Talas 751: The Captives Who Carried Paper West

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Two giant empires from opposite ends of the world met face to face only once in history. When that clash, lasting a few days, was over, the losing side left behind not just an army but its own greatest secret. A handful of men walking among the prisoners would change the way humanity stores knowledge forever.

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If you could have looked down on the map of the world in the middle of the eighth century, you would have seen two enormous shadows, born at opposite ends of Asia, growing slowly toward one another. In the east stood the Tang dynasty. Its capital, Chang'an, was the most crowded city on the planet in that age; along its streets a Sogdian merchant, a Turkic soldier, a Japanese student, a Persian musician and an Indian monk walked side by side. The reign of Emperor Xuanzong had passed its fortieth year, and the dynasty had grown used to regarding itself as the center not only of China but of the known world. Tang's western frontier now lay far beyond the Great Wall: the garrisons established across the Tarim Basin — the lines of Kucha, Khotan, Kashgar and Karashahr — had been gathered under the name of the Anxi Protectorate, extending the empire's arm all the way to the foot of the Pamir mountains.

In the west there was an altogether different energy. In the year seven hundred fifty, the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty was brought down by a revolution and the Abbasids took its place. The engine of that revolution had run not in Arabia but precisely in the east, in Khurasan. The man at the head of the movement was an extraordinary organizer whose origins are still debated today: Abu Muslim. When his black banners set out from Merv and overturned the ruling house, the center of gravity of the new caliphate shifted eastward as well. For the Abbasids, Transoxiana — the lands beyond the river Oxus — was no distant march, but the back garden of the house in which the dynasty had been born.

The country caught between these two worlds was the territory shared today by Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In that age this was nobody's provincial backwater. Samarkand, Bukhara, Panjikent, Tashkent and Ferghana were wealthy city-states, ringed by walls, their interiors covered with frescoes, each with its own kings and its own coinage. Most of their people were Sogdians: the undisputed merchant nation of the Silk Road. Sogdian was a language of trade valid from Dunhuang on the Chinese frontier to the northern shores of the Black Sea. These cities carried silk, glass, paper, horses, slaves, musk and silver; but what they really carried was information. Which pass lay under snow, where which khan's army stood, in which city the price of which commodity had risen — they knew all of it.

There was a third power in the region, and it is often forgotten: the Tibetan Empire. In the seventh and eighth centuries Tibet had spilled over to the north of the Himalayas and had repeatedly threatened Tang's western garrisons. The whole of Tang's military calculation in Central Asia was in fact built on encircling Tibet. And the most fearless executor of that calculation was the commander of the Anxi Protectorate, Gao Xianzhi.

Gao Xianzhi was the son of a family that had entered Tang service after the fall of the kingdom of Goguryeo on the Korean peninsula. Like his father he became a soldier, rose quickly, and mastered mountain warfare. He made his name in seven hundred forty-seven. That year he crossed the Pamirs to bring into line the kingdom of Little Balur — the region of Gilgit today — which had come to an understanding with the Tibetans. With thousands of soldiers he marched through passes above four thousand meters, across glacier beds, in a column that advanced as if threaded on a string. The military logic of the campaign may be argued over, but its logistics were astonishing; centuries later, archaeologists who combed the region hand's breadth by hand's breadth would still recall that march with amazement. When Gao returned, his name was circulating at the Tang court as the commander who crossed the mountains.

But that success brought a dangerous habit with it. Gao Xianzhi had begun to build his relations with the small western states no longer through negotiation, but through punishment. The reports that went to Chang'an counted victories, and the caravans that went to the treasury carried plunder. The court's distance was a reward: no one could supervise what was being done four thousand kilometers away. As the distance between a caliphate marching east and a dynasty reaching west closed a little more each year, the cities lying exactly in the middle of that distance were trying to decide which side to lean on. Where the spark would come from was not clear. The only clear thing was that it would come.

The spark came in the year seven hundred fifty, in Tashkent. In that age the city's name appears in Chinese records as Shi, and in the local tongue as Chach; it was a wealthy oasis town on the fertile bank of the Syr Darya, where the caravan roads crossed. It had its own ruler, and it had declared its loyalty to Tang, but that loyalty existed only on paper. According to Gao Xianzhi's reports, the ruler of Tashkent was not fulfilling his obligations as a vassal, and in his dispute with neighboring Ferghana he refused to recognize Tang's arbitration.

Gao came before the city with his army. The siege did not last long, because an agreement was reached before battle was joined. The ruler of Tashkent accepted surrender in exchange for a guarantee of his life and of his city. The gates were opened.

Then the word was broken.

The Chinese sources themselves — even sources not hostile to Gao Xianzhi — write with unmistakable discomfort at this point. The troops that entered the city began to plunder. The treasury was emptied, the arsenals taken, those in no condition to resist were killed. The ruler was put in chains and sent thousands of kilometers east, to Chang'an. And there, as a ruler who had surrendered and been protected by a promise, he was executed by order of the imperial court.

That execution brought no military advantage. Politically it was a catastrophe. For until that day, every minor dynasty of Transoxiana had been debating the same question: can Tang's word be trusted? The promise given at the gate of Tashkent and not kept had answered that question in a way that left nothing further to debate. In the Sogdian cities the news spread at the speed of a caravan — which is to say, at a surprising speed.

The son of the dead ruler managed to escape. And the direction in which he fled determined the whole story. He did not go east and take refuge with Tang; he went west. First he traveled among the neighboring principalities of the region and told them what had happened, then he reached Samarkand. Sitting in Samarkand at that time as governor for the Abbasid caliphate was Ziyad ibn Salih, an experienced commander answerable to Abu Muslim's broad sphere of authority in Khurasan.

For Ziyad ibn Salih this invitation was the opportunity he had been waiting for. The Abbasids had only just come to power and needed to prove their legitimacy on the eastern frontier. And what had arrived was not merely a refugee's complaint; behind it stood the support of a whole series of local dynasties alarmed by Tang's conduct. From Samarkand an army began to be prepared, moving northeast toward the valley of the Talas. The backbone of this army was formed by the Khurasani troops: disciplined soldiers who had won a revolution and knew how to fight. To them were joined local cavalry gathered from the region.

When Gao Xianzhi learned of the movement, he did not wait. That was his character: rather than meeting a threat on his own ground, he preferred to go and march upon it. He set out westward from his base at Kucha. The distance he would cover was more than seven hundred kilometers, and the road ran along the northern skirts of the Tian Shan, in midsummer, across waterless plains.

The composition of his army is critical for understanding what followed. At the core were the professional Tang soldiers of the Anxi garrisons; their number was in all likelihood between ten thousand and twenty thousand. Alongside them marched allied troops from Ferghana. And the most numerous group were the Karluks, one of the Turkic peoples of the region. According to some records the Karluks made up two thirds of the army. In other words, Gao Xianzhi's army bore the name of a Tang army, but the majority of its soldiers were not Tang subjects — they were allies with calculated interests.

The two armies met in the month of July in the year seven hundred fifty-one, on the bank of the Talas river, near a settlement called Atlakh. This is the area around the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, in the vicinity of the city of Taraz; the exact site of the battlefield is still disputed. The figures for the total number of soldiers are complete chaos: Chinese records put the other side at two hundred thousand, Arab records count the Chinese army at one hundred thousand. The estimate modern historians find plausible is far more measured — around thirty thousand on each side. But this much was certain: neither army knew the other, and both were sure of winning.

The plain on the bank of the Talas river was too narrow for a great pitched battle. Perhaps that is why the fighting did not end in a single day.

It lasted five days.

Five days is an unusual span for the battles of that age. It meant two armies probing each other without being able to force a decision. The days probably passed in mutual raids by mounted archers, in lines closing and drawing apart, in inconclusive charges against ranks of infantry holding their positions. Tang's advantage lay in discipline: tight blocks of infantry, long spears, and the most feared weapon of the Chinese army, the crossbow. The Abbasid side's advantage lay in heavy cavalry and in the battle experience of the Khurasani troops. For five days neither could break the other. At night the fires of the two camps burned facing each other on the two sides of the valley.

On the fifth day everything changed.

The Karluks changed sides.

This is one of the most cold-blooded recalculations in history. The Karluk chiefs decided, most likely, on the basis of exactly what they had seen in the first four days of fighting: the Tang army was not winning. And what had happened at Tashkent was still in their memory; even if it did win, how far could Tang's word be trusted? They looked at their own pastures, their own trade routes, their own future, and judged it wiser to stand on the west-facing side of the valley of the Talas.

The Karluk cavalry was inside the Tang lines. They did not need to cross the front or break through enemy formations. They simply turned their horses' heads and attacked the rear of the army they had been marching beside.

At that moment Gao Xianzhi's army was caught between two fires. In front, Ziyad ibn Salih's troops increased the pressure; behind, a downpour of cavalry that had been taken for allies plunged into the supply lines, the horses, the lightly protected auxiliary units. Tight blocks of infantry are strong only so long as they can hold their order. The blow from behind broke the order, and once the order broke, the battle was over. The rest was not fighting but dissolution.

The Chinese sources give the losses as between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, and put the number of Tang soldiers who escaped alive at under two thousand. Arab records write far larger figures: up to forty-five thousand dead, more than twenty thousand taken prisoner. None of these numbers is reliable; as with all medieval armies, the figures swell to match the size of the victory. What is reliable is the outcome: Tang's expeditionary army in the west was scattered in the course of one afternoon.

The flight produced a scene recounted more often than the battle itself. The retreating crowd jammed in a narrow pass. Li Siye, one of Gao Xianzhi's commanders, began beating the fleeing allied Ferghanan soldiers with the staff in his hand, dragging horses and men off the road to clear a way for his commander. According to the records, another commander, Duan Xiushi, turned to him and said, roughly, that trampling over an ally to save your own life is not the work of a brave man. Li Siye stopped, and the two of them together brought the rest through the pass. The number of Tang soldiers who came out of that pass alive was a small fraction of those who had gone into battle that morning.

Gao Xianzhi survived. He returned east, to the lands of Anxi. But he left behind not only an army; he left a policy behind as well. After the summer of seven hundred fifty-one, Tang armies never again crossed to the west of the Pamirs. The face Transoxiana turned toward China closed, and it did not open again.

And on the battlefield, among the dead, a long line of human beings formed, bound in chains. The prisoners were being marched west. Among them were ordinary soldiers; and among the soldiers, as a consequence of the mobilization system of that age, were people who had joined the army with their civilian trades. Weavers. Painters. Goldsmiths. And a clerk who would carry the rest of the story.

One of the prisoners was named Du Huan.

That we know of him today is pure coincidence. After the battle Du Huan was taken to Abbasid territory, and he stayed there a full ten years. What he saw he recounted, after his return, in a book: the Jingxingji, the Record of Travels. The book was lost. But Du Huan's relative, the statesman Du You, took excerpts from that travel account while writing the Tongdian, the Comprehensive Institutions, a vast encyclopedia of government. What remains in our hands today is those excerpts: a residue of roughly fifteen hundred characters. The only surviving direct testimony written by a Chinese prisoner about the Abbasid world before Baghdad was founded.

The city Du Huan describes was Kufa, one of the administrative centers of the caliphate at that time. His account is curious and surprisingly impartial. He notes the local faith, the order of worship, the month of fasting, the dress of women and of men, the wealth of the markets, the arrangement of rice and bread, even the provisions made for the sick and the poor. He does not belittle, he does not mock; he writes like an observer.

But for our story the most valuable lines are the ones in which he counts people. Du Huan writes that in Kufa he met Chinese craftsmen who, like himself, had been brought from the Talas, and he names some of them. Two painters from the capital region, Fan Shu and Liu Ci. Weavers from the Hedong region, among them Lü Li. He also speaks of masters who worked gold and silver. So among the prisoners of the battle of Talas there really were craftsmen, they really were working in Abbasid cities, and some of them had built a new life there.

Now let us come to the most striking aspect of this testimony. Du Huan counted the painters. He counted the weavers. He counted the goldsmiths.

He never mentioned papermakers.

In the text of the only eyewitness who was taken prisoner at the Talas, who lived there for ten years, who wrote down the trades of his countrymen one by one, there is not a single line about the making of paper.

So where does that famous story come from? Its source is known. About three centuries after the battle, in the eleventh century, the man of letters al-Tha'alibi of Nishapur, in his book Lata'if al-Ma'arif — a collection of curious information — adds a note while explaining that the paper of Samarkand was of very high quality: this art was brought to the city by the Chinese prisoners taken by Ziyad ibn Salih. A single sentence. Written three hundred years later — pleasant, memorable, an inquisitive footnote.

That single sentence passed into every history of paper written over the following thousand years.

Modern research approaches this sentence with caution, and there is a solid reason for that. Paper cannot have come to Central Asia in seven hundred fifty-one, because before seven hundred fifty-one it was already there. The clearest proof of this is the archive found in the ruins of the fortress on Mount Mugh, in Tajikistan. The documents that the ruler of Panjikent, Devashtich, carried up the mountain during the Arab conquests were found there, and a portion of those documents was written on paper. Their dates go back roughly thirty years before the battle of Talas. In other words, the Sogdian rulers were using paper in their daily administrative correspondence before the battle ever took place. Other paper finds from this region, consisting of texts in Sogdian, Arabic and Chinese, point in the same direction.

Paper itself is far older. According to the traditional account, its manufacture in China was presented to the emperor in the year one hundred five by the court official Cai Lun, while archaeological evidence has shown that simple kinds of paper were in use even before him. It is illogical in any case that a technology flowing along the Silk Road for six hundred years should have waited for the prisoners of a single battle.

What is more, the technical details also strain the story. Chinese paper was made largely from tree bark fibers. The paper that developed in Transoxiana and in Iran, on the other hand, was produced largely from rags — that is, from worn-out linen and hemp cloth. This is not a copied method but a method rebuilt around local materials. That is what made Samarkand famous: its abundant running water, its water mills, the rags left over from its textile industry, and the skill of its masters in combining those three. For centuries, Samarkand paper was cited as the measure of quality.

So the true story is not a secret stolen overnight. It is a slow transmission spread over decades, carried together by merchants, clerks, prisoners, migrants and craftsmen. The Talas was not the cause of that transmission; at most it was one of its accelerators.

Neither the winner nor the loser of the battle enjoyed victory or defeat for long.

Ziyad ibn Salih rebelled against his own superior, Abu Muslim, in the year after the Talas, in seven hundred fifty-two. His men abandoned him; he fled and was killed. Abu Muslim himself was put to death in seven hundred fifty-five, in the presence of Caliph al-Mansur, by order of the very state he had founded.

In the east the disaster was far greater. In December of seven hundred fifty-five, An Lushan, Tang's most powerful frontier commander in the north, rose in revolt. The rebellion dragged the empire into a civil war lasting nearly ten years; the capital fell, the emperor fled from the capital, and the dynasty never returned to what it had been. The collapse visible in the population registers is so great that historians still argue today over how to read those figures.

Gao Xianzhi was called back into service to put down this rebellion. He went east and, facing a rebel army vastly superior in numbers, chose to withdraw and hold the Tong Pass. Militarily it was the right decision; politically it was fatal. An accusation sent to the court presented the withdrawal as cowardice and the distribution of supplies as corruption. In January of seven hundred fifty-six, by imperial decree, he was executed before the eyes of his own soldiers. The commander who crossed the Pamirs had seen defeat at the Talas, but his own end came not at the hand of an enemy — it came from his own court.

The rebellion emptied the Anxi garrisons as well. The troops in the west were summoned east, the Tang presence in the Tarim Basin first weakened and then passed into the hands of Tibet. China's return to Central Asia would wait a full thousand years, until the eighteenth century.

As for the Talas itself, in the eyes of contemporaries it was not the great event we take it for today. In Arab historical writing the battle is passed over almost cursorily; no epic was written about it, no monument of victory was raised. It was recorded as one among dozens of clashes along the frontier. What carried it to the weight it has today is a line drawn in hindsight: after seven hundred fifty-one Transoxiana never again entered the Chinese sphere of influence, and the region entered upon a cultural orientation that would last for centuries.

As for paper, its journey continued independently of the battle, and it made its real leap forty years after the Talas. In the years seven hundred ninety-four and seven hundred ninety-five, in Baghdad, in the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, a paper manufactory was established. To understand why this mattered so much, one has to look at paper's competitors. Parchment was expensive; a single book required a great many animals. Papyrus was fragile, and was produced in practically one region only, in Egypt. Paper, by contrast, was cheap, could be made anywhere from local materials, and had one property that was vital for administration: because the ink on it worked its way in among the fibers, it could not be scraped off and altered as it could on parchment. For a state, this meant a record closed to forgery. Tax registers, court proceedings and title deeds moved onto paper.

Then paper did something that could not have been expected of it: it produced a culture. A paper-sellers' market was established in Baghdad, and a profession was born of copying, selling and binding books. Translations made from Greek, from Syriac, from Persian and from Sanskrit multiplied on this cheap surface. Texts of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy turned into books whose copying no longer cost a fortune. By the tenth century, Baghdad's book market was on a scale that had no equal anywhere in the world.

From there the road turned west. Workshops were founded in Damascus, Cairo and Fez. In the twelfth century, in Andalusia, the paper of Xàtiva came to be sought after in every port of the Mediterranean. At the end of the thirteenth century the mills in the Italian town of Fabriano began to work, and European paper entered mass production. What was needed for printing to become possible in Europe was not movable type alone; it was a cheap surface to print on, and that surface had fallen into place two centuries before Gutenberg.

We now know that this whole chain did not begin on a battlefield. But there is a reason the legend has lived so long: the human mind wants great changes to have a great moment. A valley, five days, a cavalry that changes sides, and masters in chains — as a story it is flawless. The truth is slower and more modest. Technology is carried not in chests of plunder but in people's hands and habits; it takes generations, it is reinvented according to local materials, and who brought it is most often forgotten.

At the Talas two empires drew a border, and that border still affects the cultural map of Central Asia today. But what really spilled out beyond the valley was not the border. Within the same century, in the workshops of the same geography, a substance spread that made everything written on it cheaper, more numerous and more lasting. Ask non-specialists who won the battle and most of them will not know. But what was written on that substance, thirteen hundred years later, we are still reading.

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