A Chinese Poet in Central Asia
Ts’ên Shên was one of the celebrated poets of the T’ang dynasty. Here, Arthur Waley explores his body of work and the tumultuous career that propelled it.
What, you may well ask on reading the title of this paper, induced the Chinese (whose own country is, Heaven knows, large enough) to push out into remote regions, from which they were separated by immense tracts of desert? The main reason was an economic one. And here we are not, as so often with regard to economic motives in ancient times, simply left guessing. We are specifically told that the attack on Turfan in A.D. 639, a hundred years before the time of our poet, was made because the Turfanese were preventing caravans from the West from reaching China.
This did not interfere with China’s basic economy; as regards food and clothing China was self-sufficient. The trade in question was one in luxury, articles such as perfumes, jewels and drugs. On these the Chinese levied heavy import duties which were an important source of public revenue. There were, however, for the seventh century conquest of Turkestan, political as well as commercial reasons.
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