Merchant-Less Roads: Guests, Gifts, and the Reciprocity of Traveling on the Ancient Silk Road, 800–1000

Who were the travellers on the ancient Silk Road? This fundamental question is generally answered by alluding to cases of famous travellers such as Xuanzang, Marco Polo, and Giovanni da Pian del Carpini: like them, travellers on the Silk Road are described as merchants, monks, and envoys. In this paper, I re-examine this view by looking at travellers through the Hexi Corridor – the land bridge in modern Gansu that connects China proper with Central Asia – in the 9^th and 10^th century. Drawing from the multilingual collection of Dunhuang manuscripts in Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Khotanese, and Uyghur, I show that to categorize travelers as merchants, envoys, and monks is to disproportionally prioritize their activities at their destinations and to ignore their activities on the road. In particular, I critique the tendency of seeing most travellers on the Silk Road as “merchants” by showing that this term actually rarely appears in excavated documents. The Sogdian word s’rtp’w, for instance, indicates a leader of a traveling community rather than the straightforward ‘merchant.’ Instead, the most commonly used term for a traveller is “guest” (e.g. Chinese ke) and for their goods, “gift” (e.g. Tibetan skyes, Khotanese skyaisa). These terms point to a whole different set of vocabularies and practices of travelling that have not been sufficiently discussed. By analyzing practices of guest-host interaction such as introduction, accommodation, expression of gratitude after departure, as well as gift exchanges of material and spiritual kinds, I argue that, rather than following the assumptions and practices of commerce, the social principle of travelling on the ancient Silk Road is founded on the reciprocal relation between guests and hosts, and mediated through the exchange of gifts. When merchants disappear, a new and more intimate way of seeing how people travelled emerges.