts King Fuad that there were fty million Muslims in China in need of assistance from their Arab co-religionists.45 In response, the trafc in books and bodies accelerated between Egypt and China, connections that were made possible by the revival of Arabic rather than Persian in China. Irans medieval links with China and Persians role among Chinese Muslims had been replaced by the Egyptian and Arabic connections that were enabled by a newer period of globalization. Steam and print, then, were the means of an Arabic revival in China. Whether directly from the treaty ports of the Chinese coast or indirectly via overland connections from Yunnan to Burma, where steamships were accessible from Rangoon, steamship connections were a key factor in enabling Chinese Muslim contact with Egypt, Arabia and India, as well as in enabling increasing numbers of Hui to perform the
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hajj.46 In 1937, over 170 Chinese Muslims boarded a steamer at Shanghai to make the pilgrimage.47 By the same token, the connection of Chinese ports to the steamship itineraries of the Indian Ocean saw the establishment of new Muslim communities in such cities as Shanghai and Hong Kong. Mainly as a result of labor migration by soldiers and merchants, as early as the 1850s Indian Muslims formed a community in Hong Kong that was sufciently large to be recognized by the colonial government.48 This in turn enabled the construction of several mosques (the rst completed in 1890) and community associations that served as channels into mainland China for Indian Muslim ideas, not least through the marriage of many Indian Muslims to local Chinese women.49 As hundreds of Chinese Muslims also went to study in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and began publishing journals from Tokyo for their co-religionists in China, even Japanese came to rival (and probably overtake) Persian as a communicational medium for Chinas Muslims.50 Pitted against these new connections was Chinas older link to an Iran that in the Qajar period was bypassed by most of the infrastructures of industrial globalization. While future research may contradict this impression, it therefore appears that the isolationism created by Irans combination of Shiism with a lack of either railheads or a major steamer port led Iran to be overlooked by Hui modernists who looked instead to the reformist Muslim organizations of Egypt, the late Ottoman Empire, colonial India and even Japan. And so, in spite of the earlier history of the Persian language in China, in the early twentieth century both Persian and Iran were largely left behind by Chinese Muslims as Iranians, for their part, made little attempt to engage them. Railroad links were also important in bringing Muslim travelers into China, albeit more typically from the Russian Empire rather than from Iran, which lacked any rail infrastructure prior to the 1930s. The most important case of Muslim railroad migration into China was the Tatars, who ed Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to found an important community in Harbin. (The same period also saw the creation of Harbins important Jewish community).51 Based in this new port (which until 1918 was ruled by Russia), the Tatars printed numerous books and journals that brought the reformist ideas of Russian Islam to northeast China, though it is unclear to what extent Hui Muslims accessed these works.52 As well as the mass exodus of Tatars, the railroad also brought many individual Muslim travelers into China, some of whom left records of their travels. One such traveler was the Siberian Tatar and pan-Islamist Abd al-Rashid Ibrahim (18571944), whose own vividly described Turkish travelogue recorded many varied encounters along the railroad to China.53 Yet even though by 1915 several railroads connected Beijing to the treaty ports of the East China Sea, aside from the line (opened in 1907) that linked Beijing to the city of Taiyuan in Shanxi province, no railroad went anywhere near Chinas Central Asian provinces, leaving several thousand miles between China and Iran disconnected from the age of steam. The railroad had not so much replaced the Silk Road as circumvented it. Overall, what we have seen is a sequence of communicational changes through which Chinese Muslim contact with Arabic learning and Arab lands led in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century to an increase in Arabic intellectual input into China and a corresponding decrease in Persian input. In part, this was the result of the vigor of reformist Arab institutions and magazines, particularly al-Manar, which was read from the Mediterranean to British India and the Dutch East Indies as well as China.54 Moreover, the internal logic of Islamic reformist thought placed a far greater emphasis on Arabic as the language of scripture, with Persian being associated with the Su texts and rival scholarly authorities which reformists were attempting to replace by their renewed emphasis on Arabic and their new connections with Egypt, al-Azhar and al-Manar. Even before this modern revival of Arabic, Persian had suffered through the rise of the Chinese Islamic syllabus (Han Kitab). But the revival of Arabic learning meant that Hui students would approach Persian as a third literary language to acquire after Chinese and Arabic.55 Though in some non-reformist Chinese madrasas, Persian texts retained a foothold at the highest stages of the syllabus, where advanced ulema would be introduced to teachings of Jami, few made it this far. In late nineteenth and twentieth century China, the increasing (though never total) eclipse of Persian by Arabic had thus come as Hui intellectuals had connected themselves to the Arab Middle East via the port cities of eastern China and not via the old overland Silk Road. Aside from the ease of maritime travel by steamship, from the late nineteenth century the intervening Central Asian territories between China and Iran experienced a sequence of turmoil, from the kidnapping practices of Turkoman nomads and the Czarist conquests to the Muslim rebellions in Xinjiang and the refugee ights from the October Revolution. From around 1900, the only practical overland route between Iran and China was via the Trans-Siberian and Manchurian railroads, which involved incredibly long detours. Nonetheless, it was this circuitous rail route that Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, the rst of our Iranian travelers under scrutiny, chose to make his journey to China. In turning to the records of two journeys to China, in 1904 and 1975, we are now prepared to ask two sets of questions that connect the travelers evidence to what we have seen of the history of prior Sino-Persian contact. First, did the means of these travelers journeys to China and interactions with Chinese people in any way build on surviving mechanisms of pre-modern Sino-Persian exchange? Second, turning from practical means to conceptual meanings, were either of these two modern travelers sufciently aware of this earlier history of Sino-Persian exchange to use it to reect on Irans place in the world? In this way, the two travelogues help us to empirically assess whether an earlier period of connection passed on to the twentieth century any practical or conceptual means of exchange. In this, we can also learn something about the continuous or episodic nature of cultural connections across Eurasia. From Silk Road to Railroad: Mehdi Qoli Hedayat A forty year old civil servant and future statesman, Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, travelled to China in 1904 with a small party of fellow Iranians, including the former prime
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minister Mirza Ali Asghar Khan Atabek. Their visit to China was part of a worldwide steam journey that culminated in the hajj to Mecca.56 Enabled by the Russian railroad system, Hedayats journey from Iran began by sailing on a small boat from Bandar-e Anzali to Baku in the Russian Caucasus, where he boarded a train for Moscow and transferred onto the Trans-Siberian Railway.57 He reached geographical (if in this period not political) China as his train arrived at the port of Port Arthur (Lshun), having crossed the entire length of Siberia.58 What is immediately clear from this itinerary is that it held nothing in common with the former Central Asian routes of connectivity that had linked Iran to China in the medieval period. From camel caravans to railroads, the means of exchange had changed completely; as a consequence, the geography of exchange had changed too, for the Trans-Siberian ran far north of the former Silk Road. Since Hedayats journey to and then around China was enabled by rail, it is worth giving a brief overview of the state of Chinas rail network by the time of his arrival at Lshun in 1904. For this furthers the point about the novelty of the railroads new geography of exchange as it bypassed Central Asia entirely. After the short-lived Woosung Road railroad from Shanghai, which only operated between 1876 and 1877, Chinas rst sustained railroad was the Kaiping Tramway which opened in 1881 to link the coalelds around Tangshan with the town of Xugezhuang (Hsuokochuang).59 However, the real expansion of rail into China began around 1900 when, as the Jingha Railway, the Kaiping line was extended to connect Beijing with the treaty port of Tianjin. In 1904, another line opened to link the Chinese capital with the German-administered port of Qingdao (Tsingtao). Further extensions to these lines were subsequently made as part of the Russian imperial Trans-Siberian Railway project, which led to the China Eastern Railway (which opened in 1901) and the South Manchuria Railway (which opened in 1903). Together, these lines connected Beijing with the ports of Tianjin, Harbin, Shenyang and Lshun, thence to the Trans-Siberian Railway and ultimately Western Europe. Iran (and Europe) were now linked with China through railroads that were in no sense geographical heirs of the Silk Road. If this speaks to the means by which Hedayat was able to reach China after centuries during which Iranian access to the region had been rendered almost impossible, we must now ask what an Iranian of his period might have known about China. Hedayat had earlier studied in Germany and was probably as well-informed as any of his countrymen about world affairs in general, and the impact of European expansion on Chinas maritime frontiers in particular. But setting aside such overseas education, at the beginning of the twentieth century educated Iranians appear to have had few sources of knowledge about China available to them in Persian. Certainly, there was the occasional printed history, such as the Ketab Mirat al-Zaman dar Tarikh-e Chin u Machin u Japan written in Bombay by the well-known Iranian publisher Malek al-Kuttab Shirazi, who in 1896 had also printed the famous missive on the Tobacco Revolt by Abd al-Baha.60 A decade later, a Persian translation of a history of China written by the French orientalist Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier (1801 73) was published in Tehran.61 Presumably, there were also newspaper reports on
China in the Iranian press, though of course the great newspaper expansion during the Constitutional Revolution had not happened by the time Hedayat set off on his journey. Certainly, there were Iranian newspaper reports on Japan (which Hedayat visited directly after China), though Japan was undoubtedly much more prominent than China in Iranian intelligentsia discourse during the early twentieth century and China inspired no comparable work to Hosayn Ali Shirazis Mikado-nameh.62 This was somewhat ironic, given the fact that Chinas situation as a tottering autocratic monarchy impinged on by a range of European powers offered a much closer parallel of the Iranian situation than Japan. For their part, Chinese newspapers had certainly reported on events in Iran as early as 1904, when Hedayat visited China. The context was the build-up to the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, which garnered much attention from such Chinese periodicals as Zhengyi tongbao (Journal of Politics and Arts), Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) and Minbao (Peoples Magazine) between 1904 and the downfall of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911.63 What is certainly clear, then, is that Hedayats own data-gathering visit to China exactly coincided with the beginning of interest in Iran among Chinese proponents of republicanism who were afliated with the new magazines. The very fact that this mutual interest and awareness was possible was the result of the new communications infrastructure of the period, particularly the telegraph, which relayed the news from Tehran that was carried in these papers. Prior to his departure on the world tour that took him to China, Hedayat had studied medicine in Berlin and worked in the Tehran Telegraph Ofce and later the Dar al-Fonun polytechnic. His use of trains, mail and telegraphs were only some of the ways in which his travels were linked to the new infrastructure of globalization that were, however circuitously, now connecting Iran and China. But what is important here is that it was not Chinese Muslim ideologues who were taking an interest in Iran, for their interests had already been captured by the Muslim modernizers of Egypt and India. Turning towards Hedayats actual travels, we can now work thematically through his recorded experiences, addressing who and what he saw and understood in China, and asking to what extent, if any, the Sino-Persian legacy of earlier centuries enabled his interactions with the people he met. To rst lay out his itinerary, after spending several days in Port Arthur, his party next took a boat to Chifu (Yantai); thence another boat to Tientsin (Tianjin), the main port for Beijing; thence a train to the imperial capital itself; thence another train to Tsingtau (Qingdao); thence another steamship to Shanghai, from where he and his companions sailed to Kobe for their tour of Japan.64 The rst characteristic of Hedayats itinerary which becomes immediately clear is the extent to which it was based around the infrastructure of steam travel: his China consisted solely of the treaty ports and Beijing, which by 1904 were connected by steamships and the rst railroads in China. Having formerly worked as the director of the Post, Customs, and Telegraph Ofce in Tabriz, Hedayat was a keen observer of this modern infrastructure. He commented regularly on the conditions of different steamships, comparing those operated by the different European nations with concessions at the treaty ports.65 In several ports he took an interest in customs (gomrok) procedures and emigration (mohajerat), meeting with the post
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master at Chifu (with whom he was able to converse in German) and describing the emigration from Shanghai of large numbers of Chinese workers to new labor markets in Hong Kong, Formosa and the Dutch East Indies.66 His former occupation in the Telegraph Ofce similarly led him to describe telegraphy procedures, not least when he himself received a telegram from Tehran which had been relayed from Iran to Europe, then the United States, and then across the Pacic to reach him in Chifu, travelling a distance of ve thousand farsakhs in only six hours.67 The infrastructure of global communications was now such that it was far quicker to send a message from China the long way around the world westward from Tehran than it was to attempt to send it across the old overland route through Central Asia. Summed up in Hedayats marveling telegraphic anecdote was the fact that the Silk Road was no longer a viable means of connection between Iran and China. On what was intended as a journey to instruct his politician companion Atabek in the benets of reform, other aspects of Chinas developing infrastructure also attracted Hedayats attention. In implicit comparison between the situation in his own pre-constitutional Iran and in pre-revolutionary China, he described the lavish grandeur of the royal Forbidden City (Qasr-e Khaqan), before turning to the evidence of progress by way of the new school opened in 1899 in Beijing.68 As a former teacher at Dar alFonun, Hedayat enthusiastically reinforced the point that, under the oversight of an American principal, the new schools curriculum was taught in English and Japanese (with French, German and Russian also taught), with the primary subjects on offer being math, chemistry, physics and medicine.69 Moving around every ve days, Hedayats attention also naturally turned towards hotels. Here too, he relied on the infrastructure of European-led globalization rather than the old mosafer-khanehs of the Silk Road. In Chifu, which he described as having two good hotels, he stayed at the Pich Hotel, while a few days later in the treaty port of Tientsin he stayed at the Astor House Hotel.70 The latter was a very grand establishment, as evidenced both by the postcard which he included in the printed edition of his diary and by his description of its great hall and gardens.71 After a train journey from Tientsin, in Beijing (very dirty), he stayed in the Europe Hotel (one of the nicest in Pekin).72 Hotels in the narrow streets of Chifus Chinese quarter, by contrast, he described as having very small rooms lled with opium smokers.73 In practical terms, then, Hedayats journey to and around China made no use of the old infrastructure of prior Sino-Persian exchange. For not only had the Silk Road long ceased to exist as a tangible reality, as we shall now see as we turn to Hedayats cultural interactions and conceptions of China, the Silk Road had also yet to be adapted as a concept by Iranians dealing with China. In assessing the extent to which Hedayats travels represented continuity or rupture from the earlier long history of Sino-Persian exchange, we must therefore look beyond the infrastructural dimensions of his journey towards its social prole. In this way, we can assess the extent to which he and his companions associated with Han Chinese, Hui Muslims or even any Central Asian and Indian merchants among whom Persian may have still served as a lingua franca. However, based on the evidence of Hedayats travelogue, the Iranians social encounters largely involved Europeans rather than
Chinese of any kind. Aboard their steamship to Chifu, for example, the Iranian party met an Englishwoman (who spoke French, German and Chinese and whom Hedayat took for a spy) as well as a group of German men and women.74 Having studied in Germany, translated German texts for Naser al-Din Shah and taught German at the Dar al-Fonun, Hedayat mixed more often in China with Germans than with Chinese. With their own concession over Kiautschou Bay (including the port of Tsingtau which Hedayat visited) between 1898 and 1919, Germans were a regular presence in the ports of the East China Sea at the time of the Iranians tour. As a consequence, meetings with Germans crop up regularly in his travelogue. Aboard ship for Tsingtau, for example, he spent a pleasant evening speaking German with three Germans and one American passenger, remembering the Germans name as Herr Schultz.75 In Tiensin, he spent time with the Russian consul, to whom the Iranian party turned for help rather than to any local Chinese or Muslims.76 Hedayat also described the lifestyles of the Russians, Germans and French who lived in Tiensin and who had their own orderly quarter of the city, as well as a racecourse; the Russian consul in particular was fond of horse-racing (asb-davani).77 In social terms, then, the greater proportion of Hedayats interactions were with Europeans, with whom he was able to communicate, primarily in German, but also through his partial knowledge of French and English. His travelogue paints a vivid picture of the multilingual world of the treaty ports, for in addition to the German and British presence he mentioned a Spanish hotel manager and other Spanish workers in Chifu, where he also heard French spoken.78 Moreover, he also provided what may have been the rst Persian account of Pidgin, which he described as a result of mixing Chinese, French and English words, with Dutch and Spanish vocabulary also sometimes thrown in.79 Among so many languages, though, there was no place for Persian as the lingua franca it had once been. Indeed, at one point Hedayat bewailed the fact that Europeans always seemed to have better access to information than Iranians.80 The only time when Persian proved to have a viable social life in China was when Hedayats party met a couple of Iranian traders, who were chiey occupied with tea exports.81 But far from being remnants of the old days of the Silk Road, the two Iranian merchants were based in Shanghai, a city that had scarcely even existed when the overland trade through Central Asia was ourishing. If the meeting with the Iranian merchants in Shanghai appears to have been the only occasion when Hedayat encountered a fellow Persian-speaker in China, then this is not to say that his journey otherwise comprised only meetings with the Europeans of the treaty ports. While his inability to speak Mandarin meant that no Chinese appear as individuals in his travelogue, he did on the whole paint a sympathetic picture of the Chinese people. Although he found the Chinese quarters of the ports a maze of narrow, overcrowded streets lled with donkeys, cows and camels a stark contrast to his account of the electric lighting and orderly streets of the European quartershe was intelligent enough not to draw negative conclusions about the Chinese themselves.82 Even if it was a positive generalization based on a few interactions with shopkeepers, he described the Chinese as a polite and hospitable people.83 Later, in Beijing, he took a genuine interest in touring the Forbidden
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City, a Confucian college and a Buddhist temple, if very much in the manner of a European tourist and in the company of an interpreter tour guide.84 There was, then, much room on such a journey for cosmopolitan discoveries, even if the Persian-mediated cosmopolitanism of old was no longer in evidence. In view of Hedayats itinerary, with its strong emphasis on the rail-and-steamerconnected treaty ports, it is perhaps hardly surprising that his party encountered no traces of the Persian legacy of former exchanges. The one place on their itinerary where they might have encountered such survivals was Beijing. Just two years after they visited the city, it received another Middle Eastern visitor in Sleyman kr (18651922?), who stayed in a lodge belonging to the citys Hui Muslims and also penned an account of the non-Muslim religious groups of the city.85 According to the American missionary Charles Ogilvie, writing just under a decade after Hedayats visit, there were no fewer than thirty-two mosques in Beijing, with the total Muslim population of the city given the impressively exact gure of 5,949 families.86 And as we have already seen, while by the early 1900s the status of Persian had been greatly diminished by the three century rise of the Chinese Han Kitab syllabus and the more recent renaissance in Arabic studies, there nonetheless remained small numbers of Hui as well as Turkic Muslims in Beijing able to read and perhaps even converse in Persian. Written as it was in the midst of the revival of Arabic in China, Hedayats account of Beijing therefore forms something of a test case for the continued viability of Persian as a lingua franca for visitors from Iran. He and his companions did in fact make contact with Beijings Muslims, visiting what Hedayat described as a mosque in the Tatar city (that is, within the walled Manchu inner city of Beijing) and another (unnamed) mosque.87 Hedayat described the imam of this mosque as being of Bukharan descent and being named Nur al-Din. It is possible that the mosque was an outpost of the Bukhariot Tatars rather than of the Hui or other Chinese Muslim groups. Bukhariot Tatars were highly mobile and, from their main population centers around the Volga, Siberia and Xinjiang, were establishing mosques in such cities as Urumqi and Harbin as well as Beijing in this period.88 In recounting his meeting with Nur al-Din, Hedayat noted that the imam knew a few words of Arabic, but he made no mention of any exchanges in Persian.89 Turning from the spoken to the written word, Hedayat described the imam showing him a Quran, several books on qh and a single Hanbali law book in Persian. Clearly, Nur al-Din was eager to nd common ground with this Persian-speaking fellow Muslim from far away. But insofar as we can judge on the evidence of Hedayats travelogue, this single surviving legal text was all that the Iranians encountered of the once vital presence of Persian in China. Indeed, aside from a brief overview of the history of Islam in China, which like other potted history sections in the travelogue appears to have been a later interpolation, there is no evidence that in 1904 Hedayat was at all aware that Persian had played such an important role in Chinas past. After all, as late as the 1930s, even the learned shaykhs of al-Azhar were astonished to discover that there were Muslims in China. Writing before the archeological rediscovery of the ancient Iranian past in Chinese Central Asia and before the incorporation of the Silk Road concept into Persian discourse as Jadeh-ye abrisham, it is hardly
surprising that Hedayat was unable to grasp the clue to a forgotten history in that stray Persian manuscript in a Beijing mosque. Overall, Hedayats travel account clearly reveals that his journey to China was not enabled by any remnants of a pre-modern Persian-based system of Eurasian exchange, but was based instead on the industrial infrastructure of European-dominated globalization. His was a journey of Russian-operated trains, British-operated boats, American-relayed telegraphs, Spanish-staffed hotels and Russian-dominated diplomacy. From the treaty ports to his touristic excursion to Beijing (itself enabled by the Kaiping railway), even the geography of his itinerary was entirely enabled by steam and he trod not even the smallest section of the Silk Road of old. And in linguistic terms it was no longer Persian that served as an inter-Asian lingua franca; rather, it was German that was the language he most used in China. This reected the experience at the same time of the Siberian Tatar traveler Abd al-Rashid Ibrahim, for whom Russian served as his main lingua franca on his own travels round the region.90 Moving nally from the practical to the conceptual realm, Hedayat did not even make use of the idea of the Silk Road (rah-e abrisham) when he devoted several pages of his book to the cultivation and trade of silk in China.91 He did, however, make use of another borrowed and inuential concept of the period, that of the Yellow Peril (khatar-e zard).92 While it is true that in this context he wrote sympathetically of Chinese labor migrants, the fact remains that his conceptual approach to China was not directed by the reassuring humanist language of the Silk Road but through the alarmist political discourse of the Yellow Peril. By the early 1900s, not only had the legacy of Sino-Persian connections all but disappeared as a practical means of exchange, but the concept of the Silk Road had not spread far enough to lend Iranians meaning in the memory of those former connections. From Railroad to Silk Road: Mohammed Ali Eslami Nodoushan Having traced both the practical and conceptual apparatus by which a late Qajar intellectual engaged with China, we now turn to a traveler from seventy years later to examine the Iranian approach to China of the late Pahlavi period. During the decades of Pahlavi rule, the nationalist veneration of Irans pre-Islamic and nonIslamic history gradually rendered China a place both for appreciating Irans own historical past and for demonstrating its impact on the wider world. The Pahlaviera traveler under scrutiny here, Mohammed Ali Eslami Nodoushan, was born in 1925 in his eponymous village of Nodoushan, around fty miles from Yazd. Like Hedayat in the late nineteenth century, in the 1960s Nodoushan studied in Europe and went on to complete a French law doctorate.93 On his return to Iran, he took up a teaching position in literature and law at Tehran University and began publishing a long sequence of books. By 1975, when he travelled to China as a man of forty (the same age as Hedayat at the time of his journey), Nodoushan had already published around a dozen books, beginning with poetry and moving on to essay collections and studies of Iranian history and literature. In the years directly preceding his
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travels in China, he wrote several works on the Shahnameh, including his Zendegi va Marg-e Pahlavan dar Shahnameh (The Life and Death of Heroes in the Shahnameh).94 As we shall see below, this interest in pre-Islamic Iranian history, so common among the intellectuals of the Pahlavi period, would in turn frame his understanding of China, an understanding that differed considerably from that of Hedayat seventy years earlier. In the background to Nodoushans visit lay the re-opening of ChineseIranian diplomatic relations in the early 1970s after Iran nally recognized the Peoples Republic in August 1971. In the following years, a series of high prole ofcial visits to China was made by the empress Farah and prime minister Hoveyda. Nor was Nodoushan the only Iranian to write a travelogue of China in this period, since the aristocrat and pioneer social worker, Sattareh Farman-Farmaian (19212012), also wrote a Persian account of a ve week tour of China in the mid-1970s.95 Nor was China the only foreign country which Nodoushan himself visited and wrote about, for shortly before his trip to China he also toured and published an account of the Soviet Union.96 Aside from Moscow and Leningrad (as it was then), his monthlong itinerary there consisted mainly of the Central Asian regions of the Soviet Union, particularly the cities of Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarqand.97 Flying into Bukhara, he sat next to a teacher from that city who taught new Soviet history and tried to converse with him in their apparently shared language of Persian. Though Nodoushan was unable to understand much of this Central Asian Farsi (and nothing of what the teachers wife said), he was able to ask whether Persian poets were still read in Bukhara and receive the pleasing answer that Ferdousi, Hafez, Sadi, Khayyam and Bidel were all still read there.98 Even before his visit to China, then, Nodoushan was traveling in search of the legacy of a Greater Iran. If China was slowly re-opening in the 1970s, Nodoushan nonetheless arrived before the onset of the Open and Reform Policy in 1978, which allowed Chinese Muslims more open religious activity, including the possibility of study in foreign Muslim nations and association with foreign Muslims, which had been curtailed since 1949. While Nodoushan was keen to locate traces of Iranian cultural impact on China, linked as it was to traditional religious schooling the Persian language was in a much weaker state than it had been at the time of Hedayats visit. As we have seen, even before the communist revolution of 1949, Chinese Muslim reformists had created new syllabi that sidelined Persian texts entirely.99 In the following decades, the closure of religious schools during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, along with the wider attacks on religious tradition, meant that by the time Nodoushan arrived in China, Persian was arguably in its weakest position there for a thousand years. Yet if as a sociolinguistic reality Persian had almost disappeared since Hedayats visit, in the intervening decades a powerful new concept had spread through Iran which, along with its attendant historiography, lent a vivid afterlife to Iranian contact with China. This was of course the borrowed Persian concept of the Silk Road or rah-e abrisham. By turning now to the details of Nodoushans travel account, we shall see how he made use of this concept to make meaning of a China in which the place of Persian had almost disappeared.
Nodoushans journey to China began in spring 1975, when he arrived in Beijing.100 Unlike Hedayat, who had arrived via the imperial Russian railroad network, Nodoushan ew to the Chinese capital, though from there his itinerary relied entirely on what was by the 1970s a rather more extensive domestic rail network than had been available to his predecessor. Even so, it is important to note that at this time Chinas railroads still only lent access to eastern and central China, leaving the former heartlands of the Silk Road over a thousand miles from the nearest Chinese railhead. If Nodoushan was therefore able to penetrate deeper into China than Hedayat, who had made nothing more than an excursion into Beijing from the treaty ports, his geography of interaction was still that delimited by Chinas rail network. After spending several days in Beijing, where he visited the Forbidden City (like Hedayat) and the Great Wall (like Farman-Farmaian but unlike Hedayat), he took the train south to Nanjing, from where he made a short excursion to the garden city (shahr-e baghha) of Suzhou before returning by train to the capital.101 From there, he made another train journey, this time inland to the southwest of Beijing, to visit the cities of Anyang in Henan province and Xian in Shaanxi province. It was here that Nodoushan would convince himself that he had resurrected the medieval Iranian past; that he was walking the Silk Road. Yet even as Nodoushan sought out the archeological legacy of Sino-Persian exchange, in social terms his travels were even more removed from that legacys living remnants than Hedayats had been. For while Hedayats party had at least visited a few mosques in Beijing, made friends with a Bukhara-descended imam and been shown a Quran and a Persian manuscript, Nodoushans China was one which was overwhelmingly Han and communist. Throughout his travels Nodoushan was escorted by Chinese minders and on his arrival at each new town he was met by the head of the local Revolutionary Committee.102 Far from touring mosques where the last living remnants of Sino-Persian had until recently survived, with the Cultural Revolution still ofcially continuing in 1975, Nodoushan was instead treated to a series of visits to model factories and communes.103 After one particularly nostalgic visit to a Buddhist archeological site, his Silk Road reveries were interrupted by a compulsory inspection tour of a ball bearing factory.104 Much of the China he was shown, then, consisted of model sites of modernity by way of state-operated carpet manufactories, orderly public parks and workers apartment buildings.105 Even his trip to Xianto which he excitedly referred as the eastern terminus of the Silk Roadwas preceded by a long train journey in which his ofcial companions, Mr Ye and Mr Chu, regaled him with stories of the previous decades tunnel-building triumphs.106 This in turn was merely a prelude to an overnight excursion to see the Red Flag Canal, completed in 1965 as one of the most visible successes of the Great Leap Forward, along with two compulsory lm-viewings and a museum visit.107 In spite of his hosts determination to demonstrate the modernity of the Peoples Republic, Nodoushans own imagination was captured by the historical sites which he was allowed to inspect. This was all the more true of those sites he was able to conceptually associate with the Silk Road (rah-e abrisham), a term which he used
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repeatedly when describing them. If this was the main historical concept he used to connect what he saw in China with the history of Iran, alongside it Nodoushan deployed a series of antique labels to evoke, for himself and his readers, a further sense of shared history. For example, he referred to Beijing as Khanbaligh, the Turkic and Persian name for its Yuan era predecessor from the time when both China and Iran were ruled by the Mongols.108 Similarly, for the inland provinces he used the pre-modern Persian name of Machin.109 However, it was on visiting the famous Longmen Grottoes in Henan province and the city of Xian, along with their associated museums, that Nodoushan made fullest use of the Silk Road concept to connect what he saw in China to the ancient Iranian history that was so central a concern of his other books. Turning rst to the Longmen Grottoes, Nodoushan initially explained the meaning of their name as the Dragons Gateway, before giving a brief but largely accurate account of their history. As the best example of Buddhist sculpture in China, he wrote, the caves were carved from the rock after the year 494, when the Wei dynasty moved its capital to Luoyang.110 There were, he wrote with some exaggeration, around 2,100 large and small caves containing sculptures, with the earliest caves built between around 500 and 523 CE, as well as in a second phase under the Tang dynasty after 680 CE.111 In esthetic and historical terms, the sculpture appealed to Nodoushan greatly. In one evocative passage, he wrote that: Everything is carved from the heart of the stone. Buddha and his companions and disciples, with thousands of faces and expressions, which all return to one face and expression: peace in the face of the storm of life (tofan-e zendegi). The disciples are walking the path and the Buddha is himself the means of reaching their destination: to cast aside all desires so as to enjoin one desire, which is to be free of all desires. And that is perfection.112 In itself, such a cosmopolitan afnity for Buddhism represented a continuation and development from the sympathetic descriptions of both Chinese and Japanese Buddhist temples that Hedayat wrote seventy years earlier. In the intervening decades, the travel experiences and European educations of two generations of Iranian intellectuals had combined with the Pahlavi promotion of Irans preIslamic history to decisively break with previous Iranian prejudices towards the Buddhist religion of bot-parasti (idol-worship). Yet if Nodoushans account contained no traces of Islamocentrism, it was far from free of the Iranocentrism that had for so many nationalist intellectuals served to replace it. Looking at the sculptures of Buddha and his disciples, Nodoushan could not but see signs of Sassanid inuence on their artistic style, normalizing the claim by stating that this was far from surprising in view of the regular to-and-fro between the two countries at that time.113 For before Xian had become the capital of China, he explained, it was the grottoes neighboring city of Luoyang that had stood at the eastern end of the Silk Road, receiving walnuts and grapes from Iran in return for the porcelains and silks it exported.114
Turning to the city of Xian, Nodoushan made even more use of the Silk Road concept to tie its grand imperial history to that of Iran. This great international city (shahr-e azim-e bayn al-melli), which at its eighth century height had been home to a million people, he wrote, had also been the home to several thousand Iranians.115 There they had lived in religious freedom, with a Zoroastrian temple, a Manichaean sanctuary, a Nestorian church and a mosque. It was a vivid vision of a happy Iranian past, now recovered in the depths of China, that seventy years earlier Hedayat could hardly have imagined. Yet once again, Nodoushan wished to make the point that China had not so much helped Iranians as learned from them. Drawing on the authority of the Japanese scholar Ryoichi Hayashi, he quoted the learned professors recent book on the Silk Road to emphasize the impact of Iranian customs (rosom-e irani) on China itself during this period.116 On visiting the Xian museum a few days later, he declared it to prove more than any other museum the story of Iran and Chinas connections.117 He detected what he was sure was the Sassanid style in the ceramics on display there and a Chinese statue with a face that looked surely Iranian. Through reading Nodoushans travelogue, we have seen how a Pahlavi-era intellectual made use of Iranian gains in historical knowledgeacquired partly from European and Japanese scholarshipin the decades since Hedayats travels to reconceive China as part of Irans own history in ways that were unavailable to Iranians at the beginning of the twentieth century. After all, in conceptual, historiographical and archeological terms, the Silk Road largely emerged from the European scholarship of the early decades of the twentieth century and only spread further from around 1930, apparently not reaching Iran until the late 1950s or early 1960s. But in drawing on this concept of Sino-Persian relations, Nodoushan was able to imagine a shared history even as, unbeknownst to him, the last living vestiges of Persian in China were disappearing under the impact of the Cultural Revolution. Yet partly through his Pahlavi-era predilection for Irans pre-Islamic past, in the absence of a living encounter with Chinas Persian heritage Nodoushan was able to turn to the archeological and artistic relics that he took as evidence for connections in the deep past. And the conceptual glue that held together this evidentiary bricolage was the notion of the rah-e abrisham, the Silk Road. In Pahlavi Iran, von Richthofens German Seidenstrasse had found a long and unexpected afterlife. Conclusions While the previous pages have shown how a few Iranians could and did engage with China, on such limited evidence the conclusions here can only be provisional. Many other Persian sources remain to be discovered, particularly in archives and newspapers. More than anything else, this article is intended to encourage further research into Sino-Persian, a eld that has languished in recent years as Indo-Persian studies have ourished. But by setting two accounts of twentieth century Iranian journeys to
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China in their concrete and conceptual contexts, we have seen the limits and possibilities of modern Sino-Persian contact and the ways in which that contact diverged from a longer pre-modern period of exchange. For now at least, the two case studies appear to conrm the ndings of the preceding survey section that an inward-looking Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missed the opportunity to engage with China in the way that the more outward-reaching Egyptian and Indian Islamic movements of the period were able to. The smaller and more censored print sphere of Qajar Iran was unable to compete with its more abundant and productive counterparts in Egypt and India, and Iran had no major journal devoted to a larger cause that could compare with al-Manar. Even Habl al-Matin was printed in Calcutta and devoted mainly to domestic Iranian agendas rather than the internationalist concerns of Islamic revivalists and reformists. Even when Chinese modernizers learned of the constitutionalist struggle in Iran, they did so through news telegraphs from Russia rather than through the writings of Iranians themselves. As a result, by the early twentieth century, the centuries old legacy of Persian in China was depleted as Persian became only one of several languages competing for the attention of Chinese Muslims and, by 1900, the least inuential. In methodological terms, this article has differentiated between the means and meanings, the infrastructure and conceptions, of Iranian interaction with China. By doing so, it has been possible to show how the disappearance of the Silk Road as a tangible reality did not prevent its ascendance as an explanatory and emotive paradigm. In this way, we have seen how from the mid-twentieth century, Iranian intellectuals gradually took a new interest in China through the realization that their own history lay in long forgotten outposts along the Silk Road. The irony was that this period coincided, at the international level, with the complete closure of Sino-Iranian relations between 1949 and the early 1970s and, at the domestic level, with the suppression of Chinese Muslim traditions (including the use of Persian) during the Cultural Revolution. When in the 1970s Nodoushan, along with other Iranian intellectuals and politicians of the period, began to look east to China, too much had been lost to build a new phase of connection on an earlier one. All that remained was the historical memory, articially revived, of an earlier age of exchange. But however articial, the concept of the Silk Road has since then proven an effective way for Iranians to nd meaning in their growing relationship with China. For what is clear is that Iranian ofcial engagement with China is expanding and that new Islamic means and meanings of connection are being deployed by both sides.118 Since the publication of Nodoushans travelogue in 1983, a considerable body of Persian works has been written on Iranian connections with China. Attempting to strengthen claims of both Irans historical ties with China and Irans impact on Chinese culture, scholarship from the Islamic Republic has moved beyond archeological and artistic evidence into linguistic and religious domains. Resurrecting a lost Persian language road that once reached from Nishapur to Xian, several of these works have traced the ow of Persian words into the languages of China, both Uighur and Mandarin.119 Making connections to China through Islam has been an
especially important strategy, both intellectually and diplomatically. Book-length studies of Chinas Muslim minorities have been published in Iran, while on his ofcial visit to China Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani went to the famous Niujie mosque in Beijing.120 From the Chinese side, since the easing of restrictions on religion in China from the 1980s onwards, some Hui Muslims have undertaken studies in Iran, resulting in a very minor revival of Sino-Persian, though once again this has been outweighed by the far larger number of Hui studying in Arabic-speaking countries. If the encounter between Islam and the West has been one of the great public topics of recent years, as China expands its interests into its Central Asian backyard and the oil rich Middle East, then the Iranian encounter with China will be one of the major geopolitical issues of the decades to come. The history of ChineseIranian relations is far from over. Notes
1. Nodoushan, Krnmeh, 277. 2. Here, as throughout this article, Chinese Islamic and Chinese Muslims refer to the culturally and linguistically Sinicized Hui Muslims and not to the Uighur or other Turko-Mongolian Muslim groups at various times under Chinese rule. On the development of Hui Islam, see Lipman, Familiar Strangers. 3. On Chinas outreach to the Arab Middle East, see Gladney, Sino-Middle Eastern Perspectives, and Ho, Mobilizing the Muslim Minority. 4. Mohajer, Chinese-Iranian Relations; Schichor, The Middle East in Chinas Foreign Policy. 5. On the reception of their works among Chinese and Japanese scholars, see Galambos, Buddhist Relics from the Western Regions, and Jacobs, Confronting Indiana Jones. 6. Mnov, Tarjomeh-ye Ulm-e Chn; Tashakkur, rn beh Ravyat-e Chn-e Bstn. 7. Waugh, Richthofens Silk Roads. 8. Thanks to Touraj Daryaee for this information. 9. Mazhir, Jdeh-ye Abrsham; Yagnah, Semnn. 10. Franck and Brownstone, Jdeh-ye Abrsham. 11. It is worth noting here that for medieval Persian writers, China proper was designated as Chn, with Chinese Central Asia or Eastern Turkestan designated as Mchn (or, as a compound, Chn Mchn), likely from the Sanskrit Mahchna (Greater China). 12. Khaleghi-Motlagh, ChineseIranian Relations. 13. Jahn, China in der islamischen Geschichtsschreibung; idem, Die Chinageschichte des Rad ad-Dn. 14. Afshr, Khity-nmeh. For studies, see Hemmat, Children of Cain in the Land of Error, Kahle, Eine islamische Quelle uber China, and Yih-Min, A Comparative and Critical Study. 15. For an unconvincing attempt to demonstrate Shii currents in Chinese Islam, see Israeli, Islam in China, chapter 9: Is There Shia in Chinese Islam? 16. On the changing infrastructure of Central Asian travel, and the different written accounts this produced, see Green, Introduction. 17. In the pre-modern period, China and Iran were evidently not xed cultural, political or geographical entities, particularly with regard to the intermediary Central Asian domains (now constituting the Central Asian republics and the Chinese Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) through which Iranian contact with East Asia was carried between the antique and early modern periods. 18. For an overview up to the Yuan period, see Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds. 19. Yingsheng, A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road. 20. Shi-jian, The Persian Language in China. On Il-Khanid connections with China in this period, see Rossabi, Tabriz and Yuan China.
22 Green
21. Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad, chapter 3, and Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 4851. 22. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 7285. 23. On the eastward migration of the Persian Su classics, see Zarcone, Le Mathnav de Rm au Turkestan. 24. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 21415. The ethnonym Hui is used here to dene the Sino-Muslims proper who, though cherishing traditions of Middle Eastern genealogy, had by the early modern period emerged as culturally Sinicized Muslims who spoke Chinese, developed a Chinese Muslim syllabus (known as the Han Kitab) and in many cases worked closely with the Ming, Qing and Republican states. On Hui understandings of their Middle Eastern genealogy, see BenDor, Even unto China. 25. Shi-Jian and Jin-Yuan, ChineseIranian Relations. 26. Botham, Modern Movements, 296. 27. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 869 and 200211. On Ma Mingxins Arabian connections, see also Fletcher, The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China. 28. Matsumoto, Rationalizing Patriotism among Muslim Chinese. 29. Ben-Dor Benite, Nine Years in Egypt. 30. While Chinese Islamic texts from the Han Kitab syllabus had previously been block printed, Arabicscript printing emerged in the Middle East only after around 1820, gaining momentum only by the mid-nineteenth century. See Green, Journeymen, Middlemen. 31. Matsumoto, Rationalizing Patriotism, 122. 32. On the Arabic, Turkish, Urdu and Malay works read by Chinese in this period, see Matsumoto, Sino-Muslims Identity, 468, idem, Islamic Reform in Muslim Periodicals, 978, and idem, Rationalizing Patriotism, 1278, 1334. 33. Ben-Dor Benite, Nine Years in Egypt, 117. 34. Ibid., 10528; Matsumoto, Islamic Reform, 46; idem, Rationalizing Patriotism, 127, 133. 35. Dndar, An Analysis on the Documents, 332, 343; Papas, Voyageurs ottomans et tatars, 222. 36. An Ahmadiyya missionary in China by the name of Ghulam Mujtaba is mentioned in numerous Ahmadiyya publications from the 1910s and 20s. See for example the list of worldwide missionaries in the unnumbered front matter to The Moslem Sunrise 1, no. 1 (1921). 37. Matsumoto, Islamic Reform, 42. 38. Ogilvie, Present Status of Mohammedanism, 168. Ogilvie also mentioned the presence in Beijing of the two Ottoman teachers, Ali Riza Effendi [and] a new arrival from Constantinople, who taught through Arabic. Their presence was the result of the plans described in the 1904 Ottoman archival documents referenced in the previous footnote. 39. Matsumoto, Rationalizing Patriotism, 128. On the substantial intellectual trafc that emerged between Egypt and China in the 1930s, see Ben-Dor Benite, Taking Abduh to China. 40. Matsumoto, Sino-Muslims Identity, 46. 41. Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 54. 42. Matsumoto, Islamic Reform, 100. 43. Ben-Dor Benite, Nine Years in Egypt, 108, Matsumoto, Rationalizing Patriotism, 133. 44. This and other letters from the students are translated in Harris, Al-Azhar through Chinese Spectacles, 17882; quotation at 178. 45. Cited from a letter to Yueh-hwa from one of the Chinese students in ibid., 181. For more on the confused and exaggerated Muslim population of China in this period (even sometimes estimated as 80 million), see Matsumoto, Islamic Reform, 98, note 21. 46. Dillon, Chinas Muslim Hui Community, 513; Mao, A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation. 47. Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 54. 48. OConnor, Islam in Hong Kong, 2533. 49. Weiss, South Asian Muslims in Hong Kong. The local boys are the descendants of these mixed marriages. 50. Bodde, Japan and the Muslims of China, 31113.

51. Usmanova, The Trk-Tatar Diaspora. On Harbins varied international communities before 1918, see Carter, Creating a Chinese Harbin, chapter 1. 52. Dndar and Misawa, Books in Tatar-Turkish, 68. 53. Ibrahim, Alem-i Islam. On Abd al-Rashids meetings with non-Muslims in China, see Papas, Voyageurs ottomans et tatars. 54. Azra, The Transmission of al-Manrs Reformism, Laffan, Islamic Nationhood, chapters 6-8 and Yasushi, Al-Manr Revisited. 55. Matsumoto, Why Was Persian Learning Excluded? 56. For Hedayats biography, see Bmdd, Sharh-e Hl-e Rejl, vol. 2, 4559; vol. 4, 1847; vol. 6, 196 8. See also Barzegar, Mahdi Qoli Hidayat, and Kasheff, Hedyat. 57. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 68, 12. On Hedayats wider journey, see Green, The Rail Hajjis. 58. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 23. Throughout the following, I have given the period spellings of the cities in the main text and the modern names in parentheses. While establishing where Hedayat went from his diarys phonetic Persian spellings of Chinese place names whose Romanization (let alone Arabization) has changed several times since his journey has been challenging, I am satised that the identications are correct. In identifying his ports of call, I have been helped by Dennys, The Treaty Ports of China. 59. Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse. 60. Shrz, Ketb Mirt al-Zamn. This and Malek al-Kuttabs other books were printed in Bombay for export to Iran. On Bombays Iranian exile publishers, see Green, Bombay Islam, 11826. A few Turkish works on Chinese history and geography were similarly printed in the late Ottoman Empire. See Papas, Voyageurs ottomans et tatars, 222. 61. Nadm al-Soltn, Trkh-e Chn. 62. On Iranian interest in Japan and Hedayats own travels there, see Green, Shared Infrastructures, Informational Asymmetries. For newspaper reports about Japan, see Rajabzadeh, Russo-Japanese War as Told by Iranians. 63. Wang, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution. 64. The Chinese section of the travel diary thus covers Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 2392. 65. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 234, 2930, 6061, 645, 92. 66. Ibid., 23, 26, 7073. 67. Ibid., 28-29. 68. Ibid., 37-40, 54-56 on the Forbidden City; 58-59 on the medresseh. 69. He was of course describing Peking University, which was actually established in 1898 rather than 1899. 70. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 25-26, 30-31. 71. Ibid., 34; postcard at 31. 72. Ibid., 36. 73. Ibid., 27. 74. Ibid., 24. 75. Ibid., 60. 76. Ibid., 26, 30. 77. Ibid., 32, 35. 78. Ibid., 26. 79. Ibid., 26. 80. Ibid., 25. 81. Ibid., 645. The merchants were named as Hajji Mohammed Taqi and Mohammed Hosayn Namazi. 82. Ibid., 323. 83. Ibid., 34. 84. Ibid., 3747. 85. Papas, Voyageurs ottomans et tatars, 2215. To refer to the Hui, kr used the Turkic term Tungan (Dungan).
24 Green
86. Ogilvie, The Present Status of Mohammedanism, 165. 87. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 4751. Hedayat attempted to transcribe the Chinese name of the mosque in the Tatar city as follows: chin men wa yatu layasheh. The rst lexical items (chin men) appear to be a reference to the mosques location as Qianmen or Chien-men, that is, near the outer southern gate of the imperial palace, at the southern end of modern Tiananmen Square. The other lexical items are less immediately clear. Thanks for Jonathan Lipman for advice. 88. Noack, Die sibirischen Bucharioten. 89. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 47. 90. Green, The Rail Hajjis. 91. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 668. 92. Hedyat, Safarnmeh, 7071. On the wider Middle Eastern proliferation of this concept at the time, see Eich, Pan-Islam and Yellow Peril. 93. Further details on his life and writings are available on his website: http://www.eslamiNodoushan. com/ (accessed June 28, 2013). 94. Nodoushan, Zendag va Marg-e Pahlavn. 95. Farmn-Farmin, Dar ns-ye Dvr-e Chn. 96. Nodoushan, Dar Keshvar-e Shaurah. 97. Nodoushan, Dar Keshvar-e Shaurah, 28593 on Tashkent, 294319 on Bukhara and 32146 on Samarqand. 98. Nodoushan, Dar Keshvar-e Shaurah, 279. 99. Even so, in a few regions, Hui conservatives were able to maintain Persian learning, particularly in the city of Tianjin, which in being ruled by the Japanese from 193745 was sheltered from the Arabizing policies of the Hui reformist-nationalists afliated to the Republic of China. See Matumoto, Why Was Persian Learning Excluded? 100. Nodoushan, Krnmeh, 9. 101. Nodoushan, Krnmeh, 3141, 8596, 97102, 12643, 20910. Calling Suzhou a city of gardens was itself something of an Iranian emphasis, since its famous canals more often lend it the clich moniker of the Venice of the East. 102. For example, Nodoushan, Krnmeh, 235, 237, 243, 257, 290. 103. Ibid., 24852, 27077 (communes) and 15670, 26578, 34655 (factories). 104. Ibid., 26578. 105. On the parks and apartment buildings, see ibid., 2623. 106. Ibid., 2356. 107. Ibid., 2428. 108. Ibid., 3141. 109. Ibid., 2267, 279. 110. Ibid., 256. 111. Ibid., 258. 112. Ibid., 257. 113. Ibid., 25960. 114. Ibid., 264. 115. Ibid., 27980. 116. Ibid., 28081. Since there appears to have been no Persian translation made, the edition on which Nodoushan drew was presumably the recently translated Hayashi, The Silk Road. 117. Nodoushan, Krnmeh, 296. 118. On Chinese ofcial deployment of Hui Muslims to diplomatically and commercially engage the Middle East, see Gladney, Sino-Middle Eastern Perspectives, and Ho Mobilizing the Muslim Minority. 119. Ahmad, Zabn-e Frs dar Chn; Bad, Farhang-e Vzheh-h-ye Frs. 120. Somewhat ironically, these Iranian translations include the writings of the Israeli scholar Raphael Israeli, the most conspiratorial and anti-Islamic academic commentator on Chinese Islam. See zrl, Musalmnn-e Chn.
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This article was downloaded by: [SOAS, University of London] On: 20 November 2013, At: 03:18 Publisher: Routledge

Iranian Studies, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2013.855047

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