Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (51 page)

In Tibet, however, things took a turn for the worse. In connection with the campaigns against Galdan, the K’ang-hsi Emperor learned in 1693
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or 1696
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that the Fifth Dalai Lama had actually died in 1682, and that Tibet had been governed since then by his son, the regent Sangs-rgyas Rgyamtsho, a strong partisan of Galdan. The emperor was outraged, though he could do nothing yet. Eventually, under pressure from all sides, the regent installed the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tshangs-dbyangs Rgyamtsho (1683–1706), who had been duly discovered and educated in secret. But the young man was a libertine or a freethinking tantric mystic
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—to outside appearances there was little difference—who had a talent for composing popular love songs.
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Opposition to him mounted among religious conservatives, and in 1705 Lhazang Khan of the Khoshuts, with the support of the Manchus, invaded Lhasa. The young Sixth Dalai Lama was taken in captivity to the Kokonor region, where he died on the way under mysterious circumstances in 1706. The Khoshuts installed their own pretender on the throne, with the support of the Ch’ing, but the Tibetans rejected him. When a boy was born in Lithang, eastern Tibet, in 1706 and identified as the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, he was seized by the Manchu-Chinese, who kept him captive in Hsining.

Meanwhile the Tibetans, protesting against the Khoshut actions, requested help from the Junghars. Tsewang Rabtan sent his cousin Tseren (Tsering) Dondub, who led ten thousand Junghars over the forbidding Kunlun Mountains to invade Tibet from the northwest in 1717. They defeated the Khoshut and killed Lhazang Khan in battle.

It is clear that the Junghars saw themselves as the protectors of the Dalai Lama,
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but they were overly zealous devotees of his Dgelugspa sect, and when they occupied Tibet, Tsewang Rabtan’s chief monk oppressed the other sects, causing widespread unrest. To make matters worse, on November 30, 1717, Tseren Dondub, who had previously been a monk in the rival city of Shigatse, ordered Lhasa and its monasteries to be sacked. A relief army sent by the Ch’ing from Hsining was destroyed by the Junghars in September 1718 before it could even get close.
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In spring of 1720 a new Ch’ing army marched to Tibet, followed shortly afterward by the young Dalai Lama. The Junghars abandoned Tibet to the Manchu-Chinese, who entered Lhasa unopposed on September 24, 1720 and formally enthroned the Seventh Dalai Lama, Bskal-bzang Rgyamtsho (1708–1757).
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Their establishment shortly thereafter of a protectorate in Tibet
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cemented Manchu-Chinese control over all of eastern Central Eurasia except the Junghar dominions in East Turkistan and Jungharia.

Upon the death of Tsewang Rabtan in 1727, his son Galdan Tseren (r. 1727–1745) succeeded as ruler of the Junghars. He reorganized the empire and attempted to push the Manchu-Chinese out of the Khalkha Mongol lands in 1730 and 1731, but he was defeated both times and finally made peace with the Ch’ing in 1739. He then attacked the Kazakhs, who separated the Junghars from their Torgut (Kalmyk) relatives far to the west on the lower Volga. The Junghars established their domination deep into Western Central Asia.

At the same time, the agreement with the Manchu-Chinese included allowance for trade, and the Junghars took full advantage of it. Although official Junghar trade missions were allowed only every other year, the Manchu-Chinese government representatives of border towns were ordered to be lenient, so the Junghars actually traded at the frontier every year. A very high percentage of the Junghar traders were not Mongol ethnically or nomads by occupation, but Turkic Muslims from the cities of East Turkistan or further west. The caravans “were dominated by experienced Central Asian merchants who moved bulk goods and currency along the ancient Silk Roads. In 1748, for example, of a total of 136 men, 46 were Mongols and 90 were Turkic Muslims (Chantou Hui). Three of the four headmen of the caravan were Turkic.”
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To give an idea of the amount of trade involved in one of these official trade missions, in 1750 the Junghars “brought goods worth 186,000 taels, the largest amount ever, which they exchanged for 167,300 taels’ worth of cloth and tea, with the balance in silver.”
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The Junghars certainly profited from the trade, as did the urban peoples and merchants involved.

Like all Central Eurasian nomad rulers, the Junghars were intensely interested in fostering trade and, to that end, minted their own coins to unify the diverse currencies of the different petty states in their territory of East Turkistan.
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The prosperity of Central Eurasia increased markedly under the Junghars at least into the mid-eighteenth century,
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even after the death of Galdan Tseren in 1745 and that of his successor in 1750, despite the subsequent contested succession and civil war in the Junghar Empire.

The Junghars, however, were devastated not only by civil war but by natural disasters that included a smallpox epidemic. Finally, when Amursana, the leader of one Junghar faction, went to the Ch’ing leaders, offering to submit if they would appoint him head of the Junghar nation, the Manchu-Chinese saw their chance. By the time the two Ch’ing armies arrived, the Junghars had fragmented and lost the support of allies and subjects such as the Kazakhs. The Ch’ing forces quickly defeated the Junghars and occupied Jungharia in 1755.
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Subsequently, the Junghars made an attempt to regain their independence under Amursana. He led the remaining independent-minded Junghars in a “rebellion” against the Manchu-Chinese, who after two years of concerted efforts could not catch him. The Ch’ien-lung Emperor went nearly mad with fury and frustration. In the winter of 1756–1757 he ordered that the Junghars be exterminated. His armies massacred nearly half of the Junghar people, including men, women, and children; the majority of the remainder died of smallpox or starvation; only about 10 percent of the Junghars, mainly women and children, survived. They and other Junghars who had previously surrendered to the Ch’ing were moved away from Jungharia and settled among other peoples who were considered more loyal. Amursana, who had received insufficient support from the exhausted and weakened Junghar people, died of smallpox on September 21, 1757, while in Tobolsk seeking support from the Russians.
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The massacre of the Junghars and the subjugation of the Torgut (Kalmyks)—those on the Volga by the Russians and those who later returned east to Jungharia (to escape the Russians) by the Manchu-Chinese—destroyed the power of the Western Mongols, the last free steppe people.

The leaders of East Turkistan, deprived of their Junghar protectors, now found themselves under direct Ch’ing pressure. But despite their valiant attempt to emulate the Junghars and repel the Manchu-Chinese, they were defeated in 1759. Ch’ing power was thus established throughout Eastern Central Asia,
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which came to be called in Chinese Sinkiang (Xinjiang) ‘New Territory’ during the Manchu campaigns there.
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The Manchu-Chinese replaced the Junghar imperial coinage of East Turkistan with Manchu-Chinese coins they began minting in Yarkand in 1759. But the once robust economy of East Turkistan, the plum over which eastern Eurasian empires fought for almost two millennia, had already begun to decline. After the Ch’ing conquest, not only East Turkistan (Xinjiang) but even Kansu (Gansu) and other largely Chinese regions that bordered on Central Eurasia actually had to be subsidized with taxes drawn from the wealthier central provinces of China.
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The economic and cultural destruction of Central Eurasia had begun.

European Domination of Eurasia from the Littoral

In the century following the Manchu-Chinese conquests in eastern Central Eurasia, the Russians conquered and colonized Western Central Asia, while the British displaced the Mughals as rulers of most of the Indian subcontinent. All three powers established tightly controlled borders around their empires. This effectively closed Central Eurasia.
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Though the fall of the Junghar steppe empire had been a blow to the Central Eurasian Silk Road economy, it was in itself not the fatal blow. The death stroke was delivered by the Russian and Manchu-Chinese politicians who crafted the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 and the Treaty of Kiakhta in 1727, establishing strict, exclusive controls over international trade.

In fact, the closing of the borders, severe restriction of international trade, and elimination of all significant Central Eurasian polities destroyed the economy of Central Eurasia. Both the internal component of the Silk Road economy and its long-distance component were thus largely put out of business.
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The direct result was the severe impoverishment of Central Eurasia—especially its center, Central Asia—and its rapid plunge backward into darkness in technology and every other aspect of culture.

Because the peripheral empires were partly dependent upon international trade, and traditionally by far the most important part of it had been conducted by land with Central Eurasia, they harmed themselves too. But by this time they had an alternative to the Silk Road: the new, fast growing Littoral System. Despite their lack of interest in getting involved seriously in maritime trade themselves, the Manchu-Chinese already profited from the silver trade with the Spanish. While the Russians had reached Central Asia in the west, from which they could obtain Oriental goods directly, their treaty with China allowed them to obtain East Asian products directly as well, and their possession of ports on the seas around them gave them access to the developing Littoral System.

It is not surprising that the great peripheral powers of continental Asia did not have as highly developed naval and navigational technology as the Europeans and therefore could not fight the latter at sea. This may be explained by their Central Eurasian origins and traditional continental orientation. Yet the continental powers also seem not to have made any attempt to acquire the technology or at least to hire mercenary Europeans to help them take control of their own coastal trade. It is clear not only that they paid little attention to the Littoral route commerce
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but also that they did not understand it and did not take advantage of their political power on land to attempt to control it or profit by it.
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Accordingly, the Western European littoral countries Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, and France acquired or opened trading ports and naval bases almost at will all around eastern Eurasia from Persia to Japan. The development of these ports into the dominant great metropolises of Asia as a whole, coupled with the Italian and Ottoman Empire control of most of the Mediterranean, established the Littoral System as the only functioning international economy in Eurasia by the nineteenth century.

Japan and the Completion of Littoral Domination of Eurasia

For some two millennia local Littoral zone trade had extended around the coast of Eurasia from northwestern Europe to northeastern Asia, where its terminus was the Japanese Archipelago. Japan was founded by migrants who had traveled there by sea and colonized the islands sometime in the first millennium
BC
. They continued to trade with the neighboring areas of northeastern Asia, especially the Korean Peninsula, and eventually developed the skill to be able to sail against the current to China and beyond.

By the time Europeans reached the country—the first were two or three Portuguese merchants who arrived aboard a Chinese ship in 1543
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—Japan was a highly civilized, populous land that produced silks, swords, and other products the Europeans coveted and wanted to purchase. The Europeans brought firearms and other products unknown in Japan, though the bulk of their trade items came from nearby China. The Japanese were part of the old pre-European, local Littoral zone trade route system, so they were accustomed to international commerce and were willing to trade. But the Europeans brought something else new that was not as welcome: Christianity.