Precious Stones on the Silk Road

The trade in precious and semi-precious stones was one of the most ancient and durable components of the Silk Road economy. Jade, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires, garnets, and turquoise moved along the same corridors that carried silk and spices, and the geography of the gemstone trade did much to determine the geography of the routes. Some of the most important sources of gemstones — the jade mines of Khotan, the lapis quarries of Badakhshan, the ruby mines of Burma, the sapphire deposits of Sri Lanka — were nodes on the network, and the trade in stones helped to bind the producing regions to the consuming markets of China, India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. The wider pattern of overland commerce is mapped in the article on the routes of the Silk Road, and the economic infrastructure that carried the stones is described in the article on Silk Road economy.

Jade from Khotan

The single most important gemstone in the Chinese market was jade, the white and green nephrite worked in China since the Neolithic period. The principal source was the kingdom of Khotan (modern Hotan, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region), on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, where the rivers that flowed from the Kunlun Mountains brought down boulders of jade from the surrounding hills. The Khotan mines had been worked since at least the Bronze Age, and the Han Chinese, who valued jade more highly than any other material, sent large quantities of silk to Khotan in exchange for raw and worked jade. The trade in jade, like the trade in horses and silk, was one of the original economic engines of the network, and it persisted long after the Roman and Tang demand for the route had faded. I have always thought the standard accounts undersell the Khotan case — the city was, in its prime, the principal Chinese source of white jade for nearly a thousand years, and the mines are still worked in the modern period under the same geological conditions.

The trade in Khotan jade was the principal economic activity of the southern branch of the Tarim routes, and the city of Khotan, on the route that ran from Dunhuang through the southern Tarim to Kashgar, was one of the great oasis kingdoms of the Silk Road. By the Tang dynasty, jade was being worked into a wide range of objects: girdle pendants, cups, hairpins, and ceremonial blades. The Chinese taste for jade was so strong that it became, in effect, a second currency in the tribute system of the early empires. A point that is often missed: the Khotan rivers still produce jade, and the modern Hotan jade market is the largest in China, but the geological depletion of the easily-reached deposits has been a concern since at least the eighteenth century.

Stones, unlike silk, leave almost no archaeological trace.

Lapis lazuli from Badakhshan

The second great gemstone of the Silk Road was lapis lazuli, the deep blue stone used in the East for jewellery and inlay and, in the West, for the pigment ultramarine. The principal source was the Sar-i Sang mines in the Kokcha valley, in what is now Badakhshan in northeastern Afghanistan (the mines are still worked, and remain the principal world source). The mines had been worked for more than six thousand years when they were first described in Chinese sources in the Tang dynasty, and they remained the principal source of lapis for the entire Old World until the modern period. The earliest substantial lapis finds in the archaeological record — the Royal Cemetery of Ur, the Badari predynastic Egyptian material — are now thought to be from Sar-i Sang or its geological relatives, which is, when you stop to think about it, an extraordinary length of supply chain.

Lapis was worked in Afghanistan and exported in three principal directions. Westward, it travelled through the markets of the Levant to the workshops of Byzantium and the medieval West, where it was used for reliquaries, icons, and the pigment ultramarine. Eastward, it travelled through the Pamirs into the Tarim Basin and on to China, where it was used in Buddhist sculpture and in the court jewellery of the Tang and Yuan dynasties. Southward, it travelled into the markets of India, where the Mughal emperors used it in the inlay work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the most spectacular surviving example is the pietra dura work of the Taj Mahal, which used Badakhshan lapis in significant quantities. Popular accounts tend to oversell the West-bound trade; the East-bound trade, particularly into Tang and Yuan China, was at least as large, and the Chinese demand for ultramarine-grade blue is, in my view, the single most under-studied part of the lapis trade.

A personal note

The trade in precious stones along the Silk Road is one of the hardest parts of the story to reconstruct, because the goods are small, easily concealed, and almost never leave archaeological traces. Most of what we know comes from textual sources, which are biased toward the precious and the famous. The bulk of the trade, in lower-grade stones, is largely invisible in the record.

Further reading

If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
• Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
• Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
• The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.

Related pages

Silk Road trade: goods, routes, and economy · The routes of the Silk Road · Kashgar, the western gateway to the Tarim Basin · The history of the Silk Road · and the rest under the main guide.