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From the Silk Road to the Railroad (andBack): The Means and Meanings of theIranian Encounter with ChinaNile GreenPublished online: 19 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Nile Green , Iranian Studies (2013): From the Silk Road to the Railroad(and Back): The Means and Meanings of the Iranian Encounter with China, Iranian Studies, DOI:10.1080/00210862.2013.855047

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Nile Green

From the Silk Road to the Railroad (and Back): The Means and Meaningsof the Iranian Encounter with China

In view of the recent expansion of Indo-Persian studies, the neglect of the Sino-Persian nexusis a missed opportunity to place Iranian history on a larger Asian stage. While Iraniancontact with China has continued episodically from antiquity to modernity, scholars haveso far focused almost exclusively on the pre-modern phases of exchange. As a contributionto developing the field of Sino-Persian studies, this article situates two twentieth centuryIranian travelers to China against the changing background of Chinese–Iranianexchange from the medieval to modern period. In so doing, it demonstrates theinfrastructural and conceptual apparatus that enabled the modern Iranian encounterwith China while asking how, if at all, twentieth century intellectuals were able to drawon a longer history of interaction to find meanings for Sino-Persian exchange.

The friendship of Iran and China is rooted in a thousand yearsAnd today an Iranian friend has come to our village…

The road of friendship is glittering with the splendor of the sun.The Silk Road ( jadeh-ye abrisham) is glittering.1

Introduction

From pre-Islamic antiquity through the Mongol period, Iran maintained irregular butsustained contacts with China. One set of outcomes was the introduction of Zoroas-trianism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and, eventually, Islam into the terri-tories of Chinese empires, along with their accompanying literatures. Another setof outcomes saw a counter-flow of religious and cultural imports into Iran, whetherin terms of Buddhism, ceramics, silk or a variety of technologies. Filtered throughthe cultural matrices of Central Asia and the so-called “Silk Road,” the forms ofIslam that developed in China absorbed many Persian elements, particularlythrough the impact of Persian Sufi writings on the Chinese Islamic syllabus.2 Repeat-edly interrupted and recommenced, Iranian contact with China has been sequenced

Nile Green is Professor of History at UCLA. I am most grateful to Jonathan Lipman, Masumi Mat-sumoto, Alexandre Papas and Rahim Shayegan for comments and suggestions. I am also thankful to thevarious Hui and Uighur Muslims who guided me through their mosques and other historical buildings indifferent parts of China.

Iranian Studies, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2013.855047

© 2013 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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through distinct periods of interaction, each with their own motivations and mechan-isms of exchange. Yet despite this long history of episodic contact, the balance of scho-larship weighs far more heavily in favor of antiquity, with a diminishing proportion ofattention given to the medieval, early modern and, least of all, the modern periods. Asa contribution to promoting interest in Iran’s modern connections with China, thisarticle uses two twentieth century Persian travel accounts as examples of two distinctphases of modern exchange.In order to highlight what was both recurrent and distinctive in this modern period

of contact, the article first presents a survey of Sino-Iranian interactions from the med-ieval to modern periods, allowing us to pinpoint convergences as well as divergences inthe twentieth century. It then turns to the travelogues of Mehdi Qoli Hedayat (1863–1955), who visited China in 1904, and Mohammed ‘Ali Eslami Nodoushan (1925–),who visited China in 1975, as examples of two phases of modern Iranian engagementwith China. By placing these travelers against the background of prior Sino-Iranianexchange, the aim is to show how, if at all, modern Iran’s intellectuals were able todraw on a premodern “connected history.” In this way, the article compares twoperiods of globalization to ask whether an earlier phase left any meaningful legacy(where practical or conceptual) for a later phase. By comparing the infrastructuresof how premodern and modern Iranian contacts with China were undertaken, andassessing whether twentieth century Iranian travelers were influenced or even awareof earlier contacts, we are also able to explore the nature of Eurasia’s globalizationas either an incremental and continuous process or a sequence of episodic and discon-tinuous periods of connectivity. Finally, a critical understanding of how this relation-ship evolved is all the more important in view of China’s recent emergence as Iran’slargest trading partner, itself part of China’s broader outreach to the Middle East.3 Yetthe concern here is less with international politics than with intellectual historythrough tracing the ways in which new forms of transnational mobility allowed theIranian intelligentsia to conceptualize China, both in itself and in relation to theirown country.Geopolitical considerations have certainly generated an Iranian diplomatic and

business discourse about China since the modern thaw in relations created by thehigh level official visits to China of Farah Pahlavi and Amir-‘Abbas Hoveyda in the1970s and ‘Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and ‘Ali Khamena’i in the 1980s.4

However, even prior to these diplomatic contacts, cultural connections were beingmade between China and Iran. As they also did for Chinese intellectuals, the arche-ological discoveries of Albert von le Coq, Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin in ChineseCentral Asia during the early twentieth century led a small number of Iranian scholarsto realize that unknown dimensions of “Iranian” history were also to be found inChinese Central Asia and beyond into “China proper,” even though Chinese andJapanese scholars were much quicker to take up (or at least translate) the works ofHedin et al.5 By the 1950s, such distinguished scholars as Mojtaba Minovi (1903–76) were already working on Iran’s medieval links with China and by the mid-1970s the Pahlavi promotion of Iran’s pre-Islamic history saw the publication of sig-nificant scholarly works on Sino-Persian interactions in antiquity.6 Yet, in conceptual

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terms, a simple and evocative phrase was a vital asset for both Europeans and MiddleEasterners seeking to tell such a story of Eurasian exchange. This was the concept ofthe “Silk Road.” Having first been coined in 1877 by the Silesian geographer Ferdi-nand von Richthofen (1833–1905), the German term Seidenstrasse graduallywound its way through other languages into English, most prominently throughthe 1938 English edition of Sven Hedin’s Swedish work, Sidenvägen (Silk Road).7

In turn, the concept of the “Silk Road” wound its way into Persian as variously rah-eabrisham or jadeh-ye abrisham, though the term was apparently not translated intoPersian until the late 1950s or early 1960s, possibly being first used in the influentialIranological journal, Sokhan.8 As a Wanderwort in its own right, by the end of thetwentieth century the borrowed concept of the “Silk Road” proved to be a productivetool for carving out the historical geography of a Greater Iran whose cultural impactwas felt as far away as China. Since the 1980s in particular, Iranian interest in histori-cal connections with China has seen the publication of numerous Persian works onthe Silk Road, whether by such distinguished figures as the Franco-Iranian scholarAly Mazahéri (1914–91) or such local antiquarians as Homayun Amir Yaganah.9

Pointing back to the imported trajectory of the concept, in other cases writings ofEuropean and American scholars have been translated into Persian.10 Throughsuch historiographical re-conceptualizing of the Iranian past, the “Silk Road” hasafforded a venerable etiology for the Islamic Republic’s peculiar reliance on a commu-nist and atheist nation.In view of the rapid recent rise in the usage of rah-e abrisham and jadeh-ye abrisham

in Persian historical writings, by examining the writings of two twentieth centuryIranian travelers to China this article aims to chart something of the history ofboth the term and the contacts to which it refers. Since the Persian concept of the“Silk Road” has become a central part of both diplomatic and cultural visions ofIran’s international reach, the following pages serve as an exercise in conceptual arche-ology by exploring whether the concept was already being used in earlier twentiethcentury Persian accounts of China. By comparing a late Qajar travel account ofChina with a late Pahlavi account, we are therefore able not only to compare the infra-structural means of their journeys across Asia, but also to begin excavating the mean-ings of China for modern Iran. By looking first at the history of Sino-Persian contactup to the 1900s, we will also be able to judge whether these later contacts represented acontinuously connected history or an episodic globalization that eventually if inven-tively reclaimed that prior era of exchange.

A Brief History of Sino-Persian Exchange

Without grasping something of the longer history of Iranian interaction with China,it is impossible to assess whether in its practical or conceptual apparatus, in its meansor meanings, the twentieth century Iranian engagement with China represented a newphase of connection. What we will see, then, in the following pages is a three phasehistory of Sino-Persian. In the first (largely medieval) phase, Persian spread widely

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in China as a result of the old overland connections through Central Asia. In thesecond (largely early modern) phase, Persian in China acquired a relatively auton-omous existence through the breakdown in direct overland connections acrossCentral Asia, while also losing influence through the rise of a Muslim syllabus inChinese. In the third (largely modern) phase, Persian was substantially replaced byArabic through a combination of Chinese interest in Sunni reformism and more effec-tive channels of steam and print communications with the Arab Middle East.In fact, for most of Iranian history, China was more a focus of imagination than an

object of knowledge, its magnificence magnified by its inaccessibility.11 In medievalPersian literature, the mysteriousness of China afforded fantasies based on longstand-ing stereotypes. Above all, Chin represented beauty and idol-worship: the phrases bot-khaneh-ye Chin (idol-house of China) and negarestan-e Chin (picture-gallery ofChina) were metaphors for exotic places and their captivating but mysteriousinhabitants.12 Following the brief unification of Eurasia after the Mongol conquests,the Il-Khanid period (1256–1335) saw the earlier vagueness of both Persian andArabic geographical works give way to more reliable historical writings on China,such as the sections included in the Jame‘ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din (1247–1318).13 In the following centuries, the most reliable Persian account of China wasthe Khita’i-nameh composed in 1516 by the Central Asian Sayyed ‘Ali AkbarKhita’i, though the text was more widely read in its Ottoman Turkish translationthan in its Persian original.14 Apart from this textually brokered contact, for themost part, the Safavid period saw a reduction in the direct communications forgedunder the Il-Khans. In the century after the Safavid revolution, Iran’s gradual “Shi‘iza-tion” meant that neither Turkic nor Hui Sunni Muslims from Central Asia or Chinahad any great incentive to study in Iranian madrasas.15 Meanwhile the rise of theUzbeks in Central Asia created a barrier for Iranian merchants or scholars seekingto travel into Ming or Qing domains and Shi‘is were still being enslaved by CentralAsia’s tribal groups as late as the mid-nineteenth century. While the occasionalPersian (and certainly Afghan) dervish and merchant may occasionally havereached Kashgar or Yarkand after their fall to the Qing after 1755, the Silk Roadhad long fallen into abeyance as a genuine means of exchange between Iran andChina.16

However, knowledge about China in Iran formed only one dimension of Sino-Persian exchange, for knowledge of Persian (if not necessarily knowledge aboutIran) in China had a more robust and continuous history. Through the continuationof the cultural and mercantile connections that had first developed in antiquity, theTang-Song period (618–1279) in China saw the development of the earliestMuslim communities in China.17 While port cities such as Canton (Guangzhou)saw early Arab Muslim settlement via what has recently been conceived as a “MaritimeSilk Road,” the overland trade routes across Central Asia saw the arrival of Muslimmerchants from Persian-speaking regions.18 Even as these culturally Persianate mer-chants and, occasionally, scholars intermarried with Chinese women, Persian survivedto become the lingua franca of the Chinese Muslims and their interlocutors.19 Butwhile the Persian language would survive in China through future centuries, its

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fortunes had already reached their peak under the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty between1271 and 1368, when, along with Chinese and Mongolian, Persian served as an officiallanguage of administration and education.20

The second phase of Sino-Persian relations was characterized more by disconnec-tion than exchange. While the state importance of Persian rapidly declined in theMing period (1368–1644), Persian (together with Arabic) works remained an impor-tant part of the jingtang jiaoyu (scripture hall education) used to educate ChineseMuslim ‘ulema.21 However, in the later Ming period, Persian usage began to diminishthrough a new movement towards creating an Islamic syllabus in Chinese, known astheHan Kitab (literally, Chinese books).22 In some cases, as with the translation of theMersad al-‘Ibad of Najm al-Din Razi (d. 654/1256) and the ‘Asha‘‘at al-Lama‘at ofJami (d.898/1492), this saw Persian works pass into Chinese, enabling them to main-tain their place on the syllabus as part of the “fourteen classics.”23 While increasinglyabsorbed into the Chinese cultural arena, Chinese (or Hui) Muslims still absorbedmany words from Persian into their distinguishing patois, known as Huihuihua.24

Examples of such vocabulary include ahong (from akhond, “mullah”), da-shi-man(from daneshmand, “scholar”), die-li-wei-shi (from darvesh, “mendicant”) and na-ma-si (from namaz, “prayer”).25 At madrasas where the Han Kitab were not taught(particularly in Chinese Central Asia), Persian works remained part of the syllabusthrough the Qing period (1644–1911), even into the twentieth century in somecases, albeit only at an advanced level which few candidates reached. Writing in1918, the American missionary Reverend Mark Botham was able to report that therevival in learning promoted by China’s Muslim reformists saw one Beijing booksellerkeep “a stock of Persian and Arabic works, numbering one hundred and twenty-eight.”26

Even so, the eclipse of Persian was already well underway by the seventeenthcentury. For the high status that the language had enjoyed in Yuan and early MingChina was not only dislodged by the rise of the Han Kitab Islamic syllabus inChinese, but also by the revival of Arabic studies in China from the late eighteenthand, more sustainably, from the late nineteenth century, which further acceleratedthe diminishing of Persian in China. One impetus behind this Arabic revival camefrom the Muslim renewal movements founded by Ma Mingxin (1719?–81), whosereturn to China in 1761 after years of study in Mecca and Yemen saw him introducea new Naqshbandi school of scripturalist renewal, and Ma Wanfu (1853–1934),whose own sojourn in Mecca between 1888 and 1892 saw him adopt ideas fromthe followers of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and found a parallel Ahl al-Sunna (Chinese: Aihailisunnai) movement on his return to China.27 The followersof Ma Wanfu later changed their name to al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Chinese: Yihei-wani) and through their slogan “venerate the scriptures, reform the customs”(Chinese: Zunjing gaisu) directed an influential campaign against the Sufi texts andcustoms that had for centuries been so central a part of scholarly and popular Islamamong the Hui. Since many of the most important Sufi works on the traditional syl-labus—by Razi, Sa‘di and Jami—were Persian works, these reforms had an inevitablenegative effect on Persian studies. The increasing prominence of the Yiheiwani

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enabled their anti-Persian reforms to be widely institutionalized in Chinese Muslimschools. By effectively aligning themselves to the Chinese nationalist movementafter the 1911 revolution, for example, in Republican China (1912–49) theYiheiwani were instrumental in directing the syllabus of many madrasas away fromthe Persian texts they denigrated as conduits of Sufi “innovation” (bida‘).28 Herewas a process that Zvi Ben-Dor Benite has referred to as “the Arabization ofChinese Islam.”29

In view of this article’s partial focus on means of exchange, it is important to recog-nize how the revival of Arabic in China was enabled by the new communication tech-nologies of steam and print.30 As a result of the open-door policy of the late Qingperiod, the textual output of the expanding Muslim print sphere of the MiddleEast and South and Southeast Asia begin to enter China through the treaty ports.The effects of this print-mediated contact were tremendous for Chinese Muslimswho, in developing their own Chinese language Islam during their long centuries ofisolation in the Ming and Qing periods, had largely forgotten even the Arabicterms for “Islam” and “Muslim.”31 While magazines and books entered China fromthe productive print marketplaces of Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, India and theDutch East Indies, such that Arabic, Turkish, Urdu and even Malay journals weretranslated, read and responded to by Chinese readers, researchers have so farlocated no Iranian magazines or books reaching China in the decades either side of1900.32 One survey of hundreds of Muslim books published in China during the1920s reveals a corpus of entirely Arabic texts with no Persian books printed atall.33 Thus, while an earlier period of overland Eurasian exchange in the Mongolera had seen Persian spread east into China, the later period of industrial globalizationleft Iran—and Persian—as bystanders.Industrial communications technologies did not only allow Arabic printed books to

reach China. They also allowed Chinese students to travel to study in Arab lands asthe impact of such Arabic journals as Rashid Rida’s famous al-Manar and al-Azhar’sbulletinNur al-Islam attracted Chinese Muslims to the journals’ home institutions. Inthe opening decades of the twentieth century, Hui students thus went to study inEgypt, Turkey, Arabia and India, but not, as far as we know, in Iran.34 This wasperhaps no surprise: Qajar Iranian institutions appear to have pursued no projectsof outreach to Chinese Muslims. Other states and their institutions did. In 1904,for example, the Ottoman government dispatched books to fill a Muslim schoollibrary in Beijing and also made arrangements to send teachers, leading in 1907 tothe dispatch from Istanbul of ‘Ali Reza and Hafez Hasan to teach, via Arabic, atthe Ottoman-supported Dar al-‘Ulum-e Hamidiyeh in the Chinese capital.35

Indian Muslims also made contact with China. These included Indian Muslim mis-sionaries from the Ahmadiyya Movement as well as soldiers and merchants.36 As Mat-sumoto Masumi has noted, “Muslims from India and Southeast Asia in charge ofinternational trade often visited and stayed in the coastal cities of China such asShanghai and Tianjin. They also carried new trends of Islamic Revival to China.”37

The relative absence of Iranian merchants from these markets perhaps also contribu-ted to the incrementally marginalized place of Iran in modern Chinese Islam. When

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the American missionary Charles Ogilvie described the foreign travels of severalBeijing imams in 1913, he thus mentioned their journeys to Mecca, Jerusalem, Con-stantinople, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but not to Iran.38

Through the new connections of steam and print, educated Chinese Muslims read(and sometimes responded in writing to) imported journals, particularly such Egyptianperiodicals as al-Manar, al-Majallah al-Azhar, Nur al-Islam, al-Fath and al-Irshad.39

In this way, communications infrastructures amplified the theologically reformist re-orientation towards Arabic rather than Persian studies. There were knock-on effects inturn from these new Arabic links. In 1929 reformist Hui scholars at the ChengdaNormal School in Beijing’s Tongsi Mosque founded their own journal, Yuehua(1929–48).40 Other publications followed and between 1911 and 1937 some thirtynewMuslim journals were published in Beijing alone.41 The contents of these journals(particularly Yuehua) often comprised translations of articles from imported period-icals, but, again, Arabic and even Urdu journals seem to have been read in place ofPersian ones. The cause appears to have been a combination of Egypt and India’smore effective communications links compared to Iran and of the Sunni profile oftheir institutions.The reading of Egyptian and Indian journals in turn created interest in the reformed

teaching methods of Egyptian and Indian Muslim colleges.42 In 1931, this led to thedispatch of four Chinese students to study at al-Azhar in Cairo, followed by afurther sixteen students in 1937.43 With their minds inspired by the import ofprinted books, the export of these Hui bodies was in turn enabled by steam travel.After sailing from Hong Kong aboard a French steamship, the first student partystopped at Singapore, Colombo, and Aden before reaching Egypt: Iran offered noteven a port-of-call on the Muslim itineraries of the steam age. As one of the studentswrote in a letter published in the April 1932 issue of the Yuehua journal, “After ourarrival at Port Said, a telegram was dispatched to the Azhar. When we alighted fromthe train at the Cairo station, four men from the school were there to meet us.”44 Itis notable that this influential twentieth century intellectual traffic between Egyptand China took place without any medieval antecedents, such that Egyptian Muslims(including even the scholars of al-Azhar) were astonished to learn that Muslims evenexisted in China. Moreover, China’s then-uncertain population statistics enabled oneof the students to claim in a personal audience with Egypt’s King Fu’ad that therewere fifty million Muslims in China in need of assistance from their Arab co-religio-nists.45 In response, the traffic in books and bodies accelerated between Egypt andChina, connections that were made possible by the revival of Arabic rather thanPersian in China. Iran’s medieval links with China and Persian’s role among ChineseMuslims had been replaced by the Egyptian and Arabic connections that wereenabled by a newer period of globalization.Steam and print, then, were the means of an Arabic revival in China. Whether

directly from the treaty ports of the Chinese coast or indirectly via overland connec-tions from Yunnan to Burma, where steamships were accessible from Rangoon, steam-ship connections were a key factor in enabling Chinese Muslim contact with Egypt,Arabia and India, as well as in enabling increasing numbers of Hui to perform the

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hajj.46 In 1937, over 170 Chinese Muslims boarded a steamer at Shanghai to make thepilgrimage.47 By the same token, the connection of Chinese ports to the steamshipitineraries of the Indian Ocean saw the establishment of new Muslim communitiesin such cities as Shanghai and Hong Kong. Mainly as a result of labor migration bysoldiers and merchants, as early as the 1850s Indian Muslims formed a communityin Hong Kong that was sufficiently large to be recognized by the colonial govern-ment.48 This in turn enabled the construction of several mosques (the first completedin 1890) and community associations that served as channels into mainland China forIndian Muslim ideas, not least through the marriage of many Indian Muslims to localChinese women.49 As hundreds of Chinese Muslims also went to study in Japan in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century, and began publishing journals fromTokyo for their co-religionists in China, even Japanese came to rival (and probablyovertake) Persian as a communicational medium for China’s Muslims.50 Pittedagainst these new connections was China’s older link to an Iran that in the Qajarperiod was bypassed by most of the infrastructures of industrial globalization.While future research may contradict this impression, it therefore appears that the iso-lationism created by Iran’s combination of Shi‘ism with a lack of either railheads or amajor steamer port led Iran to be overlooked by Hui modernists who looked insteadto the reformist Muslim organizations of Egypt, the late Ottoman Empire, colonialIndia and even Japan. And so, in spite of the earlier history of the Persian languagein China, in the early twentieth century both Persian and Iran were largely leftbehind by Chinese Muslims as Iranians, for their part, made little attempt toengage them.Railroad links were also important in bringing Muslim travelers into China, albeit

more typically from the Russian Empire rather than from Iran, which lacked any railinfrastructure prior to the 1930s. The most important case of Muslim railroadmigration into China was the Tatars, who fled Russia in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries to found an important community in Harbin. (The sameperiod also saw the creation of Harbin’s important Jewish community).51 Based inthis new port (which until 1918 was ruled by Russia), the Tatars printed numerousbooks and journals that brought the reformist ideas of Russian Islam to northeastChina, though it is unclear to what extent Hui Muslims accessed these works.52 Aswell as the mass exodus of Tatars, the railroad also brought many individualMuslim travelers into China, some of whom left records of their travels. One such tra-veler was the Siberian Tatar and pan-Islamist ‘Abd al-Rashid Ibrahim (1857–1944),whose own vividly described Turkish travelogue recorded many varied encountersalong the railroad to China.53 Yet even though by 1915 several railroads connectedBeijing to the treaty ports of the East China Sea, aside from the line (opened in1907) that linked Beijing to the city of Taiyuan in Shanxi province, no railroadwent anywhere near China’s Central Asian provinces, leaving several thousandmiles between China and Iran disconnected from the age of steam. The railroadhad not so much replaced the Silk Road as circumvented it.Overall, what we have seen is a sequence of communicational changes through

which Chinese Muslim contact with Arabic learning and Arab lands led in the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth century to an increase in Arabic intellectual input intoChina and a corresponding decrease in Persian input. In part, this was the result of thevigor of reformist Arab institutions and magazines, particularly al-Manar, which wasread from the Mediterranean to British India and the Dutch East Indies as well asChina.54 Moreover, the internal logic of Islamic reformist thought placed a fargreater emphasis on Arabic as the language of scripture, with Persian being associatedwith the Sufi texts and rival scholarly authorities which reformists were attempting toreplace by their renewed emphasis on Arabic and their new connections with Egypt,al-Azhar and al-Manar. Even before this modern revival of Arabic, Persian had suf-fered through the rise of the Chinese Islamic syllabus (Han Kitab). But the revivalof Arabic learning meant that Hui students would approach Persian as a third literarylanguage to acquire after Chinese and Arabic.55 Though in some non-reformistChinese madrasas, Persian texts retained a foothold at the highest stages of the sylla-bus, where advanced ‘ulema would be introduced to teachings of Jami, few made it thisfar.In late nineteenth and twentieth century China, the increasing (though never total)

eclipse of Persian by Arabic had thus come as Hui intellectuals had connected them-selves to the Arab Middle East via the port cities of eastern China and not via the oldoverland Silk Road. Aside from the ease of maritime travel by steamship, from the latenineteenth century the intervening Central Asian territories between China and Iranexperienced a sequence of turmoil, from the kidnapping practices of Turkomannomads and the Czarist conquests to the Muslim rebellions in Xinjiang and therefugee flights from the October Revolution. From around 1900, the only practicaloverland route between Iran and China was via the Trans-Siberian and Manchurianrailroads, which involved incredibly long detours. Nonetheless, it was this circuitousrail route that Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, the first of our Iranian travelers under scrutiny,chose to make his journey to China.In turning to the records of two journeys to China, in 1904 and 1975, we are now

prepared to ask two sets of questions that connect the travelers’ evidence to what wehave seen of the history of prior Sino-Persian contact. First, did the means of thesetravelers’ journeys to China and interactions with Chinese people in any way buildon surviving mechanisms of pre-modern Sino-Persian exchange? Second, turningfrom practical means to conceptual meanings, were either of these two modern trave-lers sufficiently aware of this earlier history of Sino-Persian exchange to use it to reflecton Iran’s place in the world? In this way, the two travelogues help us to empiricallyassess whether an earlier period of connection passed on to the twentieth centuryany practical or conceptual means of exchange. In this, we can also learn somethingabout the continuous or episodic nature of cultural connections across Eurasia.

From Silk Road to Railroad: Mehdi Qoli Hedayat

A forty year old civil servant and future statesman, Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, travelled toChina in 1904 with a small party of fellow Iranians, including the former prime

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minister Mirza ‘Ali Asghar Khan Atabek. Their visit to China was part of a worldwidesteam journey that culminated in the hajj to Mecca.56 Enabled by the Russian railroadsystem, Hedayat’s journey from Iran began by sailing on a small boat from Bandar-eAnzali to Baku in the Russian Caucasus, where he boarded a train for Moscow andtransferred onto the Trans-Siberian Railway.57 He reached geographical (if in thisperiod not political) China as his train arrived at the port of Port Arthur(Lüshun), having crossed the entire length of Siberia.58 What is immediately clearfrom this itinerary is that it held nothing in common with the former CentralAsian routes of connectivity that had linked Iran to China in the medieval period.From camel caravans to railroads, the means of exchange had changed completely;as a consequence, the geography of exchange had changed too, for the Trans-Siberianran far north of the former Silk Road.Since Hedayat’s journey to and then around China was enabled by rail, it is worth

giving a brief overview of the state of China’s rail network by the time of his arrival atLüshun in 1904. For this furthers the point about the novelty of the railroad’s newgeography of exchange as it bypassed Central Asia entirely. After the short-lived“Woosung Road” railroad from Shanghai, which only operated between 1876 and1877, China’s first sustained railroad was the “Kaiping Tramway” which opened in1881 to link the coalfields around Tangshan with the town of Xugezhuang (Hsuoko-chuang).59 However, the real expansion of rail into China began around 1900 when,as the Jingha Railway, the Kaiping line was extended to connect Beijing with the treatyport of Tianjin. In 1904, another line opened to link the Chinese capital with theGerman-administered port of Qingdao (Tsingtao). Further extensions to these lineswere subsequently made as part of the Russian imperial Trans-Siberian Railwayproject, which led to the China Eastern Railway (which opened in 1901) and theSouth Manchuria Railway (which opened in 1903). Together, these lines connectedBeijing with the ports of Tianjin, Harbin, Shenyang and Lüshun, thence to theTrans-Siberian Railway and ultimately Western Europe. Iran (and Europe) werenow linked with China through railroads that were in no sense geographical heirsof the Silk Road.If this speaks to the means by which Hedayat was able to reach China after centu-

ries during which Iranian access to the region had been rendered almost impossible, wemust now ask what an Iranian of his period might have known about China. Hedayathad earlier studied in Germany and was probably as well-informed as any of his coun-trymen about world affairs in general, and the impact of European expansion onChina’s maritime frontiers in particular. But setting aside such overseas education,at the beginning of the twentieth century educated Iranians appear to have had fewsources of knowledge about China available to them in Persian. Certainly, therewas the occasional printed history, such as the Ketab Mirat al-Zaman dar Tarikh-eChin u Machin u Japan written in Bombay by the well-known Iranian publisherMalek al-Kuttab Shirazi, who in 1896 had also printed the famous missive on theTobacco Revolt by ‘Abd al-Baha.60 A decade later, a Persian translation of a historyof China written by the French orientalist Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier (1801–73) was published in Tehran.61 Presumably, there were also newspaper reports on

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China in the Iranian press, though of course the great newspaper expansion during theConstitutional Revolution had not happened by the time Hedayat set off on hisjourney. Certainly, there were Iranian newspaper reports on Japan (which Hedayatvisited directly after China), though Japan was undoubtedly much more prominentthan China in Iranian intelligentsia discourse during the early twentieth centuryand China inspired no comparable work to Hosayn ‘Ali Shirazi’s Mikado-nameh.62

This was somewhat ironic, given the fact that China’s situation as a tottering auto-cratic monarchy impinged on by a range of European powers offered a much closerparallel of the Iranian situation than Japan. For their part, Chinese newspapers hadcertainly reported on events in Iran as early as 1904, when Hedayat visited China.The context was the build-up to the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, which gar-nered much attention from such Chinese periodicals as Zhengyi tongbao (Journal ofPolitics and Arts), Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) and Minbao (People’s Maga-zine) between 1904 and the downfall of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911.63 What iscertainly clear, then, is that Hedayat’s own data-gathering visit to China exactlycoincided with the beginning of interest in Iran among Chinese proponents of repub-licanism who were affiliated with the new magazines. The very fact that this mutualinterest and awareness was possible was the result of the new communications infra-structure of the period, particularly the telegraph, which relayed the news from Tehranthat was carried in these papers. Prior to his departure on the world tour that took himto China, Hedayat had studied medicine in Berlin and worked in the Tehran Tele-graph Office and later the Dar al-Fonun polytechnic. His use of trains, mail and tele-graphs were only some of the ways in which his travels were linked to the newinfrastructure of globalization that were, however circuitously, now connecting Iranand China. But what is important here is that it was not Chinese Muslim ideologueswho were taking an interest in Iran, for their interests had already been captured bythe Muslim modernizers of Egypt and India.Turning towards Hedayat’s actual travels, we can now work thematically through

his recorded experiences, addressing who and what he saw and understood in China,and asking to what extent, if any, the Sino-Persian legacy of earlier centuries enabledhis interactions with the people he met. To first lay out his itinerary, after spendingseveral days in Port Arthur, his party next took a boat to Chifu (Yantai); thenceanother boat to Tientsin (Tianjin), the main port for Beijing; thence a train to theimperial capital itself; thence another train to Tsingtau (Qingdao); thence anothersteamship to Shanghai, from where he and his companions sailed to Kobe for theirtour of Japan.64 The first characteristic of Hedayat’s itinerary which becomes immedi-ately clear is the extent to which it was based around the infrastructure of steam travel:his China consisted solely of the treaty ports and Beijing, which by 1904 were con-nected by steamships and the first railroads in China. Having formerly worked asthe director of the Post, Customs, and Telegraph Office in Tabriz, Hedayat was akeen observer of this modern infrastructure. He commented regularly on the con-ditions of different steamships, comparing those operated by the different Europeannations with concessions at the treaty ports.65 In several ports he took an interestin customs (gomrok) procedures and emigration (mohajerat), meeting with the post

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master at Chifu (with whom he was able to converse in German) and describing theemigration from Shanghai of large numbers of Chinese workers to new labor marketsin Hong Kong, Formosa and the Dutch East Indies.66 His former occupation in theTelegraph Office similarly led him to describe telegraphy procedures, not least whenhe himself received a telegram from Tehran which had been relayed from Iran toEurope, then the United States, and then across the Pacific to reach him in Chifu,travelling a distance of “five thousand farsakhs” in only six hours.67 The infrastructureof global communications was now such that it was far quicker to send a message fromChina the long way around the world westward from Tehran than it was to attempt tosend it across the old overland route through Central Asia. Summed up in Hedayat’smarveling telegraphic anecdote was the fact that the Silk Road was no longer a viablemeans of connection between Iran and China.On what was intended as a journey to instruct his politician companion Atabek in

the benefits of reform, other aspects of China’s developing infrastructure also attractedHedayat’s attention. In implicit comparison between the situation in his own pre-con-stitutional Iran and in pre-revolutionary China, he described the lavish grandeur ofthe royal Forbidden City (Qasr-e Khaqan), before turning to the evidence of progressby way of the new school opened in 1899 in Beijing.68 As a former teacher at Dar al-Fonun, Hedayat enthusiastically reinforced the point that, under the oversight of anAmerican principal, the new school’s curriculum was taught in English and Japanese(with French, German and Russian also taught), with the primary subjects on offerbeing math, chemistry, physics and medicine.69 Moving around every five days,Hedayat’s attention also naturally turned towards hotels. Here too, he relied on theinfrastructure of European-led globalization rather than the old mosafer-khanehs ofthe Silk Road. In Chifu, which he described as having two good hotels, he stayed atthe Pich Hotel, while a few days later in the treaty port of Tientsin he stayed atthe Astor House Hotel.70 The latter was a very grand establishment, as evidencedboth by the postcard which he included in the printed edition of his diary and byhis description of its great hall and gardens.71 After a train journey from Tientsin,in Beijing (“very dirty”), he stayed in the Europe Hotel (“one of the nicest inPekin”).72 Hotels in the narrow streets of Chifu’s Chinese quarter, by contrast, hedescribed as having very small rooms filled with opium smokers.73 In practicalterms, then, Hedayat’s journey to and around China made no use of the old infrastruc-ture of prior Sino-Persian exchange. For not only had the Silk Road long ceased toexist as a tangible reality, as we shall now see as we turn to Hedayat’s cultural inter-actions and conceptions of China, the ‘Silk Road’ had also yet to be adapted as aconcept by Iranians dealing with China.In assessing the extent to which Hedayat’s travels represented continuity or rupture

from the earlier long history of Sino-Persian exchange, we must therefore look beyondthe infrastructural dimensions of his journey towards its social profile. In this way, wecan assess the extent to which he and his companions associated with Han Chinese,Hui Muslims or even any Central Asian and Indian merchants among whom Persianmay have still served as a lingua franca. However, based on the evidence of Hedayat’stravelogue, the Iranians’ social encounters largely involved Europeans rather than

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Chinese of any kind. Aboard their steamship to Chifu, for example, the Iranian partymet an Englishwoman (who spoke French, German and Chinese and whom Hedayattook for a spy) as well as a group of German men and women.74 Having studied inGermany, translated German texts for Naser al-Din Shah and taught German atthe Dar al-Fonun, Hedayat mixed more often in China with Germans than withChinese. With their own concession over Kiautschou Bay (including the port ofTsingtau which Hedayat visited) between 1898 and 1919, Germans were a regularpresence in the ports of the East China Sea at the time of the Iranians’ tour. As a con-sequence, meetings with Germans crop up regularly in his travelogue. Aboard ship forTsingtau, for example, he spent a pleasant evening speaking German with threeGermans and one American passenger, remembering the German’s name as HerrSchultz.75 In Tiensin, he spent time with the Russian consul, to whom the Iranianparty turned for help rather than to any local Chinese or Muslims.76 Hedayat alsodescribed the lifestyles of the Russians, Germans and French who lived in Tiensinand who had their own orderly quarter of the city, as well as a racecourse; theRussian consul in particular was fond of horse-racing (asb-davani).77

In social terms, then, the greater proportion of Hedayat’s interactions were withEuropeans, with whom he was able to communicate, primarily in German, but alsothrough his partial knowledge of French and English. His travelogue paints a vividpicture of the multilingual world of the treaty ports, for in addition to the Germanand British presence he mentioned a Spanish hotel manager and other Spanishworkers in Chifu, where he also heard French spoken.78 Moreover, he also providedwhat may have been the first Persian account of Pidgin, which he described as a resultof mixing Chinese, French and English words, with Dutch and Spanish vocabularyalso sometimes thrown in.79 Among so many languages, though, there was no placefor Persian as the lingua franca it had once been. Indeed, at one point Hedayatbewailed the fact that Europeans always seemed to have better access to informationthan Iranians.80 The only time when Persian proved to have a viable social life inChina was when Hedayat’s party met a couple of Iranian traders, who were chieflyoccupied with tea exports.81 But far from being remnants of the old days of theSilk Road, the two Iranian merchants were based in Shanghai, a city that had scarcelyeven existed when the overland trade through Central Asia was flourishing.If the meeting with the Iranian merchants in Shanghai appears to have been the

only occasion when Hedayat encountered a fellow Persian-speaker in China, thenthis is not to say that his journey otherwise comprised only meetings with the Eur-opeans of the treaty ports. While his inability to speak Mandarin meant that noChinese appear as individuals in his travelogue, he did on the whole paint a sympath-etic picture of the Chinese people. Although he found the Chinese quarters of theports a maze of narrow, overcrowded streets filled with donkeys, cows and camels—a stark contrast to his account of the electric lighting and orderly streets of the Euro-pean quarters—he was intelligent enough not to draw negative conclusions about theChinese themselves.82 Even if it was a positive generalization based on a few inter-actions with shopkeepers, he described the Chinese as a polite and hospitablepeople.83 Later, in Beijing, he took a genuine interest in touring the Forbidden

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City, a Confucian college and a Buddhist temple, if very much in the manner of aEuropean tourist and in the company of an “interpreter” tour guide.84 There was,then, much room on such a journey for cosmopolitan discoveries, even if thePersian-mediated cosmopolitanism of old was no longer in evidence.In view of Hedayat’s itinerary, with its strong emphasis on the rail-and-steamer-

connected treaty ports, it is perhaps hardly surprising that his party encountered notraces of the Persian legacy of former exchanges. The one place on their itinerarywhere they might have encountered such survivals was Beijing. Just two years afterthey visited the city, it received another Middle Eastern visitor in Süleyman Şükrü(1865–1922?), who stayed in a lodge belonging to the city’s Hui Muslims and alsopenned an account of the non-Muslim religious groups of the city.85 According to theAmerican missionary Charles Ogilvie, writing just under a decade after Hedayat’s visit,there were no fewer than thirty-two mosques in Beijing, with the total Muslim popu-lation of the city given the impressively exact figure of 5,949 families.86 And as wehave already seen, while by the early 1900s the status of Persian had been greatly dimin-ished by the three century rise of the Chinese Han Kitab syllabus and the more recentrenaissance in Arabic studies, there nonetheless remained small numbers of Hui aswell as Turkic Muslims in Beijing able to read and perhaps even converse in Persian.Written as it was in the midst of the revival of Arabic in China, Hedayat’s account

of Beijing therefore forms something of a test case for the continued viability ofPersian as a lingua franca for visitors from Iran. He and his companions did in factmake contact with Beijing’s Muslims, visiting what Hedayat described as “a mosquein the Tatar city” (that is, within the walled Manchu inner city of Beijing) andanother (unnamed) mosque.87 Hedayat described the imam of this mosque as beingof Bukharan descent and being named Nur al-Din. It is possible that the mosquewas an outpost of the Bukhariot Tatars rather than of the Hui or other ChineseMuslim groups. Bukhariot Tatars were highly mobile and, from their main populationcenters around the Volga, Siberia and Xinjiang, were establishing mosques in suchcities as Urumqi and Harbin as well as Beijing in this period.88 In recounting hismeeting with Nur al-Din, Hedayat noted that the imam knew a few words ofArabic, but he made no mention of any exchanges in Persian.89 Turning from thespoken to the written word, Hedayat described the imam showing him a Quran,several books on fiqh and a single Hanbali law book in Persian. Clearly, Nur al-Dinwas eager to find common ground with this Persian-speaking fellow Muslim fromfar away. But insofar as we can judge on the evidence of Hedayat’s travelogue, thissingle surviving legal text was all that the Iranians encountered of the once vital pres-ence of Persian in China. Indeed, aside from a brief overview of the history of Islam inChina, which like other “potted history” sections in the travelogue appears to havebeen a later interpolation, there is no evidence that in 1904 Hedayat was at allaware that Persian had played such an important role in China’s past. After all, aslate as the 1930s, even the learned shaykhs of al-Azhar were astonished to discoverthat there were Muslims in China. Writing before the archeological rediscovery ofthe ancient Iranian past in Chinese Central Asia and before the incorporation ofthe “Silk Road” concept into Persian discourse as Jadeh-ye abrisham, it is hardly

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surprising that Hedayat was unable to grasp the clue to a forgotten history in that strayPersian manuscript in a Beijing mosque.Overall, Hedayat’s travel account clearly reveals that his journey to China was not

enabled by any remnants of a pre-modern Persian-based system of Eurasian exchange,but was based instead on the industrial infrastructure of European-dominated globa-lization. His was a journey of Russian-operated trains, British-operated boats, Amer-ican-relayed telegraphs, Spanish-staffed hotels and Russian-dominated diplomacy.From the treaty ports to his touristic excursion to Beijing (itself enabled by theKaiping railway), even the geography of his itinerary was entirely enabled by steamand he trod not even the smallest section of the Silk Road of old. And in linguisticterms it was no longer Persian that served as an inter-Asian lingua franca; rather, itwas German that was the language he most used in China. This reflected the experi-ence at the same time of the Siberian Tatar traveler ‘Abd al-Rashid Ibrahim, for whomRussian served as his main lingua franca on his own travels round the region.90

Moving finally from the practical to the conceptual realm, Hedayat did not evenmake use of the idea of the Silk Road (rah-e abrisham) when he devoted severalpages of his book to the cultivation and trade of silk in China.91 He did, however,make use of another borrowed and influential concept of the period, that of the“Yellow Peril” (khatar-e zard).92 While it is true that in this context he wrote sym-pathetically of Chinese labor migrants, the fact remains that his conceptual approachto China was not directed by the reassuring humanist language of the Silk Road butthrough the alarmist political discourse of the Yellow Peril. By the early 1900s, notonly had the legacy of Sino-Persian connections all but disappeared as a practicalmeans of exchange, but the concept of the “Silk Road” had not spread far enoughto lend Iranians meaning in the memory of those former connections.

From Railroad to Silk Road: Mohammed ‘Ali Eslami Nodoushan

Having traced both the practical and conceptual apparatus by which a late Qajarintellectual engaged with China, we now turn to a traveler from seventy years laterto examine the Iranian approach to China of the late Pahlavi period. During thedecades of Pahlavi rule, the nationalist veneration of Iran’s pre-Islamic and non-Islamic history gradually rendered China a place both for appreciating Iran’s ownhistorical past and for demonstrating its impact on the wider world. The Pahlavi-era traveler under scrutiny here, Mohammed ‘Ali Eslami Nodoushan, was born in1925 in his eponymous village of Nodoushan, around fifty miles from Yazd. LikeHedayat in the late nineteenth century, in the 1960s Nodoushan studied in Europeand went on to complete a French law doctorate.93 On his return to Iran, he tookup a teaching position in literature and law at Tehran University and began publishinga long sequence of books. By 1975, when he travelled to China as a man of forty (thesame age as Hedayat at the time of his journey), Nodoushan had already publishedaround a dozen books, beginning with poetry and moving on to essay collectionsand studies of Iranian history and literature. In the years directly preceding his

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travels in China, he wrote several works on the Shahnameh, including his Zendegi vaMarg-e Pahlavan dar Shahnameh (The Life and Death of Heroes in the Shahna-meh).94 As we shall see below, this interest in pre-Islamic Iranian history, socommon among the intellectuals of the Pahlavi period, would in turn frame his under-standing of China, an understanding that differed considerably from that of Hedayatseventy years earlier.In the background to Nodoushan’s visit lay the re-opening of Chinese–Iranian dip-

lomatic relations in the early 1970s after Iran finally recognized the People’s Republicin August 1971. In the following years, a series of high profile official visits to Chinawas made by the empress Farah and prime minister Hoveyda. Nor was Nodoushan theonly Iranian to write a travelogue of China in this period, since the aristocrat andpioneer social worker, Sattareh Farman-Farmai’an (1921–2012), also wrote aPersian account of a five week tour of China in the mid-1970s.95 Nor was Chinathe only foreign country which Nodoushan himself visited and wrote about, forshortly before his trip to China he also toured and published an account of theSoviet Union.96 Aside from Moscow and Leningrad (as it was then), his month-long itinerary there consisted mainly of the Central Asian regions of the SovietUnion, particularly the cities of Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarqand.97 Flying intoBukhara, he sat next to a teacher from that city who taught “new Soviet history”and tried to converse with him in their apparently shared language of Persian.Though Nodoushan was unable to understand much of this Central Asian Farsi(and nothing of what the teacher’s wife said), he was able to ask whether Persianpoets were still read in Bukhara and receive the pleasing answer that Ferdousi,Hafez, Sa‘di, Khayyam and Bidel were all still read there.98 Even before his visit toChina, then, Nodoushan was traveling in search of the legacy of a “Greater Iran.”If China was slowly re-opening in the 1970s, Nodoushan nonetheless arrived before

the onset of the Open and Reform Policy in 1978, which allowed Chinese Muslimsmore open religious activity, including the possibility of study in foreign Muslimnations and association with foreign Muslims, which had been curtailed since 1949.While Nodoushan was keen to locate traces of Iranian cultural impact on China,linked as it was to traditional religious schooling the Persian language was in a muchweaker state than it had been at the time of Hedayat’s visit. As we have seen, evenbefore the communist revolution of 1949, Chinese Muslim reformists had creatednew syllabi that sidelined Persian texts entirely.99 In the following decades, theclosure of religious schools during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, alongwith the wider attacks on religious tradition, meant that by the time Nodoushanarrived in China, Persian was arguably in its weakest position there for a thousandyears. Yet if as a sociolinguistic reality Persian had almost disappeared since Hedayat’svisit, in the intervening decades a powerful new concept had spread through Iranwhich, along with its attendant historiography, lent a vivid afterlife to Iranian contactwith China. This was of course the borrowed Persian concept of the “Silk Road” orrah-e abrisham. By turning now to the details of Nodoushan’s travel account, weshall see how he made use of this concept to make meaning of a China in which theplace of Persian had almost disappeared.

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Nodoushan’s journey to China began in spring 1975, when he arrived in Beijing.100

Unlike Hedayat, who had arrived via the imperial Russian railroad network,Nodoushan flew to the Chinese capital, though from there his itinerary relied entirelyon what was by the 1970s a rather more extensive domestic rail network than had beenavailable to his predecessor. Even so, it is important to note that at this time China’srailroads still only lent access to eastern and central China, leaving the former heart-lands of the Silk Road over a thousand miles from the nearest Chinese railhead. IfNodoushan was therefore able to penetrate deeper into China than Hedayat, whohad made nothing more than an excursion into Beijing from the treaty ports, hisgeography of interaction was still that delimited by China’s rail network. After spend-ing several days in Beijing, where he visited the Forbidden City (like Hedayat) and theGreat Wall (like Farman-Farmai’an but unlike Hedayat), he took the train south toNanjing, from where he made a short excursion to the “garden city” (shahr-e bagh-ha) of Suzhou before returning by train to the capital.101 From there, he madeanother train journey, this time inland to the southwest of Beijing, to visit thecities of Anyang in Henan province and Xi’an in Shaanxi province. It was herethat Nodoushan would convince himself that he had resurrected the medievalIranian past; that he was walking the Silk Road.Yet even as Nodoushan sought out the archeological legacy of Sino-Persian

exchange, in social terms his travels were even more removed from that legacy’sliving remnants than Hedayat’s had been. For while Hedayat’s party had at leastvisited a few mosques in Beijing, made friends with a Bukhara-descended imam andbeen shown a Quran and a Persian manuscript, Nodoushan’s China was one whichwas overwhelmingly Han and communist. Throughout his travels Nodoushan wasescorted by Chinese “minders” and on his arrival at each new town he was met bythe head of the local Revolutionary Committee.102 Far from touring mosqueswhere the last living remnants of Sino-Persian had until recently survived, with theCultural Revolution still officially continuing in 1975, Nodoushan was insteadtreated to a series of visits to model factories and communes.103 After one particularlynostalgic visit to a Buddhist archeological site, his Silk Road reveries were interruptedby a compulsory inspection tour of a ball bearing factory.104 Much of the China hewas shown, then, consisted of model sites of modernity by way of state-operatedcarpet manufactories, orderly public parks and workers’ apartment buildings.105

Even his trip to Xi’an—to which he excitedly referred as “the eastern terminus ofthe Silk Road”—was preceded by a long train journey in which his official compa-nions, Mr Ye and Mr Chu, regaled him with stories of the previous decade’stunnel-building triumphs.106 This in turn was merely a prelude to an overnight excur-sion to see the Red Flag Canal, completed in 1965 as one of the most visible successesof the Great Leap Forward, along with two compulsory film-viewings and a museumvisit.107

In spite of his hosts’ determination to demonstrate the modernity of the People’sRepublic, Nodoushan’s own imagination was captured by the historical sites which hewas allowed to inspect. This was all the more true of those sites he was able toconceptually associate with the “Silk Road” (rah-e abrisham), a term which he used

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repeatedly when describing them. If this was the main historical concept he used toconnect what he saw in China with the history of Iran, alongside it Nodoushandeployed a series of antique labels to evoke, for himself and his readers, a furthersense of shared history. For example, he referred to Beijing as Khanbaligh, theTurkic and Persian name for its Yuan era predecessor from the time when bothChina and Iran were ruled by the Mongols.108 Similarly, for the inland provinceshe used the pre-modern Persian name of Machin.109 However, it was on visitingthe famous Longmen Grottoes in Henan province and the city of Xi’an, alongwith their associated museums, that Nodoushan made fullest use of the “Silk Road”concept to connect what he saw in China to the ancient Iranian history that wasso central a concern of his other books.Turning first to the Longmen Grottoes, Nodoushan initially explained the meaning

of their name as “the Dragon’s Gateway,” before giving a brief but largely accurateaccount of their history. As the best example of Buddhist sculpture in China, hewrote, the caves were carved from the rock after the year 494, when the Weidynasty moved its capital to Luoyang.110 There were, he wrote with some exagger-ation, around 2,100 large and small caves containing sculptures, with the earliestcaves built between around 500 and 523 CE, as well as in a second phase underthe Tang dynasty after 680 CE.111 In esthetic and historical terms, the sculptureappealed to Nodoushan greatly. In one evocative passage, he wrote that:

Everything is carved from the heart of the stone. Buddha and his companions anddisciples, with thousands of faces and expressions, which all return to one face andexpression: peace in the face of the storm of life (tofan-e zendegi). The disciples arewalking the path and the Buddha is himself the means of reaching their destination:to cast aside all desires so as to enjoin one desire, which is to be free of all desires.And that is perfection.112

In itself, such a cosmopolitan affinity for Buddhism represented a continuation anddevelopment from the sympathetic descriptions of both Chinese and JapaneseBuddhist temples that Hedayat wrote seventy years earlier. In the interveningdecades, the travel experiences and European educations of two generations ofIranian intellectuals had combined with the Pahlavi promotion of Iran’s pre-Islamic history to decisively break with previous Iranian prejudices towards theBuddhist religion of bot-parasti (idol-worship). Yet if Nodoushan’s account con-tained no traces of Islamocentrism, it was far from free of the Iranocentrismthat had for so many nationalist intellectuals served to replace it. Looking at thesculptures of Buddha and his disciples, Nodoushan could not but see signs of Sas-sanid influence on their artistic style, normalizing the claim by stating that this wasfar from surprising in view of the regular to-and-fro between the two countries atthat time.113 For before Xi’an had become the capital of China, he explained, itwas the grottoes’ neighboring city of Luoyang that had stood at the eastern endof the Silk Road, receiving walnuts and grapes from Iran in return for the porce-lains and silks it exported.114

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Turning to the city of Xi’an, Nodoushan made even more use of the “Silk Road”concept to tie its grand imperial history to that of Iran. This “great internationalcity” (shahr-e a‘zim-e bayn al-melli), which at its eighth century height had beenhome to a million people, he wrote, had also been the home to several thousand Ira-nians.115 There they had lived in religious freedom, with a Zoroastrian temple, aManichaean sanctuary, a Nestorian church and a mosque. It was a vivid vision ofa happy Iranian past, now recovered in the depths of China, that seventy yearsearlier Hedayat could hardly have imagined. Yet once again, Nodoushan wished tomake the point that China had not so much helped Iranians as learned fromthem. Drawing on the authority of the Japanese scholar Ryoichi Hayashi, hequoted the learned professor’s recent book on the Silk Road to emphasize theimpact of Iranian customs (rosom-e irani) on China itself during this period.116

On visiting the Xi’an museum a few days later, he declared it to prove more thanany other museum the story of Iran and China’s connections.117 He detectedwhat he was sure was the Sassanid style in the ceramics on display there and aChinese statue with a face that looked surely Iranian.Through reading Nodoushan’s travelogue, we have seen how a Pahlavi-era intel-

lectual made use of Iranian gains in historical knowledge—acquired partly fromEuropean and Japanese scholarship—in the decades since Hedayat’s travels to re-conceive China as part of Iran’s own history in ways that were unavailable to Ira-nians at the beginning of the twentieth century. After all, in conceptual, historio-graphical and archeological terms, the Silk Road largely emerged from theEuropean scholarship of the early decades of the twentieth century and onlyspread further from around 1930, apparently not reaching Iran until the late1950s or early 1960s. But in drawing on this concept of Sino-Persian relations,Nodoushan was able to imagine a shared history even as, unbeknownst to him,the last living vestiges of Persian in China were disappearing under the impactof the Cultural Revolution. Yet partly through his Pahlavi-era predilection forIran’s pre-Islamic past, in the absence of a living encounter with China’s Persianheritage Nodoushan was able to turn to the archeological and artistic relics thathe took as evidence for connections in the deep past. And the conceptual gluethat held together this evidentiary bricolage was the notion of the rah-e abrisham,the “Silk Road.” In Pahlavi Iran, von Richthofen’s German Seidenstrasse had founda long and unexpected afterlife.

Conclusions

While the previous pages have shown how a few Iranians could and did engage withChina, on such limited evidence the conclusions here can only be provisional. Manyother Persian sources remain to be discovered, particularly in archives and newspapers.More than anything else, this article is intended to encourage further research intoSino-Persian, a field that has languished in recent years as Indo-Persian studies haveflourished. But by setting two accounts of twentieth century Iranian journeys to

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China in their concrete and conceptual contexts, we have seen the limits and possibi-lities of modern Sino-Persian contact and the ways in which that contact divergedfrom a longer pre-modern period of exchange. For now at least, the two casestudies appear to confirm the findings of the preceding survey section that aninward-looking Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missed theopportunity to engage with China in the way that the more outward-reaching Egyp-tian and Indian Islamic movements of the period were able to. The smaller and morecensored print sphere of Qajar Iran was unable to compete with its more abundantand productive counterparts in Egypt and India, and Iran had no major journaldevoted to a larger cause that could compare with al-Manar. Even Habl al-Matinwas printed in Calcutta and devoted mainly to domestic Iranian agendas ratherthan the internationalist concerns of Islamic revivalists and reformists. Even whenChinese modernizers learned of the constitutionalist struggle in Iran, they did sothrough news telegraphs from Russia rather than through the writings of Iraniansthemselves. As a result, by the early twentieth century, the centuries old legacy ofPersian in China was depleted as Persian became only one of several languages com-peting for the attention of Chinese Muslims and, by 1900, the least influential.In methodological terms, this article has differentiated between the means and

meanings, the infrastructure and conceptions, of Iranian interaction with China.By doing so, it has been possible to show how the disappearance of the Silk Roadas a tangible reality did not prevent its ascendance as an explanatory and emotiveparadigm. In this way, we have seen how from the mid-twentieth century, Iranianintellectuals gradually took a new interest in China through the realization thattheir “own” history lay in long forgotten outposts along the Silk Road. The ironywas that this period coincided, at the international level, with the completeclosure of Sino-Iranian relations between 1949 and the early 1970s and, at the dom-estic level, with the suppression of Chinese Muslim traditions (including the use ofPersian) during the Cultural Revolution. When in the 1970s Nodoushan, along withother Iranian intellectuals and politicians of the period, began to look east to China,too much had been lost to build a new phase of connection on an earlier one. Allthat remained was the historical memory, artificially revived, of an earlier age ofexchange. But however artificial, the concept of the Silk Road has since thenproven an effective way for Iranians to find meaning in their growing relationshipwith China.For what is clear is that Iranian official engagement with China is expanding and

that new Islamic means and meanings of connection are being deployed by bothsides.118 Since the publication of Nodoushan’s travelogue in 1983, a considerablebody of Persian works has been written on Iranian connections with China. Attempt-ing to strengthen claims of both Iran’s historical ties with China and Iran’s impact onChinese culture, scholarship from the Islamic Republic has moved beyond archeolo-gical and artistic evidence into linguistic and religious domains. Resurrecting a lostPersian “language road” that once reached from Nishapur to Xi’an, several of theseworks have traced the flow of Persian words into the languages of China, bothUighur and Mandarin.119 Making connections to China through Islam has been an

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especially important strategy, both intellectually and diplomatically. Book-lengthstudies of China’s Muslim minorities have been published in Iran, while on his officialvisit to China ‘Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani went to the famous Niujie mosque inBeijing.120 From the Chinese side, since the easing of restrictions on religion in Chinafrom the 1980s onwards, some Hui Muslims have undertaken studies in Iran, resultingin a very minor revival of Sino-Persian, though once again this has been outweighed bythe far larger number of Hui studying in Arabic-speaking countries. If the encounterbetween Islam and the West has been one of the great public topics of recent years, asChina expands its interests into its Central Asian backyard and the oil rich MiddleEast, then the Iranian encounter with China will be one of the major geopoliticalissues of the decades to come. The history of Chinese–Iranian relations is far fromover.

Notes

1. Nodoushan, Kārnāmeh, 277.2. Here, as throughout this article, “Chinese Islamic” and “Chinese Muslims” refer to the culturally

and linguistically Sinicized Hui Muslims and not to the Uighur or other Turko-MongolianMuslim groups at various times under Chinese rule. On the development of Hui Islam, seeLipman, Familiar Strangers.

3. On China’s outreach to the Arab Middle East, see Gladney, “Sino-Middle Eastern Perspectives,”and Ho, “Mobilizing the Muslim Minority.”

4. Mohajer, “Chinese-Iranian Relations”; Schichor, The Middle East in China’s Foreign Policy.5. On the reception of their works among Chinese and Japanese scholars, see Galambos, “Buddhist

Relics from the Western Regions,” and Jacobs, “Confronting Indiana Jones.”6. Mīnovī, Tarjomeh-ye ‘Ulūm-e Chīnī; Tashakkurī, Īrān beh Ravāyat-e Chīn-e Bāstān.7. Waugh, “Richthofen’s ‘Silk Roads’.”8. Thanks to Touraj Daryaee for this information.9. Mazāhirī, Jādeh-ye Abrīsham; Yagānah, Semnān.10. Franck and Brownstone, Jādeh-ye Abrīsham.11. It is worth noting here that for medieval Persian writers, “China proper” was designated as Chīn,

with Chinese Central Asia or Eastern Turkestan designated as Māchīn (or, as a compound, Chīn ōMāchīn), likely from the Sanskrit Mahāchīna (Greater China).

12. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Chinese–Iranian Relations.”13. Jahn, China in der islamischen Geschichtsschreibung; idem, Die Chinageschichte des Rašīd ad-Dīn.14. Afshār, Khitāy-nāmeh. For studies, see Hemmat, “Children of Cain in the Land of Error,” Kahle,

“Eine islamische Quelle uber China,” and Yih-Min, “A Comparative and Critical Study.”15. For an unconvincing attempt to demonstrate Shi‘i currents in Chinese Islam, see Israeli, Islam in

China, chapter 9: “Is There Shi‘a in Chinese Islam?”16. On the changing infrastructure of Central Asian travel, and the different written accounts this pro-

duced, see Green, “Introduction.”17. In the pre-modern period, “China” and “Iran” were evidently not fixed cultural, political or geo-

graphical entities, particularly with regard to the intermediary Central Asian domains (now consti-tuting the Central Asian republics and the Chinese Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) throughwhich Iranian contact with East Asia was carried between the antique and early modern periods.

18. For an overview up to the Yuan period, see Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds.19. Yingsheng, “A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road.”20. Shi-jian, “The Persian Language in China.” On Il-Khanid connections with China in this period,

see Rossabi, “Tabriz and Yuan China.”

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21. Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad, chapter 3, and Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 48–51.22. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 72–85.23. On the eastward migration of the Persian Sufi classics, see Zarcone, “Le Mathnavî de Rûmî au Tur-

kestan.”24. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 214–15. The ethnonym Hui is used here to define the Sino-Muslims

proper who, though cherishing traditions of Middle Eastern genealogy, had by the early modernperiod emerged as culturally Sinicized Muslims who spoke Chinese, developed a ChineseMuslim syllabus (known as the Han Kitab) and in many cases worked closely with the Ming,Qing and Republican states. On Hui understandings of their Middle Eastern genealogy, see Ben-Dor, “‘Even unto China’.”

25. Shi-Jian and Jin-Yuan, “Chinese–Iranian Relations.”26. Botham, “Modern Movements,” 296.27. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 86–9 and 200–211. On Ma Mingxin’s Arabian connections, see also

Fletcher, “The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China.”28. Matsumoto, “Rationalizing Patriotism among Muslim Chinese.”29. Ben-Dor Benite, “‘Nine Years in Egypt’.”30. While Chinese Islamic texts from theHan Kitab syllabus had previously been block printed, Arabic-

script printing emerged in the Middle East only after around 1820, gaining momentum only by themid-nineteenth century. See Green, “Journeymen, Middlemen”.

31. Matsumoto, “Rationalizing Patriotism”, 122.32. On the Arabic, Turkish, Urdu and Malay works read by Chinese in this period, see Matsumoto,

“Sino-Muslims’ Identity,” 46–8, idem, “Islamic Reform in Muslim Periodicals,” 97–8, and idem,“Rationalizing Patriotism,” 127–8, 133–4.

33. Ben-Dor Benite, “‘Nine Years in Egypt’,” 117.34. Ibid., 105–28; Matsumoto, “Islamic Reform,” 46; idem, “Rationalizing Patriotism,” 127, 133.35. Dündar, “An Analysis on the Documents,” 332, 343; Papas, “Voyageurs ottomans et tatars,” 222.36. An Ahmadiyya missionary in China by the name of Ghulam Mujtaba is mentioned in numerous

Ahmadiyya publications from the 1910s and 20s. See for example the list of worldwide missionariesin the unnumbered front matter to The Moslem Sunrise 1, no. 1 (1921).

37. Matsumoto, “Islamic Reform,” 42.38. Ogilvie, “Present Status of Mohammedanism,” 168. Ogilvie also mentioned the presence in Beijing

of the two Ottoman teachers, “Ali Riza Effendi… [and] a new arrival from Constantinople,” whotaught through Arabic. Their presence was the result of the plans described in the 1904 Ottomanarchival documents referenced in the previous footnote.

39. Matsumoto, “Rationalizing Patriotism,” 128. On the substantial intellectual traffic that emergedbetween Egypt and China in the 1930s, see Ben-Dor Benite, “Taking ‘Abduh to China.”

40. Matsumoto, “Sino-Muslims’ Identity,” 46.41. Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 54.42. Matsumoto, “Islamic Reform,” 100.43. Ben-Dor Benite, “‘Nine Years in Egypt’,” 108, Matsumoto, “Rationalizing Patriotism,” 133.44. This and other letters from the students are translated in Harris, “Al-Azhar through Chinese Spec-

tacles,” 178–82; quotation at 178.45. Cited from a letter to Yueh-hwa from one of the Chinese students in ibid., 181. For more on the

confused and exaggerated Muslim population of China in this period (even sometimes estimated as80 million), see Matsumoto, “Islamic Reform,” 98, note 21.

46. Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community, 51–3; Mao, “A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation.”47. Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 54.48. O’Connor, Islam in Hong Kong, 25–33.49. Weiss, “South Asian Muslims in Hong Kong.” The ‘local boys’ are the descendants of these mixed

marriages.50. Bodde, “Japan and the Muslims of China,” 311–13.

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51. Usmanova, The Türk-Tatar Diaspora. On Harbin’s varied international communities before 1918,see Carter, Creating a Chinese Harbin, chapter 1.

52. Dündar and Misawa, Books in Tatar-Turkish, 6–8.53. Ibrahim, ‘Alem-i Islam. On ‘Abd al-Rashid’s meetings with non-Muslims in China, see Papas,

“Voyageurs ottomans et tatars.”54. Azra, “The Transmission of al-Manār’s Reformism”, Laffan, Islamic Nationhood, chapters 6-8 and

Yasushi, “Al-Manār Revisited”.55. Matsumoto, “Why Was Persian Learning Excluded?”56. For Hedayat’s biography, see Bāmdād, Sharh-e Hāl-e Rejāl, vol. 2, 455–9; vol. 4, 184–7; vol. 6, 196–

8. See also Barzegar, “Mahdi Qoli Hidayat,” and Kasheff, “Hedāyat.”57. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 6–8, 12. On Hedayat’s wider journey, see Green, “The Rail Hajjis.”58. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 23. Throughout the following, I have given the period spellings of the cities

in the main text and the modern names in parentheses. While establishing where Hedayat wentfrom his diary’s phonetic Persian spellings of Chinese place names whose Romanization(let alone Arabization) has changed several times since his journey has been challenging, I am sat-isfied that the identifications are correct. In identifying his ports of call, I have been helped byDennys, The Treaty Ports of China.

59. Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse.60. Shīrāzī, Ketāb Mirāt al-Zamān. This and Malek al-Kuttab’s other books were printed in Bombay

for export to Iran. On Bombay’s Iranian exile publishers, see Green, Bombay Islam, 118–26. A fewTurkish works on Chinese history and geography were similarly printed in the late OttomanEmpire. See Papas, “Voyageurs ottomans et tatars,” 222.

61. Nadīm al-Soltān, Tārīkh-e Chīn.62. On Iranian interest in Japan and Hedayat’s own travels there, see Green, “Shared Infrastructures,

Informational Asymmetries.” For newspaper reports about Japan, see Rajabzadeh, “Russo-JapaneseWar as Told by Iranians.”

63. Wang, “The Iranian Constitutional Revolution.”64. The Chinese section of the travel diary thus covers Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 23–92.65. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 23–4, 29–30, 60–61, 64–5, 92.66. Ibid., 23, 26, 70–73.67. Ibid., 28-29.68. Ibid., 37-40, 54-56 on the Forbidden City; 58-59 on the medresseh.69. He was of course describing Peking University, which was actually established in 1898 rather than

1899.70. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 25-26, 30-31.71. Ibid., 34; postcard at 31.72. Ibid., 36.73. Ibid., 27.74. Ibid., 24.75. Ibid., 60.76. Ibid., 26, 30.77. Ibid., 32, 35.78. Ibid., 26.79. Ibid., 26.80. Ibid., 25.81. Ibid., 64–5. The merchants were named as Hajji Mohammed Taqi and Mohammed Hosayn

Namazi.82. Ibid., 32–3.83. Ibid., 34.84. Ibid., 37–47.85. Papas, “Voyageurs ottomans et tatars,” 221–5. To refer to the Hui, Şükrü used the Turkic term

“Tungan (Dungan).”

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86. Ogilvie, “The Present Status of Mohammedanism,” 165.87. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 47–51. Hedayat attempted to transcribe the Chinese name of the mosque in

the Tatar city as follows: chin men wa yatu layasheh. The first lexical items (chin men) appear to be areference to the mosque’s location as Qianmen or Ch’ien-men, that is, near the outer southern gateof the imperial palace, at the southern end of modern Tiananmen Square. The other lexical itemsare less immediately clear. Thanks for Jonathan Lipman for advice.

88. Noack, “Die sibirischen Bucharioten.”89. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 47.90. Green, “The Rail Hajjis.”91. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 66–8.92. Hedāyat, Safarnāmeh, 70–71. On the wider Middle Eastern proliferation of this concept at the

time, see Eich, “Pan-Islam and ‘Yellow Peril’.”93. Further details on his life and writings are available on his website: http://www.eslamiNodoushan.

com/ (accessed June 28, 2013).94. Nodoushan, Zendagī va Marg-e Pahlavān.95. Farmān-Farmā’iān, Dar Ānsū-ye Dīvār-e Chīn.96. Nodoushan, Dar Keshvar-e Shaurahā.97. Nodoushan, Dar Keshvar-e Shaurahā, 285–93 on Tashkent, 294–319 on Bukhara and 321–46 on

Samarqand.98. Nodoushan, Dar Keshvar-e Shaurahā, 279.99. Even so, in a few regions, Hui conservatives were able to maintain Persian learning, particularly in

the city of Tianjin, which in being ruled by the Japanese from 1937–45 was sheltered from the Ara-bizing policies of the Hui reformist-nationalists affiliated to the Republic of China. See Matumoto,“Why Was Persian Learning Excluded?”

100. Nodoushan, Kārnāmeh, 9.101. Nodoushan, Kārnāmeh, 31–41, 85–96, 97–102, 126–43, 209–10. Calling Suzhou a “city of

gardens” was itself something of an Iranian emphasis, since its famous canals more often lend itthe cliché moniker of the “Venice of the East.”

102. For example, Nodoushan, Kārnāmeh, 235, 237, 243, 257, 290.103. Ibid., 248–52, 270–77 (communes) and 156–70, 265–78, 346–55 (factories).104. Ibid., 265–78.105. On the parks and apartment buildings, see ibid., 262–3.106. Ibid., 235–6.107. Ibid., 242–8.108. Ibid., 31–41.109. Ibid., 226–7, 279.110. Ibid., 256.111. Ibid., 258.112. Ibid., 257.113. Ibid., 259–60.114. Ibid., 264.115. Ibid., 279–80.116. Ibid., 280–81. Since there appears to have been no Persian translation made, the edition on which

Nodoushan drew was presumably the recently translated Hayashi, The Silk Road.117. Nodoushan, Kārnāmeh, 296.118. On Chinese official deployment of Hui Muslims to diplomatically and commercially engage the

Middle East, see Gladney, “Sino-Middle Eastern Perspectives,” and Ho “Mobilizing the MuslimMinority.”

119. Ahmad, “Zabān-e Fārsī dar Chīn”; Badī‘ī, Farhang-e Vāzheh-hā-ye Fārsī.120. Somewhat ironically, these Iranian translations include the writings of the Israeli scholar Raphael

Israeli, the most conspiratorial and anti-Islamic academic commentator on Chinese Islam. SeeĪzrā’īlī, Musalmānān-e Chīn.

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