The Silk Road Began in East Asia

The Origin and Spread of Religion

If we look at the site plan of an East Asian palace city, the royal palace is at the north center, and to the south are two places of ritual. One is in the form of celestial religion, offering rites to heaven, and the other in the form of ancestral religion, offering rites to the ancestors. The Taoist classics are the scriptures of nature religion, and the Analects is the scripture of family religion. In this way, religion began in nature and in the family. Yin-yang and the Five Elements explain the relationship between nature and humankind, and the Taoist Book of Changes and the Hindu scriptures share the common features of nature religion.

There was a book called the Book of Changes (周易, Zhouyi). It was written by sages 3,000 years ago, and it is said that Confucius loved to read it 2,600 years ago. It is described as one of the Five Classics of Confucian learning (儒學), a book setting out the principles of change in the world. It divided the four directions of yin-yang and the Five Elements again into eight directions, represented by the eight trigrams. Our national flag, the Taegukgi (photo above), is a diagram expressing yin-yang and the Five Elements through the trigrams, with yin and yang drawn in a circle at the center and four trigrams marked at the four corners. The Book of Changes explains, for the meaning of each of the eight trigrams, eight more detailed situations of time and space, dividing everything that happens between heaven and earth into 64 cases.

The murals inside the Goguryeo tombs show the sun, the moon, and the Big Dipper on the ceiling. Around the four sides, as symbols of the Five Elements, are the Blue Dragon (靑龍) in the east, the Vermilion Bird (朱雀) in the south, the White Tiger (白虎) in the west, and the Black Tortoise (玄武) in the north, while the body at the center was adorned in gold. With black and white and the three primary colors they made the four directions and four seasons — a wisdom that built a small universe to form an environment for life. It is said that yin-yang and the Five Elements, a fusion of ancestral religion and nature religion, later carried on into Confucian learning (儒學), and so began East Asia's Taoism (道敎) and Confucianism (儒敎). Among the temples of China in East Asia, we see temples that worship matriarchal religions and nature gods together with Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.

According to recent theories that study human genes and publish the blood relationships of the world's peoples, the ancestors of Goguryeo (genetic marker M174) stayed in the Liao River region of Manchuria from 50,000 years ago, began adapting to the winter season, and migrated into inland Mongolia and Tibet. The ancestors of Baekje (genetic marker M130), from 40,000 years ago, passed through the North American continent and connect to the Maya culture of Central America and the Peruvian culture of South America. Meanwhile, archaeologists say that our people formed the Hongshan culture in the Liao River region of Manchuria earlier than anyone else in the world.

The cultures of the states called Shang or Yin in East Asian history are the cultures of our ancestors, known as the Dongyi or the Xiongnu; it seems it was our people's culture that carried metal civilization and the culture of pyramid building to every continent of the world, before the Zhou dynasty of the Chinese people was founded 3,080 years ago and before Chinese characters were standardized in the Han dynasty (200 BC). On China's east coast, the ancestors of Baekje maintained the state of Qi in Shandong Province and brought about the cultural renaissance of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, and it seems that waves of religion, philosophy, and science were carried from there to every continent of the world.

East Asian religion, carried to the Ganges in eastern India some 2,610 years ago, welcomed the birth of the Buddha, and after passing the Indus in western India, 600 years later Jesus was born in the culture of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Six hundred years after the founding of Jesus' Christianity, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born, and the ceaseless conflict between Christianity and Islam continues to this day.

Indian Buddhism long ago took root in East Asia, the home of religion, made scriptures, set standards for living, and explained the order of nature. Christianity, which continued into the Orthodox Church of eastern Europe and Russia, gave rise to Protestantism in western Europe with Martin Luther's Reformation in 1520. English Protestantism was carried to the Americas, and, strengthened by America's economic power, Christianity at last came to East Asia, the home of religion. Modern religion, having come home against the rotation of the Earth, has now reached a new starting point.

Modern humankind, having won the struggle for survival on Earth through the development of science, has fallen into the illusion of having become master over every living thing in nature, saying "Man is the lord of all creation" or "Humankind is the Creator's masterpiece," and is making nature into a human-centered environment.

Humankind is fated never to part from religion. On the path of life, in seeking truth and fulfilling our dreams, relying on a power that transcends humanity and nature is, like a helpless baby depending on its mother, the most beautiful part of our lives. If we recover the origins of religion and science that began in East Asia, protect nature with a mother's love, and care for our neighbors — if nature and human life can come into balance again, as in yin-yang and the Five Elements — might that not be the future that saves humankind and the Earth? Such efforts might also be the beginning of world peace.

The Story of the Huns

The modern humans who first settled on the Korean Peninsula and the Liaodong Peninsula began living alongside the wolves and wild horses that had long inhabited Manchuria. They began raising wolves at home, which became today's household dogs, and, unlike the oxen accustomed to Southeast Asian farming, they brought wild horses into household life, bringing about an epochal change in nomadic life. The nomadic states of the horse-riding peoples were constantly on the move, so they lasted only short periods in history. Figures well known to Western scholars even in later ages — Kanishka, Attila of the Huns, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Babur the Tiger — and the Scythians, Huns, Tatars, Turks (Göktürks), Mongols, and Manchus made their names as tribes of conquerors. The ruthless horse-riding conquerors called the wolves of the Asian steppe trampled the Han Chinese, India, and the inhabitants of Europe.

There are not many concrete historical records of the Huns, who rode horses and carried metal weapons developed since the Neolithic, but the Xiongnu are said to have been destroyed by the allied forces of the Xianbei, the Later Han, and the Southern Xiongnu. After that, the Southern Xiongnu were assimilated into the Han Chinese, and the Northern Xiongnu began moving west. At this time the leaders of the Xiongnu who advanced westward crossed the Ural Mountains and settled, and after about two centuries, having been assimilated with the nomads already living there, the people who brought a storm upon Europe are sometimes called the Huns. That place is the Altai region. The Altai Kazakh tribe calls itself the Kerei. A feature seen in the fourth-century skulls found in the Yean-ri tomb group in Gimhae and in the skull found in the Silla tomb Geumnyeongchong is cranial flattening (pyeondu). Pyeondu is a skull whose forehead has been artificially pressed flat, with furrow-like grooves around the head and an elongated cranium. The "Account of the Dongyi" in the Wei section of the Records of the Three Kingdoms says, "The people of Jinhan press their heads flat, making pyeondu." According to scholars, pyeondu was a custom of nomads and appears like a "trace of the Xiongnu."

The Records of the Three Kingdoms states, "Dongmyeong, founder of Buyeo, was the son born of a maidservant of King Geumwa (金蛙王) of the Gaori country." Professor Sumiyabaatar, a leading Mongolian historian, said, "King Geumwa's Gaori is the Gori country, and this tribe also appears in the eighth-century founding myth of Mongolia." And according to the tale of "Tanzagang, father of the Altai people," King Geumwa is the progenitor of the Altai people. That is, through the line King Geumwa – Gaori – Buyeo, the Altai became the root of the Korean people. Chinese historians also called the peoples living in the Altai Xiongnu. The Book of Han says, "Joseon is the left arm of the Xiongnu," and "Since we have not overcome the Xiongnu, Buyeo and Yemaek will rise again." It regarded Gojoseon, too, as Xiongnu."

The cause of the Huns' (Xiongnu's) movement to western Europe is thought to have been natural disasters brought on by climate change, or else migration from a densely populated place along the steppe road to sparsely populated eastern Europe. The Huns (Xiongnu), being nomads, must have begun a great migration to escape natural disasters, passing through southern Siberia along the steppes of Central Asia, going north along the steppes and then moving west. In the American production Attila, King of the Barbarians, I could not confirm the grounds for the claim that the great migration of the Huns (Xiongnu) set out from the Korean Peninsula, but the understanding and the conjecture are sufficient. In making the documentary Secrets of History, a German broadcast tracing the Huns, Dr. Berinto and Dr. Schmidt based their evidence of a direct relationship between the Korean people and the Huns on bronze cauldron relics unearthed in the Gaya region at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula and on the bronze cauldrons of the Huns (Xiongnu) excavated in the regions they passed through as they moved west. (Photo below.)

Like the bronze cauldron carried on the horse's back in the horse-and-rider figure, National Treasure No. 91, excavated in 1924 from the Geumnyeongchong tomb in Nodong-dong, Gyeongju, the Huns carried bronze cauldrons on their horses' backs. The thirty or so of these bronze cauldrons found along the Huns' route show the path of their migration. The horse-and-rider figure unearthed from the Gyeongju tomb is dressed in typical nomadic attire. The triangular hat and the dongbok (bronze cauldron) carried on the horse's back are the same in form as the cauldrons of the Huns (Xiongnu). The rider is thought to have had a flattened head, and it is said that the small diameter of the gold crowns is because the Silla kings had flattened heads, as seen in Maya culture. The rider's feet are in stirrups. Europeans had no stirrups of the same form as those the Huns used. The stirrup was made of leather, or like a shoe pouch, and attached to the saddle so the rider could keep his balance on horseback. The stirrup was one of the most powerful parts of the riding technique that enabled the Huns to conquer Europe (photo below).

Relics of the Huns found in relation to the Korean Peninsula have been discovered in North Korea and in the Jilin region of China, and they are being found in the steppes of northern China, the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, the southern Soviet Union, Hungary, and elsewhere. The Xiongnu relics found deep in the south of Korea, in the Gyeongju tombs and in Daeseong-dong, the Gaya tombs of Gimhae, are relics directly related to the northern Xiongnu. The bronze cauldron was a vessel used by nomads who inherited the Neolithic metal culture, for boiling the meat used in rituals. It is argued that the triangular hat and dress worn by the horse-and-rider figure, a national treasure, are typical of nomads, and that its saddle and stirrups are the same as those the Huns used.

Sima Qian says the Xiongnu had rather large heads, prominent cheekbones, broad faces, plenty of mustache but little hair on the face and no beard, thick eyebrows, and slanted eyes with intense, fiery pupils. The appearance of the Xiongnu described above by Sima Qian is similar to the record of Attila's appearance left by the Greek historian Priscus (Priskos), who visited Attila's court on the Danube in what is now northern Hungary in AD 448 as a member of an Eastern Roman embassy. Later, Jordanes, a historian of Gothic descent, described Attila's eyes as gray when he set Priscus' writings down in Latin — but might not the Europeans' view of Attila have been the optical illusion of looking at an Asian?

As for transport networks connecting to the world, world empires centered on Chang'an (Xi'an) were built in East Asia in the time of the First Emperor of Qin (240 BC) and the Tang dynasty (AD 618). At this time the Korean Peninsula was in the age of Gojoseon, and it was when the Buddhist culture of Unified Silla reached its peak. It was around this time that Baekje crossed to Japan and brought about Japan's Asuka culture. The Mongol Huns, fleeing the power of the Tang, conquered Rome and at the same time entered India and invaded the Kushan Empire. The East Asian culture and war civilization of the Mongol Huns were carried to eastern Europe, and some of them migrated to northern Europe and became Finland's Viking pirates. At this time the Germanic peoples began to ride horses and established order in western Europe. The descendants of the Huns raided the coasts of Britain and Europe for 300 years and settled in England, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

While the horse-riding peoples who grew up early in Manchuria moved west along the steppes for a long time, they also moved south along the east coast of the Korean Peninsula and gave rise to Silla culture, which rode horses and developed metal culture. The Gyeongsang dialect of the Korean Peninsula has a strong pronunciation and bears the features of northern languages. The horse-riding people who pushed Japan's natives (the Ainu, a seafaring people) toward Hokkaido were also mostly of genetic lineage M714, and so were a people of the Korean Peninsula.

Dr. Jon Carter Covell was an American-born historian of Asian art. After graduating from Oberlin College in the United States, she became the first Western scholar to receive a doctorate in Japanese art history, from Columbia University in 1941, with "A Study of Ink Paintings Bearing the Seal of Sesshū (雪舟), a Fifteenth-Century Japanese Zen Painter." She studied Buddhist Zen art for a long time at Shinju-an in Daitoku-ji (大德寺) in Kyoto, Japan, and from 1959 to 1978 taught Asian art history at California State University at Riverside and the University of Hawaii.

From among the more than a thousand articles written by Dr. Jon Carter Covell and her son Dr. Alan Covell between 1978 and 1986, let us look at the largest shipbuilding on the Korean Peninsula, which took place around AD 369. The ships built in Korea at that time made a stopover at Tsushima and then called at Kyushu. They announced on many occasions that the bold Buyeo-Gaya people of that time sailed on these ships, conquered Wa — the then backward country, more than half of western Japan — and thereafter held the throne of Japan's kings for over a hundred years.

They point out that the fourth-century voyage of the Buyeo-Gaya people across the Korea Strait is an event deserving far more attention than the famous voyages of the Vikings some 500 years later. The Vikings were bold and tough seamen, but even in their active period in the tenth century they did not make voyages carrying horses. Yet the Buyeo people of the Korean Peninsula, the "horse-riding people," successfully made that record-setting voyage of taking horses to an island nation, in a vibrant Asia, at the very time when in the West the Roman Empire was being trampled by "barbarians." They write that the Buyeo warriors, well-armed descendants of the Huns, easily conquered the land of Japan. Were the horses of Jeju Island also brought over at this time, or was it during the invasion of the Yuan dynasty?

The Cave Temples of East Asia

East Asian religious architecture begins with a keyhole layout, square in front and round behind (前方後元). In yin-yang and the Five Elements, the square was distinguished as the space of humans on earth and the circle as the space of the gods of the universe. The tombs of the southern Korean Peninsula and those of Japan have the square-front, round-back form, and the floor plan of Seokguram of Unified Silla is square-front, round-back. As the metal tools of East Asia brought about the Neolithic revolution, humankind began to carve rock walls with metal tools. Carving in wood developed rapidly into carving in stone, and carving in stone into casting in bronze, and it seems these were carried to South Asia and Southwest Asia.

The square-front, round-back form is commonly seen in the floor plans of India's religious temples and caves. From the second century BC to the seventh century AD, cave sculpture was in fashion throughout Asia, and countless cave temples are scattered about: Ajanta in India; in China the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang (敦煌 莫高窟), the Yungang Grottoes, and the Longmen Grottoes; and we can cite Korea's Seokguram as an example.

Ajanta is a Buddhist cave temple located in the northwest of Maharashtra state, India. Of its 29 caves, there are early caves built over about a century from around the first century BC, and later caves built from the fifth to the seventh century. Indian customs and Buddhist subjects are depicted with rich and varied brushwork not only on the walls but in every corner of the vast spaces, including the pillars, beams, and ceilings. They range from the aniconic period to murals from the period when Mahayana Buddhism was developing. The painting of Padmapani, the Lotus-Bearing Bodhisattva, is particularly famous. With the decline of Buddhism in the eighth century, it was abandoned for over 1,000 years. It was discovered in 1819 by a British soldier, John Smith, and became known to the world when Person surveyed and excavated it in 1893.

The Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, commonly called the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (千佛洞), are located at the western end of the Hexi Corridor (河西走廊) in Gansu Province, southeast of the city of Dunhuang, arranged as tiers of caves on a high cliff some 50 meters tall on the eastern foot of Mingsha Mountain (沙山). Located at a strategic point on the Silk Road, it was an intermediary point for East-West trade and a place where religion, culture, and knowledge fused. The 492 caves of Mogao, with their sculptures and murals, are today the largest and best-preserved treasure house of Buddhist art in the world. The Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India (往五天竺國傳) by the eminent Silla monk Hyecho was discovered here.

The Yungang Grottoes (云冈石窟) are a cave temple complex of about 40 caves stretching 1 km east to west, 20 km west of the city of Datong in Shanxi Province, People's Republic of China. They began with the so-called "Five Caves of Tanyao" (Caves 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20), started around 460 (the first year of Heping) on the cliffs of the Wuzhou River, a tributary of the Sanggan River, after Tanyao, the Northern Wei superintendent of monks, petitioned Emperor Wencheng. It is said that the huge stone Buddhas of these five caves were the symbolic presence of the project to revive Buddhism after Emperor Taiwu's suppression of Buddhism, the first of the "Three Wu and One Zong" persecutions. They are works from one period in the history of Chinese Buddhist sculpture, called the Yungang period (460–494). The Yungang style may be said to have its origins in the caves of Liangzhou (Gansu Province), but Yungang's influence extends to a wide range of cave temples including Longmen, Tianlongshan, and the northern and southern Xiangtangshan. Because of an invasion by King Dongseong of Baekje, the cave work was moved to Luoyang and continued as the Longmen Grottoes. (The photos show Seokguram and the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang.)

The Longmen Grottoes (龍門石窟) are cave temples on both banks 13 km south of the city of Luoyang in Henan Province, China. They began in 494 (the eighteenth year of Taihe), when Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei, which had been invaded by Baekje, moved the capital from Datong in Shanxi to Luoyang. Historically they are the cave temple that succeeded the Yungang Grottoes. Of the three caves carved out of the hills and fields in accordance with the plan of his predecessor, Emperor Xuanwu, only one was actually completed under the Northern Wei. Most of the caves were completed in the early Tang dynasty. Another representative cave of the Northern Wei period is the Lotus Cave. Even after the fall of the Northern Wei, construction of the caves continued from generation to generation, through the Northern Qi to the Sui dynasty. There is a legend that the face of the principal Buddha, Vairocana, was carved in the likeness of Empress Wu Zetian, who by then already held real power.

Korea's Seokguram — the Seokguram Grotto of Gyeongju (慶州 石窟庵 石窟) — is a grotto (石窟) halfway up Tohamsan in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, Republic of Korea (891 Jinhyeon-
dong); it was begun in the tenth year of King Gyeongdeok of Silla (751) by Kim Dae-seong, then 51 years old, and completed some 20 years later. This grotto, representing Silla architecture and plastic art, is small in scale beyond comparison with the grottoes of China or India, but with the square-front, round-back plan of East Asian religious architecture it is an artistic masterpiece and a perfectly preserved world cultural heritage. The original name of Seokguram was "Seokbulsa (石佛寺)" [Stone Buddha Temple], but since the Japanese colonial period it has been called Seokguram. Recognized for its architectural, mathematical, geometric, religious, and artistic value and its unique architectural beauty, Seokguram, together with Bulguksa, was designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site in 1995.

The interior of the grotto is round, and the ceiling is a domed stone chamber covered over with earth. It measures about 6.7 meters side to side and about 6.6 meters front to back, with an entrance 3.35 meters wide, and in front of it is a rectangular antechamber (前室). At the center, the principal Buddha, the seated Shakyamuni Buddha (釋迦如來坐像), is a masterpiece among East Asian grottoes, exquisite and brimming with a solemn, majestic spirit. In the middle of the wall behind the principal Buddha is the Eleven-Headed Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva carved in half relief (半六刻); on both walls of the antechamber are the Vajra guardians (仁王) and the Eight Guardian Deities, a pair of guardian gatekeepers; on the left and right of the entrance passage (扉道) are the Four Heavenly Kings, Brahma, and Indra; on the grotto walls, the Ten Disciples (十羅漢); above the principal Buddha, ten niches with Buddhist figures in eight of them; and in the upper part of the wall, ten Buddhist niches (佛龕) were made, in which one figure of the layman Vimalakirti (維摩居士像) and seven bodhisattva figures were enshrined. The "Nine-Story Wooden Pagoda of Hwangnyongsa," built at Hwangnyongsa (皇龍寺) in Seorabeol, the Silla capital, in the fourteenth year of Queen Seondeok (645), stood 79 meters tall, which lets us gauge the scale of Buddhist culture on the Korean Peninsula at that time.

The Great Wall and the Grand Canal

Originally the north and south of East Asia were divided at the Yellow River, and later, as the Han Chinese states expanded their territory, the Great Wall appeared as a dividing line to keep out the northern peoples. The Great Wall (萬里長城) is said to be a huge fortification begun in the time of the ancient Qin dynasty of China (the First Emperor) to hold back the northern peoples such as the Xiongnu and the Mongols. It began in the Warring States period, when the three states of Zhao, Yan, and Qin built long walls; in 221 BC the First Emperor linked the walls of Yan and Zhao and extended them farther west against invasion by the northern nomads. But since the First Emperor may himself have been a northerner, future research deserves attention.

Thereafter it was continuously repaired and enlarged by China's successive dynasties down to the Ming, and remains to this day as a symbolic monument dividing north and south in East Asia. Its length on the map is about 2,700 km, but counting the overlapping sections it reaches a total of 6,351 km. After the seafaring people of East Asia migrated from 50,000 years ago into Manchuria and Mongolia, settled into nomadic life, and became northern inland people, a distance grew between them and the life and customs of the farming people living in the south. Just as Baekje and Goguryeo differed on the Korean Peninsula, conflicts between southerners and northerners filled Chinese history in China too. Yet for most of that history, it was the northerners who ruled.

From 10,000 years ago, as the Han Chinese of Central Asia migrated into the economically flourishing northeast and mixed with the southern seafaring people, their competition with the northern nomads gave birth to the Great Wall of the Ming. The surviving walls differ in construction method according to their history and location. The parts in the north are early walls built of earth, so unlike the later Great Wall they were also low. The Great Wall is not only a long barrier wall but also a highway for moving armies, and there are many sections made up of border posts, bastions, and fortresses. The parts of the Great Wall built in places like southern Liaodong, not on the border with the northern peoples, are mostly forward-base fortresses rather than true walls.

In the Han dynasty, Emperor Wu extended the wall to Wuwei and Jiuquan, and in the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (420–589) the Northern Zhou and Northern Qi built walls on a large scale. After Emperor Yang of Sui repaired the wall and built a new wall at the southern end of the Ordos, the Jin dynasty built walls on a large scale in the Xing'an Mountains to hold off Tatar invasions. Emperors Yongle and Zhengtong of the Ming built a double wall in front of Beijing, and then Emperor Jiajing of the Ming rebuilt the wall extensively; the form completed in the sixteenth century is today's Great Wall.

The history of East Asia is a history of conflict between the northern nomads and the southern farmers. The relic of that conflict is the Great Wall. But as time passed, the line of conflict moved farther south, and in the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (南北朝時代: 420–589) the Southern Dynasties founded by the Han Chinese and the Northern Dynasties founded by nomadic peoples stood against each other until the Sui unified them; all the while the Korean Peninsula, though it commanded the seas, was always connected with the northerners. In this period four dynasties rose and fell in turn in the region south of the Yellow River (Jiangnan) — Song (宋), Qi (齊), Liang (梁), and Chen (陳) — and these were called the Southern Dynasties (南朝). Together with the Wu of the Three Kingdoms period and the Eastern Jin, which had also made Jiankang (建康; the new name of Jianye, 建業) their capital, they are called the Six Dynasties (六朝), and this era is sometimes called the Six Dynasties period, though that periodization is used mainly in cultural history.

In this era the south was greatly developed, and thereafter, in the Sui and Tang periods, the south became the economic foundation of all China. In contrast to its political turmoil, the Southern Dynasties saw Buddhist culture and civilization flourish, and an aristocratic culture called Six Dynasties culture prospered. It was the time of Tao Yuanming, Wang Xizhi, and others. In north China, the Northern Wei (北魏), founded by the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei, brought order out of the chaos of the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians, dismantled the tribal system of the northern nomads, and transformed itself into a Chinese-style state based on an aristocratic system.

While on the map of East Asia the Great Wall stands out clearly as a line of conflict, the Grand Canal became a symbolic landmark of north and south uniting as one. In the Zhou period, in 486 BC, China's first canal, the Hangou (邗溝), linking the Yangtze and the Huai River, was built, and in AD 605, by order of Emperor Yang of Sui (隋煬帝), the canal was built after six years of work. With a total length of 1,764 km — nearly twice the length of the railway from Busan to Sinuiju — the Grand Canal passes through six provinces and cities, Beijing, Tianjin (天津), Hebei (河北), Shandong (山東), Jiangsu (江蘇), and Zhejiang (浙江), and cuts across five great rivers: the Hai (海河), the Yellow (黃河), the Huai (淮河), the Yangtze (長江), and the Qiantang (錢塘).

Even today it carries coal from the north southward and rice and grain from the south northward, while serving as a key water transport route for the export economy of the Yangtze River Delta. The world's largest man-made waterway, the Grand Canal, with 2,500 years of history, became a waterway beginning at Beijing (北京) and running south to Hangzhou (杭州). Bordering six provinces (省) including Beijing and Tianjin and linking five great rivers including the Yellow (黃河), the Huai (淮河), and the Yangtze (長江), it became a shipping channel with a total length of 1,794 km. It is the waterway that links Beijing, representing the north of today's China, with Shanghai, representing the south. Looking at the Great Wall and the Grand Canal alone, the culture and civilization of East Asia boast a history and scale that can be seen nowhere else in the world.
The Silk Road

Just as the Great Wall begins on the Korean Peninsula, the Silk Road connecting East Asia and the Mediterranean also begins on the Korean Peninsula, by land and by sea. It is the road by which East Asians migrated into Europe from around 30,000 years ago, when Europe's climate grew warmer and the glaciers began to melt. The looks and customs of Italians and eastern Europeans differ in appearance and character from those of blond, blue-eyed western Europeans. It was the road by which the Huns reached Europe, and the back road by which the Mongols reached Europe and Southwest Asia.

The Silk Road came to be used as an ancient East-West trade route by land or by sea. This is because the very origin of the term "Silk Road" meant the flow of Chinese silk to the Roman Empire. But the Silk Road was also, throughout history, a channel through which culture circulated. The Silk Road has been thought of simply as an axis crossing east to west, but according to recent research it is seen as one vast transport network reaching in every direction, including many north-south routes, and accordingly the concept of the Silk Road is also expanding. The Silk Road developed into a worldwide web of transport routes made up of three trunk lines, five major branch lines, and tens of thousands of paths.

Crossing the northern steppe of Eurasia from east to west, it begins on the Korean Peninsula, passes through north China and along the Orkhon River at the northern edge of Mongolia's Gobi Desert, and reaches Kazakhstan and the Dzungarian Basin south of the Altai Mountains. It continues to the shores of the Aral Sea, the Caspian Sea in southern Russia, the northeast side of the Black Sea, and the southern end of the Baltic Sea. The first exchange of civilization is thought to have occurred 10,000 years ago, when East Asian spices and light silk fabrics spread widely along this steppe road across the northern Eurasian steppes. Around 4000–3000 BC, it seems East Asian Bronze Age culture and stone-building techniques were transmitted, and around 1000 BC Iron Age culture spread along this road.

The horse-riding people of Manchuria, who began raising wolves at home and riding horses around 50,000 years ago, are thought to have passed on the horse-riding culture of the tomb-culture period (3rd–5th centuries) to Southwest Asia by the steppe road as well. The Oasis Road refers to the road stretching east to west that links the oases dotting the arid zones (deserts) and semi-deserts of Central Asia. An oasis is precisely a place in the desert or other arid zones where water always collects, trees grow, and humans can live. The oasis was not only the home of desert life but also a center of trade, where goods gathered and were distributed and where transport developed.

The Oasis Road, lying at the very heart of the Silk Road, played the most important role. Before the historical era the steppe road was much used, but thereafter the Oasis Road became the main channel of East-West exchange. From 10,000 years ago, fairly well-developed transport routes had already been made in the East Asian region; the Pamir Plateau stood as an obstacle, and records say that only when Zhang Qian (張騫, d. 114 BC) of the Former Han, in 138–126 BC, pioneered the route across the Pamirs to the Greater Yuezhi was a complete road made at last.

The First Emperor of Qin founded the Qin dynasty (259–210 BC), the world's first empire, which unified East Asia, and settled in the capital, Xi'an. The culture of Xi'an, located at the center of the Silk Road, carried its momentum along the Silk Road to the Italian peninsula, and 200 years later the Roman Empire was born. We may call this a good example proving that it was the road by which East Asian peoples were linked to the Mediterranean and East Asian culture was carried there.

If 2,000 years ago East Asia had the coastal transport capacity to carry its skill in carving great dragons and raising pyramids along the coastlines all the way to Central America, we can imagine it also had the coastal transport capacity to reach from East Asia to Southwest Asia. According to the Book of Han, "Treatise on Geography" (漢書.地理志), around the first century BC, in China's Han dynasty, there was a trade route starting in the northwest of China and passing through Central Asia overland to Europe, and at the same time there was also a maritime trade route. This route began at present-day Xuwen County in Guangdong Province, and after about five months of sailing, and further sailing, it reached Thailand, Myanmar, India, and Sri Lanka. Goods such as Chinese silk and spices were carried along this route as far as Europe and Africa.

Admiral Zheng He (鄭和), a general and explorer of the Ming dynasty and a confidant of the Yongle Emperor, is famous for making seven great expeditions to the Southern Seas at the Yongle Emperor's command. He set out on the first expedition in June 1405. According to the History of Ming (明史), 27,800 crew members in all sailed on 62 ships, including large vessels 44 jang (丈; about 137 meters) long and 18 jang (about 56 meters) wide. Compared with Vasco da Gama's later fleet of three 120-ton ships with 170 crew, and Columbus's fleet of three 250-ton ships with 88 crew, China's was an enormous great fleet combining the navigational knowledge and technology of an advanced country.

The fleet, departing from Suzhou (蘇州), passed through Champa and Sumatra and along the routes of Palembang, Malacca, and Ceylon, reaching Calicut in India around the beginning of 1407. Through this voyage, many Southeast Asian countries that had had no contact with the Ming began one after another to pay tribute to the Ming. The fourth expedition set out after a short interval, in the winter of 1413. This time, intending to go farther west, more preparation was needed. After reaching Calicut, it continued sailing west to reach Hormuz on the Persian Gulf and Aden on the southern Arabian Peninsula. It returned home in July 1415.

The fifth expedition set out in the winter of 1417; the main fleet reached Aden, as on the fourth expedition, but a squadron that split off along the way is said to have reached Malindi on the east coast of the African continent. When it returned home in August 1419, it brought back rare animals such as lions, leopards, zebras, and rhinoceroses. Gavin Menzies, a British student of maritime history, argues in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America that Admiral Zheng He crossed the Atlantic in 1421, reached South America, explored the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and then returned to China following the Pacific equatorial current. It seems the Chinese navigators already knew that the Earth was round.

As the saying goes that Rome fell drunk on silk, the Silk Road was the lifeline from which Europe was born. Yet European historians still cling to the shortsighted claim that it was the road by which the Roman Empire advanced eastward.

Shanxi Province, Where Many Beauties Are Born

There is a saying: "To see 5,000 years of Chinese history, go to Shanxi (山西)." Shanxi Province, where northerners and southerners fused, is called "the China within China," the birthplace of the Yellow River civilization. For a long time the Yellow River was the boundary between southerners and northerners, a region where conflicts and wars often broke out and great events of Chinese history took place. It is where the state of Jin (晋), one of the twelve states (列國) of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, stood. The states of nomadic peoples ruled it one after another. The states of the Han Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, and Hui (a Muslim people connected with Persia) were unified by the Northern Wei (386–534) of the Xianbei, and in its early years the Northern Wei capital was Datong in northern Shanxi. The Northern Wei later came to rule nearly all of north China.

During the Tang dynasty (618–907), this region was called Hedong (河東), meaning "east of the Yellow River." Because it was a military stronghold, it was contested by countless foreign peoples. For the northern peoples to conquer the Chinese mainland, they had to strike Shanxi, just below the Great Wall. In every such upheaval of history, Shanxi served as the rear base, so it is called "the treasure house of Chinese history, culture, and art." Shanxi is surrounded on the south and west by the Yellow River, and on the north the Great Wall forms its border with Inner Mongolia. The ancient city of Pingyao, the Wang Family Compound, the Jinci Temple, the Yungang Grottoes, the Wooden Pagoda of Yingxian, and the Hanging Temple are here.

Because it has the most coal mines in China, it secured financial resources early and became China's financial center, a region with a high standard of living and many rich people and politicians. Shanxi Province (山西省), known as the starting point of the "Noodle Road," was from the beginning a region of East Asians who had lived for tens of thousands of years in loess caves. Even today one can sometimes see residents living in dugout caves. It is said that as the Han Chinese of Central Asia crossed the Yellow River and migrated into Shanxi thousands of years ago, the blood of the two peoples mixed and beauties began to be born. It is said that China's Four Great Beauties — Xi Shi, Wang Zhaojun, Diaochan, and Yang Guifei — were born in Shanxi, where the two peoples met.

Of Xi Shi it is said that when she looked down into a well, the swimming fish stopped still; of Wang Zhaojun, that the wild geese flying overhead stopped their wings at the lady's beauty and fell to the ground. Of Diaochan it is said that the moon, seeing her, felt ashamed and hid its face, and of Yang Guifei, that the flowers, seeing her, bowed their heads in shame.