Kingdom of Khotan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Kingdom of Khotan endured for over a thousand years on the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert, one of the most arid places on earth. Tucked into a ribbon of oasis fed by two mountain rivers, it became a city of silk, jade, and Buddhist devotion that drew pilgrims and traders from China, India, and Persia. How did a settlement of a few thousand households grow into a major power on the Silk Road? What happened to its language, its faith, its royal bloodline? And what finally brought it down, in the year 1006, after more than a millennium of existence?

• 2. Water, Jade, and Geography

  ›

  Two rivers, the Yurung-kash and the Kara-kash, made Khotan possible. They carried meltwater down from the Kunlun Mountains and spread sediment across the desert floor, building the fertile soil that supported cereal crops and fruit orchards in a landscape that would otherwise be uninhabitable. The Taklamakan lay to the north, and the largely uninhabitable Kunlun range rose to the south. To the east, oases were few beyond Niya, making overland travel difficult. Khotan was therefore most accessible from the west, giving it a natural strategic advantage over traffic moving along the southern branch of the Silk Roads.

  Before the city itself was founded, Khotan was already famous across China for one thing: nephrite jade. Jade pieces from the Tarim Basin have been found at Chinese archaeological sites dating to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and carvers in Xinglongwa and Chahai were shaping ring-shaped pendants from Khotanese jade as early as 5000 BC. Hundreds of jade objects from the tomb of the Shang dynasty consort Fuhao, excavated by archaeologist Zheng Zhenxiang and her team, all traced back to Khotan. Implements of lighter-colored Khotanese jade turned up in a royal tomb at the central Chinese city of Anyang, dated to around 1200 BC. The Chinese text Guanzi records that the Yuezhi people were the suppliers who moved this jade into China.

  Despite its commercial reach, the ancient city of Khotan at Yotkan was modest in physical size. Its circumference measured roughly 2.5 to 3.2 km, making it smaller than many modern neighborhoods. Much of what the city once contained has been lost; centuries of informal treasure-hunting by local people destroyed large portions of the archaeological record.

• 3. People, Languages, Origins

  ›

  The inhabitants of Khotan spoke at least two languages. Khotanese, an Eastern Iranian language of the Saka branch, was the tongue of daily life and, by the 10th century, an officially recognized court language used in royal administrative documents. Gandhari Prakrit, an Indo-Aryan language related to Sanskrit, was also present, particularly in official records. Both left behind manuscripts; Khotanese documents survive in three stylistic periods spanning roughly the 5th through the 10th centuries, moving through Old, Middle, and Late Khotanese phases.

  The question of where the original settlers came from generated serious scholarly debate. There are four versions of the founding legend, none of them contemporary with the events they describe. All agree the city was founded around the 3rd century BC during the reign of the Indian emperor Ashoka. In one version, nobles from ancient Taxila who had blinded Ashoka's son Kunala were exiled north of the Himalayas as punishment and founded Khotan, later merging with a rival colony from China. In another, Kunala himself was the exile and founder.

  The Norwegian Indologist Sten Konow, after examining the various traditions, concluded that a figure named Kustana, described as a son of Ashoka, founded the royal dynasty. Konow identified Kustana's son Ye-u-la, said to have founded the capital, with the king Yu-Lin mentioned in Chinese chronicles as ruling Khotan around the middle of the 1st century AD. Ye-u-la was followed by his son Vijita Sambhava, with whom a long succession of kings all bearing the name Vijita began.

  Aurel Stein, who discovered Prakrit documents in Kharosthi script at nearby Niya in the 1900s, argued that the Tarim Basin populations were Indian immigrants from Taxila who had conquered and colonized the region. The late Professor of Iranian Studies Ronald Emmerick, however, pointed to the distinctly Iranian title hinajha, meaning generalissimo, used for the Khotanese king in 3rd-century documents from neighboring Shanshan, and to the use of the Khotanese term kshuna for the king's regnal periods. Emmerick concluded that the ruler of Khotan was almost certainly a speaker of Iranian. One synthesis holds that the early migrants may have been an ethnically mixed group from Taxila, led by a Greco-Saka or Indo-Greek leader, who organized the new settlement on the administrative model of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Hellenistic artworks found across the Tarim Basin, including the Sampul tapestry near Khotan and tapestries depicting the Greek god Hermes and a winged Pegasus at nearby Loulan, are consistent with that reading.

• 4. Buddhism's Deep Roots

  ›

  An account by the Han general Ban Chao, writing in 73 AD, suggested that Khotanese people at that time still appeared to practice Mazdeism or Shamanism rather than Buddhism. His son Ban Yong, who spent time in the Western Regions, did not mention Buddhism there either. The absence of Buddhist art in the region before the Eastern Han period has led some scholars to place the actual adoption of Buddhism in Khotan as late as the middle of the 2nd century AD, well after the founding legends claim it.

  By the time the Chinese pilgrim monk Faxian passed through in 399, the transformation was complete. Faxian counted fourteen large viharas and many smaller ones. He wrote that the community of monks numbered several tens of thousands and that the people, without exception, had faith in the Dharma and entertained one another with religious music. Khotan's Buddhism was predominantly Mahayana, setting it apart from Kucha on the opposite side of the desert, where the Hinayana tradition dominated.

  The kingdom produced some of Buddhism's most important transmitters to China. Monks including Shikshananda and Shiladharma, who originated in Khotan, played central roles in bringing Buddhist texts into Chinese translation. The most celebrated surviving manuscript from Khotan is the Book of Zambasta, named for the official Ysamasta who commissioned it. Unlike most Khotanese Buddhist texts, which were translations from Sanskrit, the Book of Zambasta is an original literary work, an anthology exploring different themes of Buddhism. It was composed in Old Khotanese rather than being derived from an Indian source.

  The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who stayed in Khotan for seven or eight months in 644, described a city of abundant fruit and grain, carpets, fine felts, silks, and both dark and white jade. He praised Khotanese culture specifically: the people, he wrote, loved to study literature, and music was widely practiced, with men loving song and dance. He observed their taste in dress, noting their preference for light silks and white clothes over the wools and furs of more rural peoples.

• 5. Silk, Smuggled Secrets

  ›

  Khotan was the first place outside of inland China to begin cultivating silk. The story of how sericulture arrived there is one of the more vivid smuggling episodes in ancient history, preserved in several sources and illustrated in murals that archaeologists later discovered. A Chinese princess, sent to marry the Khotanese king, concealed silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds in her headdress and carried them past the Chinese frontier guards. The Chinese court had strict rules against these items leaving the country, designed to preserve China's monopoly on silk manufacture.

  Xuanzang placed the event in the first quarter of the 5th century. He wrote that the King of Khotan asked for the hand of a Chinese princess as a token of allegiance to the Chinese emperor. An ambassador was dispatched to escort her back, and he advised the princess to bring silkworms and mulberry seeds so she could make herself robes in Khotan and make the people prosperous. The princess acted on the advice. According to Xuanzang's account, silkworm eggs, mulberry trees, and weaving techniques subsequently passed from Khotan to India, and from India eventually to Europe.

  Silk became far more than a product in Khotan; it functioned as currency. Travelers and merchants used bolts of silk to buy barley, camels, horses, sheep, animal skins, food, and the services of guides. The Khotan court itself received silk in payments, typically by the hundreds of bolts at a time. Silk also served in garments, furniture, and decoration. Khotan's mulberry groves, which made all of this possible, were among the city's defining physical features alongside its nephrite jade deposits and its pottery workshops.

• 6. Power, Tribute, and Tang Alliances

  ›

  According to the Book of Han, covering the period from 125 BC to 23 AD, Khotan had 3,300 households and 19,300 individuals, with 2,400 people able to bear arms. By the time the Han dynasty consolidated its dominance over the region, the population had more than quadrupled: the Book of the Later Han, covering 6 to 189 AD, records 32,000 households, 83,000 individuals, and more than 30,000 men able to bear arms.

  Khotan's rise to regional dominance came in 61 AD, when the Khotanese general Guangde defeated the previously dominant state of Yarkand. Thirteen kingdoms submitted after that victory. The Han military officer Ban Chao, arriving in Khotan in 73 AD, was received with minimal courtesy; the king's soothsayer advised the king to demand Ban's horse. Ban killed the soothsayer on the spot. The king, impressed by the action, then killed the Xiongnu agent stationed in Khotan and offered his allegiance to the Han court. King Guangde formally submitted to the Han dynasty that same year.

  The Tang campaign against the oasis states reached Khotan in 640 AD. Khotan submitted and became one of the Four Garrisons of Anxi. When the Tibetan Empire defeated Tang forces and took the garrisons, Khotan was first captured in 665. The Khotanese assisted the Tibetans in conquering Aksu. Tang China regained control in 692, under Empress Wu Zetian. When the An Lushan Rebellion began in 755, the Khotanese king sent some 5,000 troops to help suppress it. The rebellion nonetheless so weakened Tang control that Khotan was entirely lost in the following decades, with the Tibetan Empire taking it definitively in 792.

  After gaining independence in 851, Khotan's rulers built an elaborate fiction of legitimacy. The first post-Tibetan king, Visa' Sambhava, claimed descent from the Tang imperial family and used the Chinese title huangdi while simultaneously carrying the Indic title rajasimha, lion king, and the Near Eastern title king of kings. His son Visa' Sura went further: he called himself king of kings of China, used Chinese-style imperial edicts signed with the character chi meaning edict, in imitation of Tang and Song practice, and carried a seal inscribed Han Son of Heaven of great Khotan. Visa' Sambhava cemented the alliance with Dunhuang by marrying the daughter of Cao Yijin, ruler of the Guiyi Circuit; Cao Yijin's grandson Cao Yanlu in turn married the third daughter of Visa' Sambhava. The Buddhist cave complex at Dunhuang's Mogao grottos was funded and sponsored by Khotan's royals, and their likenesses were painted on the grottoes' walls.

• 7. The Fall to Islam

  ›

  In the 10th century, Khotan stood as the only city-state in the Tarim Basin that had not been absorbed by either the Buddhist Turkic Uyghur Qocho Kingdom or the Muslim Kara-Khanid Khanate. The conflict that would end Khotan began when the Karakhanid sultan Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam in 934. Satuq Bughra Khan and his son Musa then set about proselytizing among the Turks and pursuing military conquest. A long war developed between Islamic Kashgar and Buddhist Khotan. Satuq Bughra Khan's nephew or grandson Ali Arslan was reportedly killed fighting the Buddhists.

  Khotan briefly seized Kashgar from the Kara-Khanids in 970. A Chinese account from 971 records that the king of Khotan offered to send a dancing elephant, captured from Kashgar, as tribute to the Chinese emperor. That brief reversal did not hold.

  Accounts of the war survive in the Tazkikat of the Four Sacrificed Imams, written between 1700 and 1849 in the Eastern Turkic language of Altishahr, probably drawing on older oral tradition. The text describes four imams from a city called Mada'in, possibly in modern-day Iraq, who helped the Karakhanid leader Yusuf Qadir Khan conquer Khotan, Yarkand, and Kashgar. The language is vivid: blood flows like the Oxus, heads litter the battlefield like stones. The imams were assassinated by the Buddhists before the final Muslim victory but are venerated as local saints by the region's Muslim population today.

  In 1006, Yusuf Kadir Khan of Kashgar conquered Khotan, ending its existence as an independent Buddhist state. The Karakhanid writer Mahmud al-Kashgari, writing in the 11th century, preserved a short Turkic poem about the conquest: "We came down on them like a flood, We went out among their cities, We tore down the idol-temples, We shat on the Buddha's head." Alarmed by the conquest, Buddhists in Dunhuang are thought to have sealed Cave 17 of the Mogao Caves, hiding the Dunhuang manuscripts to protect them from a similar fate. By the time Marco Polo visited Khotan between 1271 and 1275, he reported simply that all the inhabitants worshipped Mohamet.