1 Ancient and Medieval History (Before the Mongols)

Historically, steppe-based regimes of the Eurasian heartland often dominated northwest China. On one occasion, under Mongol Yuan 元, they even conquered all of China (1279) and beyond, establishing contact links with Southeast Asia. From there, direct Mongol influence and interest reached as far as Burma and Bengal. Also a concern for the Mongols in China was Iran, seat of the Ilqanate, ruled by relatives of the Mongol ruling house in China, and in the 13th and early 14th century an ally of China’s Mongols in the fight with other, hostile Mongol groups in Central Asia. Even Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea were not beyond the pale for the Mongols in China, with much of the trade and contacts based on the great port of Quanzhou 泉州 in Fujian 福建.¹⁸⁰

In the other direction, the Mongols made Khorasan—northeast Iran—an integral part of their world. Khorasan is important as a transition zone between Iran and the center; with distant links even to the Middle East proper, although culturally it has never been isolated from the Eurasian heartland. It produced its own steppe conquerors, including the Turks. The Turks conquered far beyond the region in their creation of Turkish empires in the Near East and Europe. Even Yemen once had its Turkic dynasty.

The western part of the Eurasian heartland was, to the Persians, Turan, a land of the barbarians (the Turanians), in contrast to the fully civilized Iran. To the Chinese, it was simply the “Western Regions” (xiyu 西域) with various Chinese names for the individual states and ethnic groups. Most often these Chinese names simply transliterated native names. Often, such names employed insulting characters to build up Chinese culture at the expense of outsiders, e.g., Menggu 蒙古, “Stupid and old,” for the Mongols. The groups in question often insisted in changing these when they conquered or threatened China.

Also occurring were names which rendered some key idea associated with a group, usually involved with their mythology. One famous example is Da Yuezhi 大月氏, “Great Yuezhi 月氏,” or “Great Moon Clan.” In our sources it is distinct from the Lesser Yuezhi, who stayed in China, and did not migrate west. The name is associated by scholars with the later Kushans of northern Afghanistan and southern Turkistan, with their own “moon” connection. Such connections by name may or may not mean anything about the people involved. People borrowed names, or a core group might migrate and assimilate new followers along its route.

At this point we introduce the concept of world-system, elaborated by the late Immanuel Wallerstein.¹⁸¹ Historians have always known that countries influence each other. Wallerstein systematized this obvious point, elaborating spheres of influence in which one or two core polities are surrounded by semiperipheral marcher-states and farther peripheries. He noted that the normal situation was for the cores to establish terms of trade that enriched the cores while draining the rest. This was partly old-fashioned sharp dealing, but also involved the fact that the cores usually owed their core status to rapid progress in technology, such that they controlled new and important processes and products for which they could charge high prices. The peripheries usually were reduced to supplying raw materials and uneducated—all too often enslaved—manpower. For this there was always plenty of competition, forcing prices down. Wallerstein confined his attention to the modern world-system, developing with capitalism since the Renaissance, but his students have extended the analytic technique to historic and even prehistoric societies, including old Central Asia.¹⁸² One finding that emerges from history is that semiperipheral marcher states very often conquer core states, a point already made famous by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century.¹⁸³ The most spectacular case of this in all history was the Mongol conquest of almost all of Eurasia in the 13th century (see below). Starting as a remote peripheral society supplying little beyond furs and horses, the Mongols rose under Cinggis-qan to semiperipheral status, conquering the other semiperipheral states northwest of China and northeast of Iran. His grandsons took the core polities of China, Iran, Anatolia, and Russia.

This was far from the first such conquest. China had been conquered before by a whole succession of semiperipheral marcher states. China’s first state was Erlitou 二里頭, conquered by its semiperipheral marcher Shang 商 (a historical tale confirmed by archaeology in recent years). At this time what would be the Chinese world-system was a tiny cluster of statelets or chierfdoms on the middle Yellow River. Shang in turn fell to semiperipheral Zhou, which dissolved into the famous “Warring States”; the term “Middle Kingdom” at that time meant “central states,” the states in the Yellow and Yangzi drainage that shared Chinese culture in a broad sense. All these ultimately fell to Qin 秦 (the dynasty lasting 221 to 207 BCE)—ironically occupying Zhou’s own former seimperipheral heartland. The Chinese world-system expanded to include most of what is now the core of China, the “Eighteen Provinces,” and Qin gave its name to the whole. Qin collapsed early and was reconstituted as Han 漢 under one of its leading generals. Under Han (206 BCE-220 CE) the Chinese world-system grew to include eastern inner Asia, as Han constantly battled the Xiongnu 匈奴, and also Korea. Han ultimately won, and the Xiongnu went west, ultimately morphing somehow into the Huns of Roman fame. (There was probably little overlap in people.)

Once the Han Dynasty had expanded into Central Asia, a new game emerged. Rome, Persia, and China were all great empires, mounting enormous trade and mercantile establishments. They were in constant touch; China rarely contacted Rome directly, but the Persians and steppe peoples were happy to be intermediates, reaping large profits. Grapes, alfalfa, and probably other crops went east. What crops went west is harder to assess. Of course, the Romans wanted silk, hence the memorable if latter-day term “Silk Road.” Silk is an animal product, produced by a domesticated insect. (The West domesticated only one insect, the honeybee; China domesticated another bee, along with the silk moth, the lac insect, and other small stock.) The Eurasian heartland had acquired cotton, a nonfood from India. It seems likely that Chinese cabbages spread early and widely. There is little (if any) evidence of this.

Similarly, in the west, the ancestral Persians conquered Persia under the Achaemenids, steppe marchlords from Central Asia. Persia remained under Persian rule until the Mongols, and restored Persian rule after them. The other dominant core polities affecting Central Asia through history were the Roman Empire and its primary successor the Byzantine Empire and then its successor the Ottoman Empire, also the various states of India. To relate their history would take us far beyond the bounds of this book; suffice it that India was constantly harassed and frequently conquered by Central Asian marcher states. Persia, the Byzantines, the Levant, Arabia, the Mediterranean shores, and East Europe were now incorporated into one giant west Eurasian world-system. It met China when Arab armies moved into Central Asia, confronting China at the critical Battle of Talas River in 751. This battle, near modern Tashkent, set the approximate boundary between the west and China; the current Chinese boundary runs close to it. The Byzantines integrated vast areas into the western world-system via the slave trade. Extremely active slavers, they drained southern east Europe and the western steppes of countless millions of people, doomed to lives of wretchedness and oppression. Central Asian polities were only too enthusiastic to supply them, or to keep enslaved persons for themselves. The slave trade became a major and integral part of Silk Road merchant activity.¹⁸⁴

Turkic polities in particular were so addicted to slaving that—to get ahead of our story—the Mamlūk (“enslaved”) soldiers of the Turkic world took over the Middle East, founded a dynasty with that rather ironic name, and stopped the Mongols, first at the battle of ‘Ain Jalut in 1260. The effects of this continual demographic drain on the steppes for the benefit of Mediterranean Europe and the Near East have been rather little addressed. After the decline of Byzantium, the Ottoman Turks, Venetians, and Genoese continued the trade, the Ottomans into the 19th century.

When Han collapsed the semiperipheral steppe groups moved in. China revived and reconsolidated under Sui 隋 (580-620) and Tang 唐 (620-907). China fell apart after Tang, to reunite under Song 宋 (960-1279). In the 10th through 12th centuries, semiperipheral marchers, the Liao and Jin 金, successively conquered the north, opening the way for the Mongols. The Mongols conquered Jin in 1234, Song in 1279. (One of us has told elsewhere the story of East Asian world-system and its climatic vicissitudes.¹⁸⁵) By this time the East Asian world-system stretched from southeast Asia to Siberia.

Through all this, deep Central Asia—the remote steppe and mountain core—was firmly peripheral to everyone. The Silk Road was held by a succession of small states semiperipheral to China and Iran. China’s influence extended roughly to its present borders when China was strong, under the Han, Tang, Yuan, and Qing 青 Dynasties. At other times, a whole succession of small states, often poorly known, occupied the land. Iran’s influence involved political power in Achaemenid times, but later the region was lost briefly to Alexander’s Greeks, and then to a succession of polities run by East Iranic and Turkic dynasties. They maintained themselves through trade, raid, and conquest.

World-system theory is largely descriptive, but allows prediction: the peripheries will be trapped as raw-materials suppliers unless they produce leaders like Cinggis-qan; semiperipheries will manage throughput trade, do light manufacturing and crafts, and transmit teachings and technologies from the cores; and the cores will get richer and richer at the expense of all. This is what happened in Central Asia over the 2500 years of imperial activities there. The other prediction most relevant here is that the cores will be overwhelming the major source of high culture: art, architecture, literature, religions, and, most important to our task, fine cuisine. They import spices, animal products, and luxury foods from the periphery, but they export new food technologies, new dishes, new fads and fashions, new cookbooks, and new ways to serve fine food. Thus it was that Iran supplied the high style to western and middle parts of the Heartland; Iran and China both supplied it to the eastern approaches. Often the Iranian contributions went back to earlier Arab and Greek creativity. Central Asia itself supplied little, and that little rarely traveled far; kumiz4 had no takers in the core metropoles. Even the fine dining of the Yuan Mongols mostly did not long survive their fall. Ming cuisine was resurgent Song Chinese.

History depends on records, and these were primarily made by outsiders in early Central Asia. There are some indigenous records, such as the Orkhon inscriptions of the early 8th-century Turks. These are the first documents in a Turkic language found in the deep Eurasian heartland, and the first time that any Turkic people tells the world who they are and what their values are in a public way. This includes an inscription record raised by “Wise” minister Tonyukuk. His column is sited in a beautiful mountain location near the Orkhon River, thus the name of the inscriptions, and not far from the old Mongol imperial capital of Qaraqorum. He advises his qan not to succumb to the wiles of the Chinese, no matter how seductive they are, and attractive their gifts. This was good advice at the time.

Unfortunately, the records are sparse in regard to food, but the story is necessary to understanding foodways. So we must digress into political matters for a few pages.

In the West, two groups were particularly important. First was the old Persians of the Persian Empire after 1000 BCE. They moved into Turkistan, where they encountered the Iranian nomadic groups (Scythians and Sakas). This encounter began the age-old conflict between Iran and Turan. There was also conflict with the Greeks who reached the margins of Central Eurasia. Alexander the Great unified most of Greece and conquered the Old Persian Empire piecemeal. From there he continued into southwest Asia and adjacent areas. Between 334 and 323 BCE he not only created the largest empire ever seen, as of that date, but made today’s Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan at least briefly and partially Greek.¹⁸⁶ He founded cities as he went along, marking a new era in the urban history of the Eurasian heartland. Some of the cities still exist, such as Balkh.

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The Orkhon inscriptions, Tonyukuk’s grave

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Particularly important centers of early Greek settlement in the area were focused on modern Afghanistan (such as a settlement at Ai Khanum on the Oxus, a completely Greek city in the central Eurasian heartland) and the immediate adjacent areas. Afghanistan, in fact, became the center of a flourishing Bactrian kingdom, which also provided a basis for the Greeks to penetrate India.¹⁸⁷ In Bactria, not only were traditional Greek temples found, but Greek plays were performed. Local people apparently produced the only Buddhist sutra in the form of a Platonic dialogue. This is the Milindapañha, “Dialogues of King Milinda,” named after a famous Greek king of the area, King Menander (165/155-130 BC). The Greeks in the area and their cultural world did not disappear for hundreds of years after that, by which time the Han-dynasty Chinese had gone looking for them. How much earlier and later Greek and Buddhist philosophy influenced each other is still unknown, but there is every reason to follow Christopher Beckwith in thinking it was long-lasting and substantial.¹⁸⁸

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The steppe and Tonyukuk’s grave

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The philosophical meetings are not reflected in food changes. The Greeks shared the general West-Asian pattern of dependence on bread, porridge, livestock, and fruit, notably including grapes for wine. Few, if any, differences show up in the archaeological record. Surviving accounts show a bread-and-wine diet that is typically Greek, although it does not reflect the gourmet delicacies of the Mediterranean.

Greek influences spread as far as China. In the Han Dynasty, Greek art influenced Chinese art, to the point that small lead disks bearing diligent but poorly-done copies of Greek letters turn up in Han sites in Gansu. They are imitations of Parthian coins that were themselves imitations of Greek ones. As Jason Sun says: “Bearing Parthian-style Greek inscriptions and Han-style dragons, they are a precious reflection of the vivid exchange between Han China, the Hellenistic West, and Central Asia via the Silk Road.”¹⁸⁹ The countless cross-influences in visual art and culture between east and west are well known; they continue today.

History has obviously influenced foodways in the area, most visibly by creating flows of cultural influences that brought new foods from all directions. Usually, food followed conquest. Even more it tracked the migration of peoples, the lines of trade, and the spread of missionary religions. Borrowing was the rule.

Every bordering region made its own contributions, but Iran was the biggest single donor of specific foods and foodways. Second was Europe, specifically Ukraine and neighboring areas. Through these came the first domesticates: wheat, barley, sheep, goats, cattle, probably some vegetables and herbs. We do not know the relative contributions of the two channels in early times. Later, however, Iran’s distinctive foodways colored the heartland. Iranian crops moved outward, and later specific dishes and preparations followed. Nan is the universal bread from Iran to the Uighurs and Kyrgyz. Words such as ash for stew, samosa for meat pies, ab (Farsi for “water”) to mark liquids, kabab (from Arabic via Persian), and many more have followed specific dishes and preparations everywhere. Cuisine in the “stans” and far west Xinjiang is basically provincial Iranian.

Influences from the north are very few. Russian fondness for vegetables such as cabbage and beets influenced western Central Asia quite early, but Central Asia was probably more often the donor, teaching the Russians the worth of foods ranging from cucumbers to manty. There are a few domestic reindeer that barely make it into northern Mongolia. Influences from China are greater, but strikingly few once one is west of the current Chinese border. Broomcorn millet and a few minor crops sum up the borrowings. Noodles may have been invented in China and spread west, but we do not know their story well. Chinese-style cakes are found mummified in northwest China in historic times.

China has always merged into Central Asia, largely through the vast open corridors of present-day Gansu and Inner Mongolia, with Dunhuang and immediately adjacent areas a focal point.¹⁹⁰ The classic distinction between non-Chinese nomads and settled, agricultural Chinese, made by the Chinese and echoed by Western scholars, is not an adequate description of the situation. Few indeed were the Chinese who became nomad stockraisers. Contrastingly, the Central Asian peoples (largely of Tibetan, Turkic or Mongol background) would often settle to farm, sometimes with encouragement from Chinese governments.

A marginal grain from the Chinese world is buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum, replaced in very cold high areas by F. tataricum). This plant does not produce a true grain (a caryopsis—the modified seed and husk of a grass) but a regular seed. However, it is a starchy, productive seed very much like a grain, and makes excellent porridge and flour. It was probably domesticated somewhere on the China-Tibet frontier. (No one knows exactly where. Whether it was domesticated by ancestral Chinese, Tibetans, Qiang 羌, or others is completely obscure.) Also poorly known is the timing of its spread west, which was probably fairly late. It became a staple food in Russia and Eastern Europe by early modern times, and has even staked out a zone of popularity in Brittany. In the Eurasian heartland, it was often the grain of choice in mountain areas too cold and weather-afflicted for anything else to flourish, e.g., Tibet. It probably moved out into the broad Eurasian heartland thousands of years ago. In Russia it and millet are standard for kasha, thick flavorful porridge, often used to stuff dumplings.

Another early migrant plant pair were peaches and apricots. Again, the exact origin point and timing are unclear, but they were known in the West by ancient times. The peach was probably domesticated somewhere in the Yangzi drainage, or near it, by 7500 years ago.¹⁹¹ The peach spread to the west via Persia, as its scientific name Prunus persica implies. It was known to the Greeks by 300 BC or earlier. The apricot is very ancient in Armenia, as the name Prunus armeniaca suggests; no one knows how far west it is native, still less how and when it spread. It appears native as far west as Kazakhstan. Nomads could easily carry dried peaches and apricots, complete with seeds, across the steppes, planting seeds wherever they camped.

Other very important Chinese fruit trees made surprisingly little headway. The mei 梅 (Prunus mume, often mistranslated “plum,” actually a form of apricot) could not tolerate the cold, dry conditions. The jujube (Zizyphus sinensis) ran into competition with similar fruits, including the Near Eastern species of the genus. Other Chinese fruits had equivalents in the West. Cherry, apple, pear, chestnut, and probably walnut and others were all independently domesticated at both ends of the Silk Road, with different species involved (except for the walnut, which is the same species but with different varieties). Archaeological studies show that Uzbekistan in 800-1100 CE was growing apple, peach, apricot, melons, pistachio, walnut (but no almonds), wild cherry and rose.¹⁹²

Other than these, the flow in ancient times seems to have been almost entirely from west to east. Chinese foods that reached India early, such as Chinese cabbages (Brassica campestris), foxtail millet, and Chinese rice varieties, did not spread west until later. The biggest single reason was the dependence of Chinese crops on abundant summer rain. Inability to stand winter cold at Central Asian levels was also involved. The cultural importance of the west, especially after the spread of Islam, was part of the story. So was the west’s lead in agriculture, developing a highly productive and easily adopted dryland agricultural system before the Chinese did so.

2 Chinese Food Meets Western Food on the Silk Road

The food of eastern Central Asia was more or less what has become the food of north China. It comprises wheat-wrapped dumplings, noodles (which are Chinese or at least early in China), and the standard grain foods from bread to millet porridge, with meat and fruit.

During the late Roman Empire, and early Middle Ages, “spices” poured into Europe. They were not always used for seasoning; most were medicinal, some strictly so. Few of them came from China. Cassia arrived from there, as a form of cinnamon. Chinese star anise goes back to Medieval times in the West. Among other Chinese foods, oranges were known. They were not grown in the West till Medieval times. At some early point, aquaculture, in the form of rearing carp in ponds, came from China via Russia, and then to Eastern Europe; as usual, we have no good evidence of how early this happened, but aquaculture was common in Roman times and during the High Middle Ages. Roman aquaculture also used different fish that were simply raised in ponds, not actually bred and farmed. The domestic duck (a descendant of the wild mallard) was common in both China and old Europe. This probably represents separate domestications, not a spread from China. Geese were clearly independent domestications; the European species (Anser anser) is quite different from the East Asian one (A. cygnoides).

Chinese chives (garlic chives) and green onions, both of which are different species from the Western ones, arrived early in both Central Asia and the West. The dating of their arrival is impossible. Chinese chives are the chives widely used in parts of the southern and eastern Eurasian heartland, as far west as Afghanistan. Handling dryness and heat much better than European chives, they thus replaced the latter in some areas of the world surprisingly far from China (south Mexico, for instance). The Chinese large white radish also got quite far west. It is the dominant radish from Xinjiang and Mongolia eastward. It is a favorite for kimchi in Korea.

Other minor Chinese crops awaited modern commerce and transportation to spread west of China. Medieval and early-modern vegetable growing in present-day Xinjiang has somehow escaped being immortalized in song and story, or at least in Chinese. (Uighur poetry does have many references to the commoner food plants.) One can only assume that Chinese cabbages and other standbys were common quite early there. They certainly were established by early modern times in the Gansu corridor that connects the central provinces of China with Xinjiang. They were probably there in ancient times as well. Yet, a testimony to how little Chinese influence the Eurasian heartland has received is the lack of soy sauce in recipes—except for recipes from the Korean communities moved into the area by the USSR. Even traditional Xinjiang food (at least as encountered by us) largely lacks it, though cooks there use it in preparing Han Chinese recipes. Mongolian food (dominated as it is by meat, dairy, wheat flour, and wild greens), has little place for borrowings, though the Medieval Mongol court in Beijing 北京 ate a full range of Chinese and other non-Mongolian foods. Today there is surprising variety, although the nomads still eat lots of boiled mutton and drink kumiz. Inner Mongolia, with its overwhelming Han-Chinese majority, eats Chinese food, except for the few Mongols who still live a nomadic lifestyle. (“Mongolian barbecue,” with its soy sauces, sesame oil and Chinese jiu 酒, “liquor,” was invented by a Chinese chef from Beijing, Wu Zhaonan, in Taiwan, around 1951, under free inspiration from Mongolian urban cooking.¹⁹³ It has been vastly and multiply transformed since, and some of the recent American transformations bear little resemblance to either Chinese or Mongolian food.)

Today, the overwhelmingly most important Chinese influences on Central Asian food are noodles and rice—the staples of the region, along with breads. Rice was not there in the early Medieval period. The noodles were. Many of the noodle dishes and noodle soups are unequivocally Chinese, being thoroughly Chinese in style and are very much unlike traditional Western noodle dishes such as lasagna and macaroni. Nonetheless, the various uses of noodle dough to wrap dumplings were apparently invented on site in Central Asia.

Rice, coming to the the Eurasian heartland via India, and then Iran, is generally cooked in the style of those regions, except in so far as recently-arriving Koreans and Chinese in Central Asia preserve their own ancestral foodways. The usual method, from Europe to Xinjiang, is one or another form of pilaf (polo, pilau, and so on). The various dumpling dishes, as we have seen, probably originated in the Near East, if not in Central Asia itself. They came early to China, but do not seem truly ancient there. Styles of preparing meat are shared very widely through the Near East and Central Asia. Only from Xinjiang eastward do we find chopsticks and food cut small for their use. Otherwise, eating is by hand, or by knife, spoon, and more recently fork.

Not long after Alexander and his successors, the Chinese state of Qin began its gradual expansion into eastern Turkistan (although it was at first more absorbed with its conquest of its competitors, China’s various Warring States). In the process it created, and named “China,” as it created a truly unified China for the first time in history. Qin finally unified the empire in 221 BCE but lasted only until 207 BCE. They were said to have “burned the books and buried the scholars,” and to have generally oppressed the people; the truth is more complicated, and is still under discussion.

By contrast, the succeeding Han Dynasty lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD and conquered much or most of the Central Asian lands that are now Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Ningxia 寧夏. Han’s great foe were the Xiongnu (in Chinese “fierce slaves”; the real meaning of the name is unclear). They created a huge empire, based in Mongolia. It was about as large as Han in surface area, but had far fewer people; it had a few million to Han’s 60 million (as of the census of 6 CE). Even though Han soldiers were tough, they were no match for the Xiongnu; however, Han had the money and the military manpower, and organization, so ultimately it prevailed. The Xiongnu split into competing groups and then declined slowly after the time of the Han Martial Emperor (Wu Di 武帝, r. 140-87 BCE), who earned his title by continual campaigns against them. The Xiongnu were the first empire to rule from Central Asia and to rule a large part of it. Other empires of the heartland owe much to their legacy, in integrating herding and farming as much as in administration and military strategy.

Following up on his efforts to outflank the Xiongnu and establish new contacts, Emperor Wu sent a courtier named Zhang Qian 張騫 (circa 200-114 BC) to go south along what soon became the main Turkistanian Silk Road to try to contact an apparently Iranian enemy of the Xiongnu, the Yuezhi (“Moon People”). By that time, they had already moved far to the west and were thus not easy to contact. After harrowing adventures, including a long sojourn in ­Xiongnu captivity, Zhang Qian fulfilled his mission and returned. He brought with him not just knowledge but very tangible biology, if we may believe the traditions associated with him, including a Western plant, alfalfa. Alfalfa was a magically-nourishing food for the equally magical “blood-sweating” horses. These horses also came from the far West, Ferghana. The bloody sweating was due to skin parasites. Zhang Qian, was the first Chinese envoy to the far reaches of Inner Asia. His biographer, historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145 or 135 to 86 BC) records the details of his travels and describes him as one who “stabbed into emptiness.” He is glorified in Sima Qian’s history as a complete pioneer, a semi-founder of the Silk Roads. He became larger than life, a true Chinese folk hero. Legends grew around him, making him responsible not only for the introduction of alfalfa, grapes, and other things actually mentioned in his biography, but for almost the whole of the early Chinese food imports from the West.

Another legend about food concerns the Queen Mother of the West, who lived in the mountains of Central Asia and controlled the Peaches of Immortality. Zhang Hua 張華 (232-300) reports that the Queen Mother visited Han Wu Di in 110 BCE:

The Queen Mother asked her attendants for seven peaches. They were as big as crossbow pellets. Giving five to the thearch [Emperor Wu], the Mother ate two. The thearch ate the peaches, then immediately took their pits and put them in front of his knees. The Mother said, ‘Why are you taking these pits?’ The thearch replied, ‘These peaches are so sweet and lovely, I want to plant them.’ The Mother laughed and said, ‘These peaches bear fruit once in three thousand years.’ Then Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 [the court’s leading philosopher] stealthily spied on the Mother…. She said to the thearch, ‘This small boy is spying through the window lattice. Formerly he came three times to steal my peaches.’ So Dongfang was over 9000 years old—no wonder he could philosophize.¹⁹⁴

Meanwhile, some Xiongnu moved steadily west, some eventually becoming the nominate group of the “Huns” of European fame. No doubt there was very little direct personal migration. The named group of “Hunnu” changed its makeup as it went along, sweeping up various Turkic, Iranic, and other groups. All we know is that Xiongnu and the later European Huns were both called Hun.¹⁹⁵ By the time the Romans fought them, they were led by a man with an Ostrogothic nickname: Attila, “little father.”

Let us follow these Hun through Central Asia to Europe to see how they were received there:

It is appropriate here to scotch the story of the Huns cooking their meat by warming it between their legs and the horses’ backs (they did “everything on horseback”). This was a bit of war propaganda spun by the 4th century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (330-395 CE). As his narrative passage cited below makes clear, he had many other stories to tell us, many of them later told about the Mongols and other groups. “Any stick will do to beat a dog,” and war propaganda invented for the Huns would do perfectly well for anyone else who seemed nomadic. It must have been rare, if it happened. No fighter wants to deal with butchering horses, let alone making a bloody mess of his clothing and mount. The nomad fighters did take horses along, and butchered them for food when they had to, but they boiled them, or at least ate them without fouling their rides. Broth, and not meat cooked between saddle and horseback, was the main repast of the Mongols.

The nearest we get to an eyewitness account comes from Jean, Sire de Joinville, writing around 1300. Taken prisoner by the “Saracens” (Muslims) during the Crusades, he got to know “Tartars” (Turks and other Central Asians, usually in Mongol service).¹⁹⁶ After noting that they live on horse meat and milk, he says:

They put raw meat between their thighs and their saddles, and when the blood is pressed out they eat it raw. What they can’t eat they put in a leather sack, and when they are hungry they open the sack and eat the oldest piece first. I saw a Coremyn [Khwarazmian], among the men of the emperor of Persia, who guarded us in prison; when he opened the sack we did not know if we could stand it, because of the stench that issued from the sack.

Note that he does not actually say he saw them treat the meat by the saddle method.

Let us consider the early European accounts by Ammianus (here) and others of the Huns, as specimens of how settled Westerners saw Central Asian nomads:

The people of the Hun, little noted in ancient records, dwelling [as they did] near the ice ocean beyond the Maeotic swamps, exceed all measure of ferocity. [They do so] to the degree that among them each cheek of their childen is furrowed by iron from their very birth, so that when the timely vigor of hair comes forth, it should be blunted by the wrinkled scars; and so that they will grow old beardless and without any grace, just like the eunuchs; all of them having compact and powerful members and fat necks, [all of them] unnaturally deformed and bent so that we might think them bipedal beasts, or like roughtly shaped posts fashioned into images to furnish bridges with railings. None the less, having the shape of human beings, however unpleasant, they are so rough in their way of living that they have no need for fire, or for savory food, but eat the roots of wild plants, and the half-raw meat of whatever the herd beast, which [meat], inserted between the upper parts of the thighs and the backs of horses, they heat with brief warming. They are never roofed in any buildings, and they avoid them just like tombs set apart from common use. Nor can there be found among them a hut roofed with straw. On the other hand, they are roamers, wandering through mountains and forests, and they become accustomed from the cradle to prefer frost, hunger and thirst. While abroad, they never enter any roof (unless forced [to] by the greatest necessity), nor do they they consider themselves safe when staying under a roof. They are covered by linen garments or [by garments] patched together from the skins of wild mammals;¹⁹⁷ nor do they have one set of clothing for domestic use, and another for public use. Once they have inserted their necks into a tunic of ordinary color, it is not taken off or changed until, wasted by such long decay, it becomes rags. They cover their heads with crooked caps, protecting their shaggy legs with [goat] kid hides, and their shoes are not prepared with any lasts and prevent walking in free steps. For this reason, they are little adapted to battles on foot, and are very nearly joined to their horses, strong but deformed, and sometimes sitting on these horses in the fashion of women, they perform their accustomed duties. Everyone in this nation buys and sells, night and day, from these horses. [Everyone] consumes food and drink [from these horses] and inclined over the narrow necks of their beasts of burden, they give themselves up to a most heavy, deep sleep, even including a richness of dreams. And when deliberation over serious things is proposed, all take counsel in common in that way. For they are led by no royal strictness, but are content with the hasty leadership of their pre-eminent persons, [and so led] they force their way through whatever they come upon.¹⁹⁸

During the next five hundred years after Han, China’s age of disunity, China had sporadic direct contacts with the Eurasian heartland on a political level, although the trade established during Han times continued unabated. As religion and other cultural goods moved along it, an increasing flow of food exchanges came about. After the 3rd century many groups based more in the Eurasian heartland than in China conquered the Chinese North or established closely associated states. Some of these were quite small. Others such as the Toba Wei 魏 (a Xianbei 鮮卑 group, ruling from the end of the 4th to mid-6th centuries) ruled all the North and were quite important culturally, as in the development of Buddhism and Central Asian foodways in China.

In the Central Eurasian heartland, the most important cultural and political development was the emergence of the Turks, including various successor groups such as the steppe Uighurs, as dominant and self-aware groups with literacy.¹⁹⁹ The Turks came from the general region of the Altai. According to an unproven though plausible tradition, they were expert smiths, hence their popularity with nomadic conquest empires. They had probably served as one component of the Xiongnu Empire. After it fell, they went on to serve successor steppe empires, most notably the Rouran.

The Turks then broke away and set up their own state, the Gök Türk Empire, a name associated both with Turkic and later Mongolian ideology. Gök means “blue,” but not just any blue: it is the pure, intense blue of the cloudless high-altitude sky. Heaven, tengri, among the early Turks and Mongols, was worshiped as the leading divinity, or indeed, “the Divinity.” (The Chinese word tian 天 for Heaven is almost certainly related, and possibly the old word di 帝 for an emperor as thearch. Both gök and tengri were borrowed into early Mongol. The Mongols were known as Köke or Blue Mongols; the word is khökh in modern Mongolian.) From the Gök state emerged the many Turkic groups that now are settled from West China to Eastern Europe.²⁰⁰

Due to the influence of outsiders by Turks and others, Chinese cooking was never the same. This interregnum, an age of disunity when China was carved up into several small realms, is poorly known, largely because of massive destruction of records in the constant wars of the time. The Qimin Yaoshu 齊民要術, “Knowledge Needed by Ordinary People,” is a great compilation of household knowledge by Jia Sixie 賈思勰 (c. 540).²⁰¹ Also from the period, and providing useful information are early examples of the Chinese herbal literature, including the basic herbal Shennong Bencao 神農本草, “Herbal of Shennong 神農,” written by Tao Hongjing 陶弘景 (456-536). It contains indications that Galenic medicine was known in China by Tao‘s time, in some very dilute and indirect form. In the early Tang Dynasty (mid-7th to mid-8th centuries), the medical works of Sun Simiao 孫思邈, and Tang tribute lists include newly-come foreign plants. A Hu Bencao 胡本草 (“Iranian Herbal,” now lost except for a few extracts in later sources) was compiled around 740.²⁰²

Sun notes food codings similar enough to Galen’s 2nd-century Greek medical lore to rule out independent invention.²⁰³ Such lore probably came with Buddhism.²⁰⁴ Among other things, Sun calls for the use of some newly-come Near Eastern spices for medicinal reasons; these include coriander and fennel. So not only foods, but Western nutritional science, was crossing the Silk Road. This was to flower fully in the Yuan Dynasty. Slightly later, “The Newly Revised Materia Medica (Xinxiu bencao 新修本草) and the Supplement to the Materia Medica (Bencao shiyi 本草衍義) written in 739…both included large numbers of new foreign drugs.”²⁰⁵

At this time, a long and rather extreme cold period hit Eurasia due to volcanic eruptions in various parts of the world. The dust and gas darkened the sun for decades creating the longest cold period in millennia from 536 to 660. This period includes 13 of the 20 coldest decades documented in our (admittedly thin) records of the region in early times.²⁰⁶ It was also intensely dry in North China and neighboring areas.²⁰⁷ It did not really alleviate until the 800s when temperatures climbed toward the very warm weather of the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 900-1300).

The effect on Central Asia was apparently to send the Turkic groups south. There they attacked or settled among Iranic peoples in the West, and Chinese in the East. It might have allowed China to strengthen its hand, since cold, dry weather weakens the power of the nomads through stressing pastures. Cold dry weather, according to a recent study by Qiang Chen,²⁰⁸ sent Turkic and Turkicized Chinese elites riding down on more favored lands that were weakened by the drought. This, thinks Chen, led to the greatest event in Chinese history during this time and the next couple of centuries: the reunification of China under Sui. That was followed by re-reunification (after a brief collapse) under Tang (618-907) and the assertion of Chinese political influence as far west as Afghanistan. Although Tang suffered a collapse in the 8th century due to the An Lushan 安祿山 rebellion, it still managed to revive and to hold much of the Inner Asian Heartland. The cold, dry period would have hit Central Asia very hard, and indeed we have evidence of a dark age in the core of the region. The great oasis cities fell on hard times.

All this influenced Chinese foodways profoundly. More and more Western and Central Asian foods appeared in China as Sogdians and others flooded Tang Chang’an in particular.

The Tang Dynasty was famously Central-Asia-oriented. Like its brief predecessor Sui (580-618), it was founded by a general from the northwest frontier who is widely believed to be partly Turkic in his ancestry. Due to this con­nection, and major Central Asian influence in North China, and a continuing military pressure from the frontier, Tang looked westward. China, then as through­out all its history until the 19th century, was primarily menaced from Central Asia and not from the South, or from the sea. The Sui and Tang Dynasties had to deal with the rapid rise of powerful Turkic states. To counter them, Tang extended garrisons and urbanized posts far out into Central Asia. Trade flourished, with Sogdians mediating and becoming the stereotypic traders along the caravan routes;²⁰⁹ they are the large-nosed, capped individuals so commonly represented in thousands of Tang pottery figures. They traded “gold, silver, perfume, saffron, brass, medicinal plants, ammonia, stone honey (cane sugar)”²¹⁰ as major products in the early 600s, also people, “horses, dogs, lions, leopards,…the golden peaches of Samarkand, …carpets, silk fabrics, indigo, black salt, jewels, quartz, carnelian, [and] …ostrich-egg cups…”²¹¹ But many Chinese travelers also took to the Silk Road, most famously the monk Xuanzang 玄奘, who went to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures and came back with a vast hoard not previously seen in China,²¹² as well as a better knowledge of how to translate them. He noted many details about food along the way, showing that Central Asian oases depended on wheat and fruit, as now. Particularly precise is his note on Bamiyan, famous already in his time for its enormous rock-cut Buddhist statues (now being reconstructed after destruction by the Taliban). He said of the valley: “It produces winter wheat, but few flowers and fruits. It is fit for cattle breeding, and there are many sheep and horses.”²¹³ Anderson’s visit to Bamiyan in 1974 showed one major change: potatoes had taken over the most fertile and well-watered parts of the landscape. The wheat was still being grown, and produced some of the best bread in Anderson’s experience. Forage clover (Trifolium resupinatum) was extensively grown for the animals. Xuanzang would have found it familiar.

The Tang state finally came up against the equally expansive Arab world at the Battle of Talas River, fought in the dead center of Asia in 751. This was one of the decisive battles of history; the Arabs won, and thereafter consolidated Muslim control of Central Asia west of the Pamirs. Tang receded but retained control of most of what is now Xinjiang.

The Sui and Tang Dynasties brought in Central Asian ideas, ranging from chairs to political theories, but above all the West Asian foods. It was apparently at this time, for instance, that the favorite Near Eastern spices—cumin, fenugreek, coriander, anise and the like—came to China. Central Asian feudalism may have inspired the idealistic revival of the well-field system involving land redistribution and, in theory, set limits on taxation. Sui and Tang attempted to use this plan,²¹⁴ in which land was held in common (in reality, by the state) and leased according to a tic-tac-toe-court plan, with the middle square producing revenue for the state. This system was called “well-field,” since the Chinese character for well, jing 井, was used to depict it.

Meanwhile, Islamic power rose in the West. The Arabs dispersed, settled, and merged with the local population, while Islamicized Iranians spread into the South and West. Turkic peoples poured in from the North. At first, they kept their traditional religion, worshiping Blue Heaven and local spirits, gradually becoming Islamized over many centuries. Only the very remote Chuvash and Yakut kept traditional religions into modern times. Gone, then, were wine and other alcoholic drinks. Also gone were blood, many game animals and other foods unclean in Islam. This was a major change for the nomadic groups. Resisting, they only very slowly cut blood and non-halal game from their menus.

After its Talas defeat and retreat in the West, the Tang dynasty was so weakened that a Central Asian (Sogdian) rebel, An Lushan, launched a rebellion that sacked the capital city of Chang’an, drove out the emperor, and almost brought down the dynasty, in 755-56. Tang control of Central Asia was never firm or thorough after that, and the dynasty slowly declined.

The Tang rulers, after the An Lushan Rebellion, even had to enlist the Uighurs to help the dynasty survive. Legend even has it that the powerful steppe lords forced their Tang masters to change the characters used to write “Uighur” to “Huiguerh 回鶻兒,” “returning falcons,” instead of an older name that was less flattering (worms wiggling in fresh excrement). As Tang declined, steppe elements such as the Uighur prospered. Some quite small groups, largely Turkic, established states, and dynasties.

As Tang lost control, China turned inward. Tang fell in 907, resulting in a disunited and chaotic China for over 50 years. The Song Dynasty, was consolidated in 960. The dynasty never controlled Central Asia or even what is now the far-northern or western parts of “China proper.” In addition, by the early 11th century, northern peoples were occupying much of the country. Their ties with the Eurasian heartland were close; they are referred to as “Altaic peoples,” though that is now known to be less than a true linguistic community. Whatever “Altaic” means, the Liao Khitan and Jin Tungus did feel a sense of kinship with the Central Asian regimes.

As part of the exchanges between China and points west during the Tang, many new plants appeared in China. Coriander and cucumber, very important plants in Near Eastern cooking, first makes their Chinese appearance in the Qimin yaoshu, that vast sixth-century encyclopedia of daily-life activities.²¹⁵ They evidently came to China through Central Asia, where they are common today; they are still abundant in northwest Chinese cuisine. They were familiar enough to be noted without special mention in Tang herbals, where they have medicinal values assigned to them. The common pea may have been introduced about the same time, or may have been introduced much earlier.²¹⁶ The broad bean, also now very common in western China, did not appear until the Yuan dynasty.²¹⁷ The lima bean, introduced very recently from the Americas, has also become common in West China. It is sometimes confused with the broad bean in modern speech and writings.

Spinach appeared a bit later, in early Tang, probably from the Iranian world and/or Nepal.²¹⁸ Its foreign origin is recognized in its Chinese name “Persian vegetable.” It remains one of the commonest vegetables in China. Sugar beets and similar roots seem to have come to China at the same time.²¹⁹

The Tang Dynasty saw the introduction of date palms to China, where they were called “Persian jujubes,”²²⁰ just as jujubes are called “Chinese dates” in the modern West. The fruits are similar in appearance and taste, though the trees could not be more different. The famous “golden peaches of Samarkand” of Edward Schafer’s book title also appeared in early Tang, This is an odd case of a special variety of a Chinese plant, developed in an environment considerably to the west of its homeland, imported to China. Almonds, by contrast, are strictly Western, and probably came rather late. Almonds acquired the name badan xing 八擅杏, “badan apricot-kernels,” from badam, the Persian word for “almond”; apricot kernels were and are used in China for many almond-like purposes too. They are somewhat poisonous if uncooked, but so were many of the almonds of the time. Meanwhile, figs and true olives seem to have been new in Tang. They remained rare in China.²²¹

Saffron also reached China, both as a spice and as whole plants, and is mentioned in Tang poetry.²²² Other introductions included kohlrabi, the pistachio,²²³ and even western mustard.²²⁴ Flax and sesame, confused under the same name (“Iranian hemp,” huma 胡麻) in Chinese, were introduced at some point, but the name confusion prevents firming the time range.²²⁵ Cumin reached China also at a somewhat obscure time, again from Iran via Central Asia, where it is exceedingly popular as a spice. It has the advantage of making beans more digestible, relieving the flatulence caused by the longer-chain sugars (stachyose, raffinose, etc.) in the beans. The same is true of fennel, another plant introduced about that time to China; it seems less integrated into the cuisine.

Most other Western foods now familiar in China came later. Asparagus, for instance, seems to be a recent introduction (19th or even 20th century). One dark mystery is the cowpea, known in China in the form of the yard-long bean and eaten fresh. It was apparently independently domesticated in India and in Africa. Cowpeas are probably native widely over the Old World. Their travels are mysterious. Those travels were apparently not over the Silk Road.

Most of China’s distinctive and characteristic foods are warm-weather items that cannot easily endure the climates of the Eurasian heartland. Most of those that reached the West, like rice, foxtail millet, citrus, tea, and various eggplants, spread largely through India. (Tea is actually native to the India-Burma-China border country and was not known to the ancient Chinese; it appeared around Han times.) Other very important Chinese plants, such as the mei (meihuashu 梅花樹, flowering apricot, mistranslated “plum” in literary Western sources), Chinese cabbages and soybeans never reached the West at all until modern shipping allowed fast transport of plants by sea.

In the Medieval period, an explosion of foods came from China, because the southern route had truly opened. Foods came from China via India and the Arabs.²²⁶ By far the most important was rice, which quickly spread not only to the West, but also into the Eurasian heartland, where it is still grown in a very limited way. It spread there from India via Iran, though, since the eastern Silk Road of Xinjiang is hardly rice country.

Citrus fruits were another important arrival to points west from China. Essentially all Western citrus has come from China, except for the lime (which is probably Indian) and the lemon. The only actual citrus species are the kumquat, citron, pomelo, and tangerine; the other citrus, such as bitter orange, sweet orange, grapefruit, and lime, are complex hybrids. Most remained in China till medieval times, but the citron had reached the Near East early enough to be mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. The lime found a home in the amazing Salalah oasis in Oman, a lush wadi-mouth in the midst of vast, lifeless deserts, where a distinctive variety is raised. These Omani limes have a unique flavor, and are exported widely into Central Asia and the West. The lemon is a true mystery; it suddenly appears in the Medieval Near East. Our word is from Arabic. It is a hybrid of tangerine, pomelo, and lime.²²⁷ Like so many other minor fruits and vegetables, it leaves little record for archaeologists and was rarely noted by writers. In addition, it is routinely confused with lime in early sources—the words “lime” and “lemon” both come from Arabic laymun via Spanish limón. In the Eurasian heartland, citrus must have remained rare imported luxuries, for they cannot tolerate cold dry conditions. A few can survive in the warmest areas and in hot-houses, but the effort is hardly worthwhile. The bitter orange (Citrus x aurantium) arrived early in the Near East, but the sweet orange (C. x sinensis) is a more modern arrival, apparently unknown in the West in the Medieval period. Confusion of the two makes dating the arrival of the sweet orange difficult.

3 China after Tang

The period following Tang was a standoff between various local interests, including Chinese and non-Chinese, with a new element, the steppe Khitan, dominating much of the North. The Khitan conquered what is now northeast China, and then all North China in the 11th century. They used a still largely undeciphered script, and spoke a Mongol-related language. Their name for China, Khitai, “land of the Khitan,” still survives today in our “Cathay,” Russian Kitai, and cognate terms.

During this period, thanks to the Khitan, China not only got this widespread name, but watermelon (“western melon” in Chinese), originally from Africa, more directly from the sedentary Uighurs of Turkistan. It was apparently not known in China until the 10th century.²²⁸ It became wildly popular in China and Central Asia. Likewise, as noted, sorghum, similarly an African crop, is not fully attested until Song or Yuan, despite persistent myths of its being prehistoric in China.²²⁹ It almost certainly came over the Silk Roads, becoming a common crop in much of Central Asia; it had long flourished in India and probably came to West China from there too. No less an authority than Rashīd al-Dīn—the Persian polymath who chronicled Cinggis-qan—associates its spread and popularization with the Mongols, with Qubilai-qan in particular.²³⁰

Later the Khitan people who founded the Liao Dynasty were replaced by the Tungus-speaking Jürchen, who widened the zone of alien control in the North. They became a serious competitor for Southern Song. The latter—the surviving part of the Song Dynasty—was well-established in the South. Nationalism and loss of the North led to a marked “southernization” of foodways in Southern Song. It became a country of rice, seafood, and green vegetables; dairy products and northern grains were sharply reduced. The cookbook of the artist Ni Zan 倪瓚, the Yunlin tang yinshi zhidu ji 雲林堂飲食制度集, “Cloud Forest Hall Collection [of rules] for Drinking and Eating,” is a Yuan work reflecting Song tastes, is a typical example; its foods are southern, with dairy getting a bare mention.²³¹

After the Khitan were displaced from North China, the Jürchen founded the Jin (“Gold,” actually named after a river) Dynasty. A group of Khitan moved to Central Asia and built a new empire there, characterized by total religious freedom,²³² like the other regimes of the eastern steppes.

The Jin held North China for a century. Among other things, they introduced the Tungus word shaman to the world; court records speak of the emperor and his priests and shamans.²³³

Thus, although Song reunified most of China after 960, it lost the North definitively after 1125 in the face of the rise and expansion of the powerful Jin. This dynasty nearly destroyed the Song entirely. The Song had to be entirely rebuilt after moving much of its focus to the South and abandoning its old capital. It forced Song to move its capital far south to what is now Hangzhou 杭州, away from the Central Plain of China and its traditions as the true heartland of China. Hangzhou is Marco Polo’s Quinsay, from a Chinese term for tempo­rary capital, xing suozai 行所在. Thanks to him, it is one of the best documented early modern Chinese cities. The account of Hangzhou alone should settle any question as to Marco Polo’s visiting China; it is abundantly confirmed by Chinese sources (from giant pears to the varieties of restaurants and tea shops).

Not only did Song step back from being a strictly land empire, but its maritime contacts were developed to an unparalleled degree. This was in part thanks to ongoing technological breakthroughs such as water-tight compartments within ships, general introduction of the stern-post rudder (long known in south China), and the compass. These breakthroughs made possible not only easier maritime contacts in the immediate vicinity of China, with larger and more secure ships, but allowed true long-distance trade with much direct sailing rather than staged sailings, from port to port. They were also crucial to the enormous fishing industry of the time, and a resulting shift toward more and more sea food in the diet.

Song was largely cut off from direct contacts with the Eurasian heartland and did not even share a land frontier with Turkistan. Even Jin had its direct access to the Eurasian heartland blocked (except through Mongolia) by another regime, the Tangut state of Xixia 西夏. This is one of the reasons that Jin meddled in the deep steppe, where the young man who became Cinggis-qan was among those in its employ. For Song, the Silk Road was mostly maritime, although the land trade continued and there were important contacts with Tibet as a source of vital imported horses. Thus, this was a period when Chinese food was minimally influenced by the West, and maximally influenced by internal developments, especially in the lower Yangzi Valley. This is the time when China became a land of rice, tea, beans, fish, and irrigated vegetables, and when its famous cuisine really developed. Records show Tang food was rather simple. The great Tang poets, for instance, speak of thin-sliced raw fish, lots of meat, dumplings, and the grain staples; Song writers refer to a more refined variety. However, the influence of Song high cuisine on Central Asia was inevitably limited. Song did not have power, or even influence there, nor could, in any case, Song gourmets make their beloved fresh fish and vegetables available in steppe, desert and oasis, in an age before refrigeration allowing long-range movement of such perishables as fish and many other food products best served completely fresh.

4 Witnesses: Travel Accounts from Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Times

In early times, judging by information collected by the Greek geographers and Latin encyclopedists such as the elder Pliny the Elder (23-79), Greeks and Latins, and others under Roman control, made their way into the Eurasian heartland and adjacent areas, often in pursuit of trade. Pliny, however, accepted the most amazingly absurd travelers’ tales, showing he lacked reliable sources for the more remote areas. From better sources came much of the rich information found in the general histories. In one case, the Histories of Herodotus (484-425 BC), we possess substantial eyewitness testimony, including his account of the Scythians and Sakas. More typical is the unique but unassigned information in historians such as Theophylactos Simocatta, who wrote in the early 7th century. Theophylactos knows an amazing amount about places as far afield as China, not to mention the Eurasian heartland, but the sources of his information are uncertain. Still more typical is legendary history, the confused tales of the peoples of Gog and Magog. These are mentioned in the Bible; legend eventually held them to be peoples walled up by Alexander to keep civilization from suffering constant invasion.

During the Hellenistic period and Roman times, we have detailed information about voyages into the Indian Ocean. One source is a book by one Cosmas Indicopleustes, “Cosmas the India Sailor.” Sailing the Indian Ocean, even in stages from point to point, was much easier than the land travel of the period, though many did travel into the Eurasian interior.²³⁴

From the Chinese side, travelers regularly went west; one at least getting as far as Syria. For East Asia there was a religious motivation. Many Westerners came to China to preach the dharma—the Buddhist law. Many Chinese went to India to study Buddhism, visit the holy sites, and bring back texts. Faxian 法顯 in the 4th century went by sea. The Tang monk Xuanzang, the Tripitaka of the novel Journey to the West, went by land. By Tang times, the Chinese were very well informed not only about the Silk Roads, including its South Asian and maritime variants, but even about the distant West.

The coming of Islam and the uniting of much of the Middle East and Iran, and even parts of Turkistan, under Islamic government, unleashed a flood of travel. A few staunch Arab travelers even managed to survive the deep Eurasian heartland and write up their experiences.

Of the early Arabic travelers, the most famous was Ibn Faḍlān, who journeyed from Baghdad to the Bulghār court near the Volga junction with the Kama River in 921-922. He is said to have brought 4,000 dinars for the king to construct a mosque, and in the meanwhile propagate Islam. However, the money got misappropriated, and Ibn Faḍlān’s mission was a failure. Despite this, he left a dramatic account, complete with tales of rhinoceri and giant snakes. Much of it was obviously gained from locals anxious to tell a story. Ibn Faḍlān was working with multiple interpreters, some of whom were apparently having some fun at his expense. One local who was surely doing so showed him a bear skeleton and said it was a giant from the lands of Gog and Magog.²³⁵

Outside of these meanderings, Ibn Fadlān’s general account is straightforward, clear, and believable. One of the most interesting notes is that he brought along large quantities of raisins, walnuts, pepper, and millet, to give out as gifts, and even kings accepted these as extremely special. It seems strange that such a lowly and common thing as millet could be a gift, since he (and others) make it clear that millet was the staple food in most of this area. Perhaps a special kind is meant. Even flat bread was exotic enough for these poor Northerners to be a special gift.²³⁶ Trade in such commodities was already established, but was rare.

In Ibn Faḍlān’s descriptions people and horses were routinely sacrificed at funerals; sometimes the horses were eaten.²³⁷ Meat—of horse, sheep, or cattle—was left at sacrificial sites, he continues: “When night falls, the dogs come and eat all this, and the man who has made the offering says: ‘My Lord [the deity] is pleased with me and has eaten the gift that I brought him.’”²³⁸ This same story has been told in similar words by countless later travelers, all over the world.

Feasts and even ordinary upper-class dinners seemed to consist mostly of sheep. Ibn Faḍlān learned to love strawberries (so do the modern Kazakhs, their büldergen, and the Uzbeks), common in Bulghār land.²³⁹ Apples, hazelnuts, honey, millet, wheat, and barley were commonly available. Mead, known as sujū ²⁴⁰ , was common and popular. The people used fish oil for cooking, which Ibn Faḍlān did not relish.²⁴¹ This and other accounts in the book note “millet” as the major, even the only, grain crop in northern East Europe. This seems strange now, since rye has occupied that role throughout better-recorded later history. In fact, all early sources agree that millet was the staple in northwest Central Asia and eastern Europe, with rye appearing only later; its spread is not well dated. A reference to wine made from tapping the sap of a tree and letting it ferment is ascribed by the editors of the 2012 translation to a misguided or interpolated reference to palm toddy, but a later translation of a more original manuscript makes it clear that birch trees and birch beer are intended.²⁴²

The religion he found among far northern Turks set Heaven as the highest, with nature spirits below; there was a phallic cult, “because I came from something like it and I acknowledge no other creator,” as one person told him.²⁴³ Ibn Faḍlān was astonished by the uncleanliness of the Turks and by far worse conditions among the Rus, the Vikings of today’s Russia and nearby areas (they raided even on the Caspian).²⁴⁴

In addition to the direct descriptions of writers like Ibn Faḍlān, by his time Turkic foods also begin to find reflection in the Arab recipe books of the time, although how authentic the material is remains to be seen. This includes two supposedly Khazar recipes. The Khazars were a Turkic group that took up residence along the Volga in what is now Southern Russia. Squeezed between Christian and Muslim powers, they converted to Judaism to be acceptable to both, and maintained a Jewish empire for centuries. Some actual recipes survive from the Khazar Empire, or so it is claimed.

The 10th-century Baghdad cookbook Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh,²⁴⁵ for example, includes a couple of recipes named for Ītākh, a Khazar who served Khalif al-Wāthiq as a general. They are not wildly different in character from other recipes in the book, so the question is whether these were dishes created for him in Baghdad (or Samarra) or whether they actually show some trace of Khazar heritage. The Khazar trading cities would have felt the same influence of Persian court cuisine that Baghdad did, which may explain a lot in the supposed Khazar recipes, and shows that assimilation of the Turks to the food cultures of the Middle East was nothing new. Other Turkic Recipes (not Khazar), also survive.

And from the 14th-century Syrian book Kitāb al-Ṭibākha:

Tutmāj

Dough is rolled out and cut [into squares] and cooked in water until done. Yogurt, mint, garlic, clarified butter, and fried meat are put with it.

Salmā

Dough is taken and twisted and cut in small pieces, and struck like a coin with the finger, and it is cooked in water until done. Then yogurt is put with it, and meat is fried with onion for it, and mint and garlic are put with it.

 (“Struck like a coin” refers to the traditional coins that were stamped by hand before modern machinery made it possible to produce flat, uniform coins. These “coins” are inevitably thinner in the middle with an irregular higher edge, like tiny pizzas.)

A variant of the second:

Salma

1 ½ cups flour

Salt

Water

1 pound minced lamb

1 onion, minced

3 tablespoons oil

Cinnamon, coriander

1 cup unflavored yogurt

2 cloves garlic

Fresh mint

Mix flour with 1 teaspoon salt and enough water to make a stiff but smooth dough. Knead hard 10 minutes, cover and let rest ½ hour.

 Pinch off pieces the size of a chickpea and roll into balls. Roll the balls in flour, one at a time, and pinch between thumb and forefinger or flatten on a floured work surface with your thumb.

 Put the oil in a pan, add the onions and fry until softened. Add the meat and fry, stirring and mashing to break it up as much as possible, until done and quite brown. Fry about 10 minutes. Drain fat and season meat to taste with salt, cinnamon, and coriander.

 Bring about 4 quarts of water to a boil, add a teaspoon or two of salt, and throw in the salma. Boil, stirring often in the beginning to keep them from sticking together, until done, about 8 minutes. If the water threatens to bubble over, skim. Drain the salma.

 Mix the yogurt with the garlic and 2 teaspoons minced mint, and toss with the hot pasta. The meat may be mixed in or served on top of it. Warm up in a pan or microwave if needed. Garnish with whole mint leaves if wished.²⁴⁶

[Note another recipe for Salma below, somewhat more assimilated. The YSZY has its Tutmāj or Tutmach too.]

In 1131, an Andalusian Arab named Abū Hāmid made trip similar to that of Ibn Faḍlān. Near the mouth of the Volga he met with sturgeons as large “as a large camel,”²⁴⁷ and of heavenly taste. Sturgeon was grilled and eaten with rice, showing rice was common there by that time. Their roe was already worthy of note, though true caviar had apparently not yet been invented.

Others followed, some penetrating more deeply into the Eurasian heartland, although we do not always have direct evidence of this. Their information in any case considerably enriched local facts found in general histories and geographies of which a great many were being written in the Arabic world during the later Middle Ages. On occasion there is even information on food in them. The Arabs also continued to produce cookbooks, many with clear information about foods that have travelled. Chinese cookbooks, which become more and more numerous as time passes, also contain relevant recipes and individual discussions of the foods, often exotic, in them some recipes and foods under their Turkic names.

In the farther West, various states such as the Samanids (819-999) and its successor the Qaraqanids (999-1211), ruled most or large parts of Turkistan. Later a major Turkic Empire in the area was that of Khwarazm (1097-1231), destroyed by the armies of Cinggis-qan in the early 13th century. Simultaneously East Asian influence moved west in the form of the Khitan successor state of Western Liao, formed by refugees from Khitan China. It dominated Eastern Turkistan and large parts of Western until it destroyed by the Mongols before their assault on Khwarazm.²⁴⁸

During this period, eastern Turkistan and some immediately surrounding areas were the focus of many small city states. Located at major oases and permanent rivers, they served not only as concentrated locations of agricultural production of every sort (particularly wine, figs, dates, other fruits, and nuts), and as way-stations for trade. There were large caravansaries and similar facilities for camels, horses, and other pack animals. Here bread and a few other travelers’ foods were readily available. At first, nearly all these states were culturally quite divergent. This included in religion. By the time of the Mongols the area was increasingly Turkic, although non-Turkic influences remained important. Even if Turkic linguistically, the dominant cultures were strongly Iranicized, in food at least as much as in other ways. Many of the groups becoming Turkic had Sogdian ancestors.

Between roughly 700 to 1100 or 1200, Western Turkistan, and Khorasan, closely connected with the Eurasian heartland, led the world in science and technology. They were advanced in many of other areas as well.²⁴⁹ The time is generally considered the golden age of early Islam. It is easy to fall into thinking that the real focus of this must have been in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran, but many of the major figures came from Central Asia. One was the mathematician al-Khwārizmī whose name immortalizes his native area, Khwarizm (or Khwarazm); his rules for calculation took his name and gave us the word “algorithm.” Western Turkistan and Khorasan developed not only mathematics, but also their own advanced astronomy, and other scientific areas, beyond anything seen before. Poetry, architecture, and fine arts also flourished. The great philosophers and medical writers Al-Bīrūnī (973-1048) and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980-1037) not only revolutionized medicine and Aristotelian thought, but also chronicled all the foods of their world, with associated medical values and indications; they were far ahead of their time, and many of their observations on food anticipate modern nutritional science. They were only the greatest of many Central Asian medical and nutritional scholars.

These glory days were a time of agricultural progress, not the least in irrigation. An incredibly advanced dam from the Mongol period (ca. 1300) survives. It is probably the earliest known dam in the world to make use of the idea that a dam curved upriver can withstand the force of the water, the way an arch bears the weight of masonry above it.²⁵⁰ It certainly had earlier antecedents; it is too well designed to have been a total innovation.

5 Medicine and Food in Medieval Central Asia

The major contributions of this period were in medicine. By this time, Hippocratic-Galenic medicine had triumphed throughout most of the Western world, reducing its rivals—or former rivals—to marginal notes in the books. This led to the loss of most other Greek medical books not written by the semi-mythical Hippocrates (5th century BC), or by Roman physician and medical theorist Galen (129-ca 213). The books included are among the first scientific treatises in any language.

Hippocratic-Galenic medicine was so important to Central Asia and its foodways that it requires explanation here. Beginning with Alexander’s legions, it entered the region broadly. It subsequently grew steadily in importance, becoming overwhelmingly dominant by the 10th century. From then until the present, every urban Central Asian’s foodways, and the foodways of many rural and nomadic people as well, were influenced at least somewhat by Galen’s teachings and those of his school. Educated people read the texts, widely translated into Arabic, and followed them; ordinary people knew at least the basics humoral categories (“hot, cold, wet, dry”), a few basic herbs, and such principles as avoiding the combination of fish and dairy foods at the same meal.

Other areas of Greek medicine spread with Alexander the Great’s conquests as well and thereafter and were firmly established in western Central Asia by 300 BCE. The glory days of Greek medicine were still to come. A first triumph was the herbal of Pedanios Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE). A Roman army doctor, Dioscorides traveled all over the Greek world, recording remedies everywhere. His herbal is one of the more amazing achievements of human history: a brilliant, thorough, rigorous, fully scientific medical work centuries before any “scientific revolution.” Dioscorides recorded a certain amount of nonsense, often with wry and skeptical comments, as well a great deal of perfectly accurate knowledge, much of it still in use. Some of it is in standard pharmacological practice today. His work, being roughly contemporary with the first versions of China’s Shen Nong Bencao jing 神農本草經, “the Shen Nong Canon of Materia Medica,” was more comprehensive and more carefully tested. In Central Asia Dioscorides became available almost universally thanks to Arabic translation, the second language for Greek medicine.

Galen of Pergamon put the field of medicine on a scientific footing through extensive research and clinical experience. His works were first translated, into Syriac, and then into Arabic, in standard editions; indeed, the majority of Galen’s works have survived to modern times only in Arabic and Syriac versions. Later there was a huge Galenic literature in Latin, some of the texts quite old, and some lost in Greek or Arabic. Most of the texts involved were translations from the Arabic. Only a few came directly from Greek.

Like Dioscorides, Galen was a highly rational, hard-headed scientist in an age more usually given over to faith-healing and astrology. Admittedly, he was very often wrong. So are most pioneers in science. (Sometimes his wrongness is amusing to modern readers; he alleged a structure in the heads of humans that is actually found only in pigs—thus showing some overgeneralization from his actual dissected models!) A simplified form of his basic view became widespread by the time Islam arose. In this view, heat, cold, wetness, and dryness combined to produce the body’s humors. Health could be maintained and restored by manipulating heating, cooling, wetting, and drying influences—especially heating and cooling

Characteristic of the tradition was careful classification of medicinals. The sheer amount of information provided in the herbal medicine texts is amazing. This is the tradition in which Al-Bīrunī and Ibn Sīnā worked. Both compiled enormous encyclopedias of herbal and dietary medicine.

Now that the humoral Galenic tradition has been largely superseded by modern biomedicine, it is hard to remember that it dominated medical science in the West for 1600 years, and remained important well into the 20th century. It is still the folk medicine of much of the Middle East and Latin America. It, or fragments of it, spread with Islam into Southeast Asia. Some of its knowledge was distantly absorbed into Chinese traditional medicine. By 1800 the Galenic tradition was the most widely believed system of thought in the world, having far outrun any religion or philosophy.

The major reason for its success was that it worked. It taught moderation and common sense in diet (“der Mensch ist was er isst,” “the human being is what he eats,” was an old idea from Galen long before it got taken up by and spread by the 19th century German writer Ludwig Feuerbach), exercise, sex, sleep, and other aspects of “regimen” (a technical term within the tradition). It went with an herbal tradition that involved many effective drugs, most of them still in use.

It taught balance in diet, using the codings “heating, cooling, wetting, and drying” as mnemonics for teaching a rough-and-ready, and surprisingly effective and successful, nutritional medicine. It taught reasonable standards for washing, wound treatment, care of pregnancy and birth, and other everyday emergencies. It has been nowhere close to modern biomedicine in success rates, but it was generally better than doing nothing. At its worst, in Europe, it led to too much bleeding of the patient, and the use of sometimes toxic drugs, leading medieval religious writers to observe that prayer was more effective than medicine; the prayer at least did not actively kill. In Asia, Galenic medicine was gentler, and such murder-by-treatment was evidently rare among well-trained physicians.

This was not its only secret of success. Much was due to the secular, pragmatic, hard-headed, and methodical approach of humoral medicine. (Muslim patients were often cheered to learn that it counseled drinking wine—in moderate amounts and for reasons now verified by biomedicine.) Much was due to the focus on health maintenance rather than mere sickness treatment. Much was due to its empowerment of the patient: a person was responsible for watching his or her regimen, maintaining health, and self-treating illness. It also counseled interaction with the doctor; the doctor was not supposed to be the white-coated god, never to be questioned, of too many modern clinics. This “MDeity syndrome” did inevitably exist, but interactive consultation was at least supposed to happen. The usual alternative, faith-healing by prayers and charms to invoke God and drive away demons, was widely seen to be weak competition, and in any case humoral medicine did not exclude it. One could take herbal pills and pray too, and many—perhaps most—took both options.

Diet therapy was targeted to restore the balance of hot, cold, wet and dry. Galenic theory postulated four humors: blood (hot and wet), bile (hot and dry), phlegm (cold and wet), and black bile (cold and dry). Black bile is the dismal mass of dead red blood cells and other infection products that clog the bile duct in cases of liver disease or malaria. Imbalance in the four basic qualities, and in the four basic humors is the cause of diseases. One can have too much or too little of any of these. The humors can, in addition, be corrupted. The humors became even more important over time, especially in Europe as in Islamic medicine. They remain with us as personality descriptors, using the Greco-Latin names of the humors. Some oversupply of blood made one sanguine; of bile, choleric; of phlegm, phlegmatic; of black bile, melancholy. Liver disease would make anyone melancholy, but the term was used more widely to cover many other psychological problems.

Food was a standard corrector of the imbalances. Foods that increased body heat were not necessarily heating in temperature; they were high in calories (i.e., they produced lots of body heat—a fact very well known to the Greeks). This also included bitter, piquant or otherwise “hot”-tasting foods, or, if other cues failed, hot-colored (red, orange). Cooling foods were usually low-calorie; almost everyone knew the problems with maintaining body heat after a starvation diet of weeds and vegetables. Cold-looking foods (icy white, pale green), sour foods, and foods apt to be actually cool to the touch (like melons in summer) were cooling. Water was known to chill anyone who fell into it, so water and wet foods were cooling. Cooling, that is, not wetting; water cools the body. Wetting foods were those that made the body retain water, swell, or otherwise become damp or wet internally. The effects of the food, not its qualia, are what matter. Dry items tend to feel dry and raspy in the throat, also irritating to throat or mouth.

The starch staple of any given area was considered locally to be the perfectly balanced food: bread in the West, boiled rice in the East. The four basic qualities were classified in degrees: first degree, very mild; second, strong; third, strong enough to be dangerous, at least to the frail. For instance, something hot in the third degree would be deadly to someone with a hot condition.

Similarly, blood, and easily digested foods, make more blood. Somewhat hot and sweet, or fatty foods make yellow bile; heavy, moist, sticky foods make phlegm; heavy, dry, heating foods make black bile.²⁵¹

All this served to make it easy to remember types of foods and individual foods, and to balance diet in a rough way. High-calorie, overheating foods like fats and alcohol were balanced with cooling, soothing ones like vegetables. At best, actual vitamin deficiencies were treated: heating foods tended to have iron, and anemia looks cold (pallor, low body temperature); cooling foods usually have vitamin C, and scurvy was considered a “hot” condition.

Digestibility of food was also a major consideration. Galen himself made more of the food’s digestibility and nutrition than of its humoral qualities.²⁵² For him, as for the Hippocrates’ circle, barley broth—water with pearl barley boiled in it for a long time—was the greatest of treatments, indicated for almost all medical conditions. This remained true in the Near East and Europe, even after modern biomedicine came along. Many Americans as well as Asians still swear by it. In East Asia, pearl barley remains a major cooling and soothing “nutraceutical” food.

Being more than a little snobbish, Galen saw the foods of the elite, such as white bread and the meat of young animals, as more digestible than the food of the peasants. This was not entirely untrue. To Galen the worst of all was coarse whole-grain bread, which only a peasant or slave—with their coarse bodies—could digest, despite the nutritional benefits. Galen tended to see spices as matters of concern; later writers, finding them both medicinal and upper-class, recommended them as cure-alls. Dioscorides records many medical virtues for them; many of these are supported by modern biomedicine. The Islamic writers used them copiously in medications. This was one of the reasons for the “spice” trade across the Eurasian heartland and over the seas. Spices, including purely medicinal items, were traded at least as much for medicine as for flavoring. Indeed, the flavoring was often seen as one sign of the medicinal use.²⁵³

Quite apart from these grand theories were the pragmatic values of herbs. Dioscorides was a practical man with little interest in high theory, which did not keep others for classifying his herbs into many categories later. He knew the actual medicinal values (often confirmed by modern biomedicine) of his herbs. He knew when they aided digestion, procured abortion, stopped sore throat, remedied headaches, or killed worms. He was little concerned did if they were heating or cooling. Dioscorides’ basically pragmatic herbal tradition combined with Galen’s highly systematized, theorized one, cooperated in producing Islamic medicine. A large percentage of Dioscorides’ herbs are foodstuffs, and the influence of his herbal on eating has been incalculable.

As mentioned, both Galen and Dioscorides were extensively translated into Arabic. M. M. Sadek²⁵⁴ has carefully compared a standard Arabic Dioscorides with what we have of the Greek original, and found the Arabic version close. Sadek also catalogues the herbs called for in these editions. The usual progression was for the Byzantine Empire to maintain and recopy the classic Greek texts; then these were translated into Syriac, either in the Empire or under the new Islamic regime; then the translation went from Syriac to Arabic (the languages are closely related). This was especially true in early centuries. Later, texts were translated directly into Arabic, sometimes almost on a factory basis.

The result was a society that was knowlegable in and valued moderation, cared about diet and health, and had a robustly secular and sensible medical tradition. They could say that “a table without vegetables is like an old man devoid of wisdom.”²⁵⁵ Islamic rules were bent for health reasons, especially in the case of wine. They even found ways to drink distilled beverages. According to the manuals, the distillation process boiled the devil out of the original ferments, as it were.²⁵⁶

Foods throughout Asia were soon being evaluated for their heating and drying qualities; in China this fused with the yang-yin theory. Galen’s work remained incredibly influential. As of the 19th century, one or another form of Galenic medicine was dominant in folk and traditional cultures throughout the Western world, from Chile to Russia, and influential throughout all Asia as well. It satisfied a need for a rational, systematized medicine that would at least occasionally work. Only the superior effectiveness of asepsis, chemical drugs, and eventually antibiotics has partially displaced it. It is not dead yet; Galen’s counsels of moderation in diet, exercise and lifestyle are directly ancestral to those that doctors tell patients today, whether in America, China, or Uzbekistan.

Nowhere was the adoption more enthusiastic than in Central Asia, which became the world center of Galenic medical writing and research in the early Middle Ages, and thus the leading medical center of the world.

Galenic medicine and the accompanying herbal lore enormously influenced foodways throughout Asia, because Galen—like early Chinese doctors—emphasized food and diet as all-important in maintaining health. Every educated Central Asian would have been influenced—if not directly, by reading or hearing about Galenic principles, at least indirectly by their influence on what foods were available and how they were cooked.

Like so much else of the Medieval Islamic golden age, medicine had a major center in the cities of the Eurasian heartland. (Another was in Moorish Spain.) A warm period, moist in at least the eastern parts of Central Asia, had made the region more prosperous and productive. Doctors were travelers, and many Central Asians went to Baghdad and elsewhere to seek their fortune. Still much of the research and training remained in Turkistan centers, especially Samarkand, Bukhara, and their immediate hinterlands. On the other hand, they wrote in Arabic, the language of Islam, and of learning at the time. This has led to those living in the cities and oases of the Eurasian heartland being grouped, not unreasonably, with Arabic or Islamic doctors in general, and indeed there was no separate tradition of a local medicine in the area; what was found there was part of the mainstream of Near Eastern thought. Still, Arabic medicine it its broadest sense forms part of our story because of its special influence on the foodways of the Eurasian heartland.

The giants of the glory days were al-Bīrūnī (973-1048) from Khwarazm, and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980-1037), from Afshana near Bukhara. They were roughly contemporary, and were rivals.²⁵⁷ Al-Bīrūnī was the older; Avicenna, evidently a rather driven and difficult man, was the challenger. Both were complete polymaths, making contributions to history, philosophy, and other sciences as well as medicine. Both were solidly in the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, but by their time it had been greatly enriched with new knowledge, and they added considerably more with their own work. Al- Bīrūnī’s expertise on India is clear in his knowledge of Indian drugs and medicine.

Although Al-Bīrūnī’s works remain largely untranslated, we fortunately have a good translation of his work on medicines and foods: Al-Bīrūnī’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica.²⁵⁸ A Medieval copyist’s preface describes Al-Bīrūnī as “a great philosopher, a scholar of immense magnitude, a master of erudition, a master of wisdom, an example for his followers…, an axis round which profound axioms and observations revolve, the circumscriber of the apparent and the hidden, a past master…besides whose work that of his predecessors…pales into insignificance,…worthy of reverence and exaltation.”²⁵⁹

The book is arranged alphabetically (not very consistently) in Arabic. Entries range from brief notes to long texts that quote leading authors in both the medical and literary literature of the time. Not many foods make it into this book; one is tea, about which Al-Bīrūnī knew a good deal; he even knew a familiar Chinese folktale about the plant. Like most writers of extensive medicinal works at the time, he gives plant names in many languages.

Avicenna has done better in translation, with two summaries of his definitive Canon to choose from. The major work is Laleh Bakhtiar’s editing and complete translation of the Canon in five volumes.²⁶⁰ The full work is now available from Hamdard Publications.²⁶¹ A more challenging summary translation of Vol. I by Mones Abu-Asab and allies²⁶² attempts to interpret Avicenna in modern medical terms, producing much that is delightful and thought-provoking, even if very hard to accept on faith.

Avicenna followed Aristotle in writing that “food and drink…change from their own nature so as to receive the ‘form’ of one of other of the human members…and the matter of which the food is composed receives the ‘form’ of the member without losing its own dominant primary quality…. Thus, the temperament of lettuce is colder than that of the human body, and yet lettuce becomes blood and is thus capable of being converted into tissue. The temperament of garlic is hotter than that of the human body and it also becomes blood”²⁶³ Moreover: “Some nutrient medicines are medicinal in quality rather than nutrient and others are nutrient rather than medicinal. Some of the latter are more like the ‘substance’ of blood in nature (such as wine, egg-yolk, and meat-juice), and others are less so (such as bread, and meat) and others are entirely different.”²⁶⁴ In other words, some foods have to change much more than others to be digested and become human tissue. Yet their qualities survive, influencing the human body. Lettuce that has become blood and flesh is still cooling.

Volume II of Avicenna’s Canon is particularly interesting for present purposes, since it details the medical values of 749 foods, herbs, and medicinally active minerals. This may be compared with the 381 categories of medicine in just the surviving fragments of the Huihui Yaofang 回回藥方—see below—and approximately 1800 in the comprehensive Chinese herbal of Li Shizhen 李時珍, the Bencao Gangmu of 1593. All the Bencao Gangmu recipes were intended to be taken by mouth, and most were actual foods (not the case with Huihui Yaofang recipes and simples, many of which were for external application). For all these substances, Avicenna provides humoral categorizations and pragmatic uses, often with separate accounts for local varieties—many of these have slightly different humoral values than the standard. Where the uses he mentions are not too forced by humoral theory, they are often quite accurate by modern biomedical standards.

Avicenna’s work remains widely used by Islamic-world doctors even today, for instance in the Yunani (Ionian, i.e., Greek) medicine of India and Pakistan. His medical theory was Galenic; his herbal lore was based on a much expanded Dioscorides.²⁶⁵

The first food thoroughly treated therein is almond, and that may stand as an example. Sweet and bitter almonds are both described. “Sweet almond is moderately moist. The bitter type is hot and dry in the second degree…. Bitter almond oil is hot and moist in the first degree…. The gum of bitter almond causes constipation and gives warmth to the body. All types of almonds have cleansing, purifying, and purgative qualities.”²⁶⁶ “Degree” refers to strength, from first (mild) to third (serious). There follow two more pages of specific indications, including for cosmetics, swellings, wounds, joints, head and eyes, respiratory organs, digestive system, and excretory system.²⁶⁷ Most of the recommendations are for bitter almond, especially the oil, which is high in cyanogenic glycosides and other active chemicals. Sweet almonds were known to be fattening. Almond oil is still used in the 21st century for its extremely effective soothing, skin-softening, and abrasion-healing effects.

Avicenna followed Dioscorides in ascribing all sorts of values, reported or confirmed, to all items, while also trying to maintain some quality control by making skeptical notes about the most extreme claims. In general, he was aware of actual values: coriander is digestive, cumin is warming (stimulant and rubefacient), and southernwood is abortifacient. He was credulous—or perhaps merely inclusive—about cure-all claims for a wide range of medicinals, so most of his recommendations are uncertain at best, even by the standards of his time. By contrast, his first-listed uses are very often correct in biomedical terms.

Almost all the drugs are Near Eastern, or are universally found (like salt and hares) but are assigned traditional Near Eastern uses. The few Chinese entries are items already widespread and long-established in Central Asia by Avicenna’s time: apricot, bamboo, millet, orange (it would have been the bitter orange) and peach. Many more Indian and Southeast Asian items also occur: black gram, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, coconut, cotton, deodar, embelia, long pepper, three kinds of myrobalans, nutmeg, pepper, sugarcane, tamarind and turmeric. Buddhism and Silk Road spice trade had made these items familiar. By this point, the concept of the “medical missionary” was well known; Buddhists, Christians, and others often spread their doctrines with the aid of medically trained monks and teachers.²⁶⁸

Subsequent works in the tradition followed the Canon, with revisions and up-datings. Shams al-Din al-Samarqandī (d. 1222), from Samarqand as his name implies, produced a brief aqrābādhīn—formulary or concise drug guide—which has been translated.²⁶⁹ Medical encyclopedias from later years are also known. Most are lost or survive only in unedited and unstudied manuscripts. Even the major contributors are not as well-known and studied as they should be. We have essentially no knowledge of the non-Galenic medicine traditions of Medieval Central Asia. Careful study would reveal some refutations of popular magic and curealls, and there are accounts of shamanic and quasi-shamanic healing rituals of a sort much better documented from later ­centuries.

In the meantime, Galen and Avicenna influenced Europe, and the influence goes on today. The most durable example of this has been the Taqwin, an Arab health manual written by the Christian physician ibn Butlān (d. 1066, just as the Normans were conquering England). It was translated, as the Tacuinum Sanitatis, at the court of King Manfred of Sicily (r. 1257-1266). A summary in Latin was translated into English by Sir John Harington in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, including the verse: “Use three Physicions still; first Doctor Quiet. Next Doctor Merryman, and Doctor Dyet.”²⁷⁰ Versions of this bit of doggerel were still being widely quoted as current advice when author Anderson was a child in the midwestern United States. And, indeed, it is still the best medical advice. When your doctor tells you to rest, eat moderately, get some exercise, and enjoy more, remember (and maybe even tell him) that he is echoing the advice of medieval Central Asians and Arabs channeling an ancient Greek.

6 History during the Mongol Empire

The rise of the Mongols in the early 13th century was in every way a watershed for the history of the Eurasian heartland and for most of the Old World. The Mongol era was the pinnacle of the Medieval glory days of Central Asia.

Not only did the forces that fueled this rise result in the greatest land empire in history, but the Mongol age became an era of unprecedented cultural exchange and economic contact, including a revived land trade along several routes. Within this context, food transfers accelerated and broadened. The upswing also included, briefly, in the late 13th and early 14th century, a first maritime age (1290-1340).²⁷¹ It centered on the trade routes of the Indian Ocean with links stretching far beyond. Later this was briefly restored during the time of the Zhenghe 鄭和 voyages in the early 15th century, and definitively under the Portuguese after 1498, but neither of these accomplishments detract from the maritime age of Mongol times.

At this point it will be useful to characterize briefly the structures of governance in Central Asia from medieval to early modern times. The world was organized into segmentary lineages—a descent form famously called by Marshall Sahlins “an organization of predatory expansion.”²⁷² It was easy to grow fighting forces by linking more and more widely along descent lines, often fictive ones, but equally possible for a lineage to break down along sub-lineage lines. As the widespread proverb said: “I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, our cousin, brother and I against our lineage, and our lineage against the world!” For “lineage” one could substitute “village” or “tribe” or any other unit of polity. Cinggis-qan proved to be the ultimate master at this game, putting all the Mongols and ultimately many nomad groups into one vast force unified by real or imagined kin.

The leader of such a lineage—or of a tribe or settlement—was called in Turkic languages a qan (pl. qanlar, but we will use “qans” for simplicity). He was usually male, though queens and powerful women often held full power. He ruled through a council of elders, the aqsakal, “white-bearded ones,” in Turkic. There were also tribal councils to answer to. Qans were leaders of branches of the lineage, and often holy men. The qan did not have full power; his family and the aqsakal and tribal councils restrained him, and the ordinary people of the tribe could always vote with their feet, deserting a poor master for a better one. The surrounding settled civilizations had regular kings, with full authority and the bureaucratic trappings of a court, and steppe leaders that conquered cities often tried to emulate them. However, even when Turkic or Mongol rulers took over an oasis city, they were constrained by their followers to maintain qan governance. Of course, once the nomads took over great civilization—especially in the Mongol conquests of the Near East and China—they quickly learned imperial forms and worked with bureaucrats, but such systems rarely got far into Central Asia itself.

Ownership and management of resources was by the descent group, or, in settled mountain regions, by the village (also unified by descent). Depending on how limited the resource was, how easily it could be controlled, and how lavishly it was supplied, the resource could be utterly unlimited and open to all, or open to various levels of the lineage from local branch to whole tribe, or to a family.

Succession in the qanates, that is, in the successor state to the Mongol enpire, after its unity broke down after 1260, was theoretically determined by the will of the people, as expressed through popular councils, khuriltay. In fact, that usually meant that brothers and sons of the deceased qan fought it out, recruiting to their side various factions of the councils. This was so routine that the great Central Asianist Joseph Fletcher borrowed from Macbeth the term “bloody tanistry” for it—“tanistry” being the Celtic term Macbeth would have used for this method of succeeding to power.²⁷³

Temüjin, the later Cinggis-qan (r. 1206-1227), the man who set it all in motion, arose out of a steppe disturbed by Jin Dynasty (1125-1234) manipulations. As the old Chinese phrase had it, “using barbarians to regulate barbarians.” “Genghis Khan” is a European transcription of a Persian form; the original Mongol was pronounced Chinggis Qan, with the Turkic back k; the modern Mongolian is Chinggis Khan (pronounced as spelled, kh representing the German ch). He united his Mongol horde and directed its energies outward, first into what is now Inner Mongolia,²⁷⁴ and later into the entire Eurasian heartland.

After the death of his father, Yesügei (poisoned by enemy Tatars), Cinggis-qan, his brother, and his mother, Hö’elün-eke, along with a few retainers, were abandoned on the pas­tures by Yesügei’s former people. Forced to eat what they could find to survive, the family lived on wild apples, bird cher­ries, and various roots. The roots included garden burnet root and cinquefoil root, scarlet lily bulbs, wild garlic, wild onions, and garlic chives. They as well caught some small, “misshapen” jebüge fish and qadara (Salmo thy­mallus) fish. The Secret History of the Mongols, our principal native source, stresses their hardship:

The Tayyici’ut elder and young brothers, set out on trek, leaving be­hind on the pas­ture grounds Hö’elün-üjin [Lady Hö’elün], the widow, and the little children, the mother and the children:

The era was favorable to pastoralism. Both human and livestock numbers expanded in Mongolia. The Mongols were fortunate to ride out during the Medieval Warm Period, which made Mongolia warmer and moister, and thus much more habitable.²⁷⁶ Temperatures soared, reaching the highest levels seen until recent years, by around 1000 and again in the 13th century. Higher average temperatures would have reduced, most notably, the incidence of dzud (see above, p. 21). There were still short periods of cooler and drier weather, which Qiang Chen²⁷⁷ associates with the invasions of northern China by seminomadic eastern-steppe groups. The very warm 1200s were followed by sharp decline in the 1300s into the Little Ice Age of the 14th-19th centuries, which proved devastating to the Mongols and others in Central Asia. (There has been a recovery since the early 1800s, with climate growing steadily warmer.)

The good weather of the 1200s, especially increased rainfall resulting in better pastures, led to population increases in Mongolia. More people and more animals gave Cinggis-qan more real power than at any time in the history of Mongolia. By Mongolian standards, there was population and livestock to spare. People and animals could profitably be moved outside of Mongolia, to expand the geographical range of Mongolia and its cultural reach.

The Mongol world conquest remains one of the great episodes of history.²⁷⁸ The Mongols themselves appeared strange to outsiders; the most over-the-top description was by the Armenian writer Grigor of Akanc, who may never have seen them. He described them thus: “They were terrible to look at and indescribable, with large heads like a buffalo’s, narrow eyes like a fledgling’s, a snub nose like a cat’s, projecting snouts like a dog’s, narrow loins like an ant’s, short legs like a hog’s….Their women wear beautiful hats covered at the top with a head shawl of brocade….They…eat like wolves.”²⁷⁹ Of course Ammianus Marcellinus’ old propaganda about the Huns in the 5th century were all recycled too, including his claim that they “cooked” their meat between their thighs and the horses’ backs.

For the areas bordering on Mongolia, but located outside the steppe, the first manifestations of new Mongol power were raids, some quite small. By 1211 the Mongols, who had by then made many local allies, most of them Chinese, could begin a general offensive. This offensive was carried out on several fronts simultaneously, resulted in advances into various points in Manchuria and points south. This included an advance in 1214 to the Jin Middle Capital (Zhongdu 中都), near where Beijing (北京, “Northern Capital), a city founded by the Mongols, is today. Due to an epizootic among their animals, the Mongols had to retreat without taking the city, at least for the moment. Their Chinese and other allies, particularly Khitan allies, went on advancing even as the Mongols themselves returned to a cooler steppe, a place healthier for themselves and their animals.²⁸⁰

The Jin court itself then moved to its Nanjing 南京, “Southern Capital.” This was not the modern Nanjing, but the Chinese city of Kaifeng 開封, located south of the Yellow River, in a well-populated and economically well-endowed area, and thus a better base for the survival of the Jin regime. Jin now became more Chinese. The Jin held out there until 1234. After conquest, a large nomadic garrison, a tanma, was left behind to control the newly conquered areas. It was based in the mixed areas of what is now Inner Mongolia.²⁸¹

The Mongols settled into controlling and exploiting their conquered areas (with more than a little help from their now many local allies), increasingly asserted on terms of their own interests. Fortunately for the Jin, the main Mongol armies had to be dispatched west. At the time, the dominant power in the West was the Khwarazmian Empire, a large but thinly-based structure of rather recent emergence. In 1218 the local Khwarazmian governor in Otrar suddenly massacred a caravan of 450 merchants and Mongol ambassadors under the protection of Cinggis-qan himself. Although this was almost certainly without the knowledge of the ruler of the Khwarazmian Empire, the Khwarazm-shāh, Cinggis-qan still held him responsible.

Suddenly the Mongols were master of a large area with many cities, and, of course, encountered sophisticated foods quite new to them. Some cities were damaged, perhaps even largely destroyed, by Mongol conquest, if we believe the second-hand account of the Persian historian Juvaynī (1226-83). One wonders what the Mongols thought of the refined urban cuisine. One suspects they first viewed it as soft and unworthy of them, then tried it in gingerly fashion and slowly came to love it. Such was, at least, the pattern later observed among Turkic conquerors.

The advance in the West continued with generals Jebe and Sübe’etei sent in pursuit of the fleeing Khwarazm-shāh and riding around the Caspian to find Russians waiting for them (1223). After they rode back (Jebe died on the way) the advance continued, but with local forces primarily as part of a continued war against Jalāl al-Din, son and successor of the Khwarazm-shāh. Soon a new Mongol thrust developed in China against the rump Jin regime. It had taken advantage of Mongol preoccupations with the West to expand its territory and attack reduced Mongol armies. In yet another break for Jin, Cinggis-qan attacked the North China state of Xixia, which had refused to send troops to support the Mongol advance, thus betraying its tribute-payment relationship with the Mongols. Cinggis died there, perhaps from falling off a horse.

Since a new qan had now to be elected in the traditional Mongol style, and this took time, an interregnum resulted. Between 1227 and 1229, Tolui-noyon, the youngest son of Cinggis-qan, ruled as regent. Finally, in 1229, Ögödei (r. 1229-1241) the second son of the founder was elected. He had been the choice of his father during his father’s lifetime and enjoyed substantial support. For all practical purposes, Ögödei became the real founder of the Mongolian Empire. He systematized administration, regularizing the coinage, and created a new capital at Qaraqorum in the deep steppe. He also organized conquest on a new basis by utilizing local resources more effectively.

As part of a continued advance west, Mongol armies poured into what is now southern Russia, taking key points one by one. The Mongols then moved on into Europe and Hungary.

Although this advance did considerable damage and alarmed the Europeans, Europe was fortunately spared by the death of Qan Ögödei in 1241. The news reached the far Mongol West in record time, showing the efficiency of the Mongol jam, their pony express. Once again, the Mongol world had to prepare to elect a new qan, and once again there was interregnum. A woman ruled: she was Töregene-qatun, wife of Qan Ögödei.

The interregnum was protracted. Only in 1246 was a new qan elected: Güyük (r. 1246-48), son of Ögödei. He did not live long, perhaps dying of poisoning.

A new interregum resulted, with still another woman regent, Oqol-qaimish, wife of Güyük, ruling. In 1251 did the Mongol world assemble once again to elect a new ruler. This time it was Möngke (r. 1251-1259), from a new imperial line. It was descended from Tolui-noyan, eldest son of Cinggis-qan. Möngke election was tantamount to a revolution. When he came to power he unleashed a frightful purge of his enemies, supposedly for plotting revolution. By this time Batu, the son of Cinggis-qan’s youngest and perhaps illegitimate son Jochi, had emerged as the most powerful single individual in the Mongolian Empire and king-maker. He supported Möngke and was hostile to the house of Ögödei. When Qan Güyük died he was actively preparing for war against Batu.²⁸²

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Mongol inscription from Qaraqorum

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Nonetheless, the Mongols continued to act with reasonable unanimity during the reign of Möngke. The main lines of advance decreed by the khuriltay that elected Möngke led in two directions. In the West, imperial younger brother Hüle’ü (died 1265) was sent to secure Mongol control in Iran and associated areas. This he did, capping off his advance with a conquest of Baghdad. This conquest ended more than 500 years of ‘Abbāsid history (750-1258). Hüle’ü’s advance for the first time put Mongol rule in Iran on a firm basis. It was probably at this point that the Mongols took seriously to the delights of Near Eastern food. Certainly, illustrations soon begin to show them doing just that.

In the East, Qan Möngke himself led a renewed advanced on China, in this case against Song China since the Mongols already controlled the North, former Jin. The most enduring outcome of this campaign, which ended with Qan Möngke’s death in 1259 (he was still in the saddle), was the Mongol invasion and conquest of the Dali 大理 Kingdom occupying present-day Yunnan 雲南. The process whereby this outlying area became definitively a part of China was begun by this conquest. Their new conquest served, as most Mongol conquests had done in the past, as a jumping off point for further advance; in this case, this meant penetration of Burma and even northern India. An attempt on Vietnam proved abortive.²⁸³ The Mongols attacked Vietnam and Champa, a kingdom centered in the Hue area of modern Vietnam, in 1281, and were defeated. They planned to attack again, but Qubilai, by then the Mongol ruler in China, died before they could in 1294. By land they also invaded Burma, and in 1292 Java. Defeated again, they still achieved maritime dominance in the Indian Ocean,²⁸⁴ which proved enormously important for marine trade—the “maritime Silk Road,” with unprecedented movement of goods and people.²⁸⁵

Thanks to inclusion in the Mongol Empire, China was once again closely connected with Central Asia, this time—the first and last time—in an empire that united the whole vast area into one realm. Peaking at thirty-three million square kilometers, the unified Mongol Empire was the biggest contiguous empire the world has ever known.

With the death of Möngke, the forces now tearing the Mongol Empire apart proved irresistible. Those ruling had no longer grown up together, and the forces tying them to local interest had become stronger than those holding the ruling elite together at an imperial level. The Golden Horde of Russia and adjacent areas had already become independent even before the death of Batu in 1255.

Hüle’ü now stood fast in Iran. His planned further advance into Mamluk Egypt had been stopped by a defeat. Mongol troops were wiped out by Mamluk horsemen at ‘Ayn Jalut in modern Israel.²⁸⁶ The Mongol advance was permanently broken, making this one of the key battles in world history.

In Mongol China, Qubilai, the middle brother of Möngke, was in charge. China was the richest area economically, and had the greatest militarily resources of all the areas under Mongol control. Qubilai quickly asserted himself as the next qan. To this end he held a khuriltay, assembly, of his supporters. Unfortunately for him, it was one not attended by representatives from most of the rest of the Mongolian world. Qubilai in China oversaw a fusion of foodways (and culture), as will appear below.

By the mid-1260s, the Mongol world was divided between five independent qanates, small empires of their own. Most significant was qanate China ruled by Qubilai (r. 1260-1294), who also asserted his influence over Mongolia, although his capital was shifted first to his princely residence in what is now Inner Mongolia (Shangdu) and then to an entirely new city, Daidu 大都, now Beijing 北京 (called Qanbaliq, “Qan City,” in Turkic).

In the Eurasian heartland was the Qanate of Qaidu. It preyed upon the Ca’adai Qanate, as did the Golden Horde, with occasional attacks also from Qubilai’s domains and the Ilqanate. Largest and most remote of the Qanates remained the Golden Horde, controlling Russia, adjacent areas and much of Siberia. It was too far away to attack or be attacked by Qubilai. Thanks to a revived Silk Road trade, it did make its economic influence felt.

In spite of the divisions in the Mongolian world, trade continued and even grew. Cultural exchanges taking place with trade were important. For the Silk Road, a particularly important aspect of land trade were new cities built near the Volga by the Golden Horde.²⁸⁷ They were used by the Mongols of the horde to try and outflank trade coming from other areas, including China, which relied increasingly on maritime contacts and a revolution in maritime technology. They became key to the spread of foodways between West and East.

China was in those days the economic center of the world, as the account of Marco Polo makes clear.²⁸⁸ Qubilai, already controlling the North, began a campaign that was to reunite China under a single ruling house for the first time since the Tang Dynasty (1276). Although the far south responded with a protracted resistance movement (1279), ultimately it failed. The last Song fleet was defeated in a naval battle. The type of battle itself marked a change in the thrust of Mongol China. On the ocean or not, it was not just Mongol allies who were engaged in the battle, but the Mongols themselves.²⁸⁹

Even before the final campaigns against Song, the Mongols began a two-stage campaign against Japan (1274 and 1281) which at first was based in Korea and later in the Chinese maritime ports as well. The attempt to conquer Japan failed.

The Ilqanate, the Mongol qanate in Iran, the ally of Qubilai, could not expand, due to the Mamluks and the Golden Horde blocking them. It still traded actively with Qanate China and other points. A route led from the southeast coast of China to Iran, and then north via the Empire of Trebizond to Genoa and beyond.

The 14th century was an era of decline for the Mongols. By 1350 only two of the Qanates survived in more than name: that in China, which fell in 1368 to the Chinese Ming 明 Dynasty (1368-1644), and the Golden Horde in the far West. The Medieval Warm Period had given way to the Little Ice Age; temperatures by 1400 were back to the horrific levels of the 6th century, and the Mongol world could no longer mount a major military effort. The Silk Road was seriously impacted. Snow and cold closed the mountain passes. Also, colder weather meant less evaporation from seas, and less storm energy on land, so many of the deserts grew drier. The Little Ice Age fluctuated greatly in actual temperatures (the 16th century was warmer than the 18th). The Silk Road temperature kept declining until warming finally began again in the 19th century and countinued through the 20th.

The past always looms large. Present realities, even the realities of regional nationalisms, tell us not only about the present but also about the past. The present has thus become a component of history, as seen from a long view, Braudel’s Longue durée.

7 The Eurasian Heartland and Its Silk Roads in Mongol Times

Some background on the Silk Roads is necessary here for any general discussion of foodways in the Eurasian heartland as they existed during Mongol times and thereafter. The Silk Roads were so vital in moving people and goods, including food and foodstuffs before there were railways and paved highways.

The main land route across Central Asia has been known as the Silk Road since the German explorer F. von Richtofen gave it that name in 1877.²⁹⁰ As Valerie Hansen points out,²⁹¹ the Silk Road neither started out to carry silk, nor was even a road. It was a network of caravan tracks, going through deserts, over mountain passes, around salt flats, and up and down dunes, and through the steppe. It changed with the weather and wind, and with threats from bandits and war conditions. It probably began as a network of trails taken by long-range nomads crossing back and forth looking for pasture or loot; some of the areas though through which the land Silk Road passed are too remote or too dry for effective use by nomads. Its glory days came when great empires held its end points and when sea travel had not yet fully come to dominance. These were the centuries from the rise of the Roman Empire in the West to the days of Mongol conquests in the 1200s, and sea trade expansion in the 1300s (the routes appropriately called “maritime Silk Roads”).

Richtofen’s naming still was appropriate. Silk was indeed a major commodity, even by sea, and was often the standard of value. Bolts of silk typically served as currency, just as they were standard units of taxation in China for much of this time. Silk-making skills traveled over it from China to the West. According to a legend first noted by the Byzantine historian Procopios of Caeserea in the late 6th century, silkworm cocoons were hidden in the tops of monks’ staffs and smuggled across. This is fiction (for one thing, the larvae would not have withstood the journey), but clearly the skill involved in making silk did travel at some early point, along with the silkmoth. The West, like India, had its own local wild silks, as we know from early tomb finds in Gaul and elsewhere. Such silk was hard to produce. Chinese silk was far superior in quality, and its worms were more productive.

Other products moving along the Silk Road were generally light-weight commodities of high resale value. These included products easy to preserve on the long road of ship on the seas, such as dried plant materials. These products were mostly “spices,” a term that encompassed a broader cross-section of commodities than it does now. Those herbal drugs immortalized by Dioscorides and Avicenna figured prominently. Involved in the Roman spice trade were many products; not all these moved by land or by the maritime Silk Road.

Among the most important²⁹² known to have come generally via the Eurasian Heartland or at least overland included:

Arabian spices such as frankincense and myrrh were important in the trade going the other way although the West got them more immediately and not via the distant silk road.²⁹⁴ Most of these “spices” had some culinary connection. Nonetheless many were purely aromatics or medicinals. Almost all are in Dioscorides.

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The Egyptian or Spice Market in Istanbul

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The Egyptian or Spice Market in Istanbul

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Spices and dried foods for sale in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

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Hansen²⁹⁵ would appear to be wrong in her assessment of the Silk Road as a thinly traveled route: “…the quantity of cargo transported along these treacherous routes was small…the land Silk Road was shown as relatively…well-traveled, but it never was.”²⁹⁶ Her image of it reminds one of John Wesley’s cynical description of the path of wisdom: “A narrow path with here and there a traveler” (from the Wesleyan hymn “Broad is the Road,” referring to Jesus’ comments in Matt. 7:13-14). However true this is of the path of wisdom, it certainly does not describe the Silk Road in its glory days. Of course, “small” and “not well-traveled” are relative terms. We are not to expect Wesley’s path of error either: “thousands throng together there.” Nonetheless, the Silk Road had heavy and frequent traffic compared to Dark Age and Medieval Europe. For its time, it was a heavily used route. It was the most important long-distance land route in the world for those few centuries. Huge caravans traveled it, carrying everything from Buddhist scriptures bound for China to Chinese ceramics, including among the first blue and white ware traded, bound for Turkey. One source of the silk involved was Tang dynasty efforts to sustain its garrisons during the high-water mark of Tang power. Tang Dynasty garrisons in the Tarim Basin in the 730s and 740s “cost 900,000 bolts of silk each year to maintain.”²⁹⁷

After the fall of the Tang Dynasty in 907, the Silk Road declined, but not immediately. Decline was partly due to troubles in one anchor of the route: Tang and post-Tang China, with its rebellions and disunity.²⁹⁸

It rose again, to greater heights than ever, during the Mongol period; the “pax Mongolica,” the Mongol peace, allowed it to get as crowded as it would ever be. At that time, with some hyperbole, “indeed, it was said a virgin carrying a gold urn filled with jewels could walk from one end of the empire to another without being molested.”²⁹⁹

Chinese Turkic Christians traveled to Rome and Marseille.³⁰⁰ Almost at the same time Marco Polo traveled to China. And Marco Polo did get to China.³⁰¹ The doubters point to Marco’s failure to mention the Great Wall—not surprising since it was built over a century after his death. He also failed to mention tea and footbinding, which merely proved that—as a foreigner—he was not allowed into the inner chambers of the elite; Mongols and ordinary Chinese then did not drink much tea (the Mongols had only begun to drink it) or bind women’s feet.

At this time, the Golden Horde cities of the Volga and nearby areas reached peak importance. Thanks to the investigations of German Federov-Davydov³⁰² and his teams, the archaeology of these cities is reasonably well known. They were large and well-provided, with some buildings enjoying such amenities as indoor plumbing and heat conduits in the floors. The extent of these cities and the evidence for the magnitude of their trade contradicts the claims of Frederick Starr³⁰³ for a post-Mongol decline in the area, although the trade was necessarily directed north.

Related to the Silk Road, from earliest times, was a land route from Sichuan 四川 south into the mountains of what are now Yunnan and the outlying areas of Tibet, leading into India. This was already noted by Zhang Qian. The Mongols considerably expanded this contact and held advanced posts in Burma, Laos, and even as far south as Bengal, where land and maritime routes came together.³⁰⁴ The Ming, who lost interest in the maritime routes after the Zhenghe voyages, expanded these land connections still again. Very little research has been done about the trade moving along these internal Southeast and South Asian routes. A recent book that is both very scholarly and stunningly beautiful, Tea Horse Road by Michael Freeman and Selena Ahmed,³⁰⁵ has finally provided a thorough and accessible look at a key part of this route. Freeman and Ahmed witnessed scenes that are probably much like those of Yuan times.

The land connections persisted. As late as the early 1400s, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, ambassador to the court of Timur in 1403-6, wrote that the Chinese “say that they have two eyes, the Franks one, and that the Moors are blind, so that they have the advantage of every other nation in the world,” and that “From India come spices, such as nutmegs, cloves, mace, cinnamon, ginger, and many others which do not reach Alexandria”.³⁰⁶ But the wars of Tamerlane—Muhammad Shuja Ud-Din Timur, called Timur Lenk, “Timur the Lame” (1336-1405) and his successors were horrifically bloody even by Central Asian standards. His tribal followers were in particular engaging in endless war and looting. The Mongols in their time had been able to protect the sedentary domains from tribal rapine. They did so by administering the main sedentary areas separately and sharing the revenues generated, so most of the princes saw little advantage in free looting. Tamerlane did this to only a limited extent. He chose instead to go out of his way to harm his enemies economically. Thus, the Golden Horde cities declined sharply after Tamerlane’s late 14th century invasion and soon disappeared, perhaps with help from bubonic plague (though this is controversial).

When Anthony Jenkinson, of whom more below, explored the route for England in the 16th century, he found it had become impractical as a trade route. “The ancient route through Khurasan [northeast Iran], extending from Persia to Europe, was…in a ruinous state, due partly to competition from the cheaper sea traffic and partly to animosity between the Safavids and their neighbours.”³⁰⁷ The land Silk Road nonetheless continued to carry the old trade goods for local uses,³⁰⁸ even though maritime trade took over the major share of trade between East Asia and the Western world. Indeed, highways and railroads still follow old Silk Route corridors.

Pegolotti, a bit earlier, noticing the trade, recorded masses of caviar in the Caspian Sea area. The caviar was often conveyed in the hide of the back half of a sturgeon. Pegolotti listed in all 288 commodities traded around that sea, incliuding saffron, clove, cubebs, lignaloes, rhubarb, mace, long pepper, galangal, camphor, nutmegs, cardamoms, and scammony.³⁰⁹ After Tamerlane this was mostly gone. The land trade routes of the Eurasian heartland were less and less significant as time passed, although local trade persisted.

8 Food and Medicine in Mongol Times

Apparently, in Medieval times, Central Asians, at least the sedentary ones, had a bit of a reputation for eating. One early Arab writer asked, in his imagination, what is true satiety in eating. The Sufi answers that one cannot know. A man from Medina says he has never experienced it. And so it goes, through various stereotypic characters. The man from Samarkand forthrightly says: “When your eyes bulge, your tongue is numb, your movements are heavy, your body teeters, your reason has left you, this is the beginning of satiety.” He is then asked: “If this is the beginning, then what is the end?” He answered: “That you are split into two halves.”³¹⁰ One is reminded of the Mexican saying: “Eat till you burst, drink till you pass out, anything more is excess!”

Cooking was of high import and prestige. The necessary lavish feasts were the great driver of this, but another was medicine. Most of the modern strictures about overeating, overdrinking, sweets, fats, and so forth were already well-known, and nutritional and diet therapy were highly developed. This was especially true of the Hippocratic-Galenic medical tradition in the West and the mainstream Chinese medical tradition in the East. Both had alternatives: shamanism, spirit curing, alternative medical schools, alchemy (which had a medical side), and others. It is no accident that the most rational, logical and food-conscious traditions won out in both areas. Starvation was common and so was overeating. No one in Central Asia was a stranger to hunger: princes and qan had to learn to temper their appetites; commoners had to learn to survive on wild plants and tree bark; and nomads also had to practice moderation except for the fermented mare’s milk, when it was in season. And everyone had to know what was healthy, and what was not.

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Milking mares

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Thomas Allsen picks up this thread. A Mongol Bolad was what is usually translated as “cook,” ba’urchi. “Provider of delicacies” would be a better translation; it stems from the word for liver, ba’ur in Middle Mongolian (chi is Mongolian for “one who works with [something]”). Like most elite Mongols associated with the court (in China) Bolad had multiple offices. One was in the imperial bodyguard, where he was a hereditary ba’urchi. His post and responsibilities were most important ones. The threat of poisoning or of assassination by a suborned cook was a very real one. Also, the ba’urchi, as we know from the Secret History of the Mongols, in most cases sat quite close to the qan, within striking distance as it were, in a place of high honor. The Bolad’s power did not stop with his bodyguard office. He also functioned in the late 13th century as a major courtier and diplomat,³¹¹ as well as Director of Imperial Household Provisions. This was not unsual, and most members of the Mongolian bodyguard in China had interior bodyguard and exterior offices at the same time. The former could be quite minor and the latter quite exalted as in the case of Bolad. He is most noted, by the way for his journey to Mongol Iran as Qubilai’s official ambassador.

Bolad probably followed Chinese practice in being both cook and medical nutritionist, and while in Iran probably provided substantial input to the polymath Rashīd al-Dīn (ca. 1250-1318), a Persian convert to Islam from a Jewish background, and a tabib, a medical doctor.³¹² Rashīd was a compulsive writer and knowledge gatherer. He did not neglect food. Attributed to him is a major work on Chinese and Central Asian agriculture, the Āthār va Aḥyā’, “Traditions and Tribes” which draws on Chinese agricultural manuals.³¹³ This book introduced a great deal of knowledge of rice, silkworm, and other cultivation to the Muslim West. It also deals with jujubes, lychees, and other items not known to most of the Muslim or Western world, and with tea, which was then cha—it had not yet become Persianized as chai, apparently.³¹⁴ Rashīd also described, very accurately, the Chinese lotus and its uses as food, the use of bean starch for noodles, and other items.³¹⁵ Chopsticks were known in the West by this time,³¹⁶ as were many forms of rice, pasta (but mostly from the Muslim World and not China), and other common commodities.

Rashīd al-Dīn founded a hospital in Tabriz; his letters call for yearly supplies of 15,000 pounds of oils and 5000 pounds each of “aniseed, agaric, mastic, lavender, dodder, and wormwood.”³¹⁷ Even if these are exaggerated, they give some idea of the extent of medicines used in Iran in those days. By this time, many Indian and Buddhist influences had reached the West, often through the Silk Road communities.³¹⁸ One hugely important medieval introduction was rice, still valued in bland, digestible diets. It spread from India to Iran, Mesopotamia and Egypt in the early middle ages, and thence to Europe. Rashīd brought up-to-date information about its cultivation and possibly new varieties, from China to Iran.

One example of Central Asian medicine, from a slightly later time, is the Chinese hospital manual of Arabic Medicine surviving from the Mongol Period, Huihui yaofang, “Muslim [or West Asian] Medicinal Recipes (HHYF).” The text is very much part of the mainstream Greek and Arabic traditions (Galen is even named using the Arabic form of his name, Jālīnūs). This is probably not its original name, but one assigned by Ming 明 Dynasty editors. Internal evidence suggests that the present HHYF, some 500 pages of manuscript, was once part of a vast encyclopedia of Arabic medicine. This encyclopedia was around 3200-3500 pages when intact, and was possibly used as a general hospital manual of the type well known from the Muslim West.³¹⁹ The Ming version exists in two manuscripts: one in Beijing containing 4 juan 卷 out of what once were 36, and another even more fragmentary, in a regional library. There are two published editions of the Beijing 北京 manuscript, by Y.C. Kong (江潤祥,) (1996)³²⁰ and Song Xian 宋峴 (2000) resepctively.³²¹

One or several of the major works from the oasis cities were probably the sources for the material. There was also, probably, material directly from Ilqanate Iran. Some sources may be surmised. Indirect influence came from Al-Bīrūnī and Avicenna. Shams al-Din of Samarqand’s 13th-century medical work³²² seems surprisingly unrelated. One possible source appears to have been Sayyid Isma’il Jurjānī’s Zakhīra-i-Khwārazmshāhī, “Thesaurus of the Khwārzamshāhs,” a monumental 12th century Persian work very important in Central Asia at the time, but lost today.³²³ If the HHYF did not rely on the Zakhīra-i-Khwārazmshāhī directly, then it likely did on one or more of that work’s own largely-lost ­sources.

In terms of human agency, since books usually do not travel by themselves, one or more transmitters must have been particularly significant. In the case of the Huihui Yaofang, the likely person most involved was the Syrian ‘Isā (Aixie 愛薛), probably speaking a variant of Syriac. ‘Isā was an important figure in Qubilai’s China. He held high ministerial posts in Mongol Iran, where he went as an ambassador.³²⁴ ‘Isā is not only known to have been directly associated with the Arabic medicine institutions of Mongol China, but to have been a doctor himself, and to have founded these very institutions. They belonged to Isā’s family before they became national. As much as anyone, ‘Isā introduced Arabic medicine to the Mongols, and was a go-between between Mongol China and Mongol Iran. Is it so farfetched to assume that he came back to China with a satchel full of medical books?

Noteworthy are the HHYF’s direct connections to Central Asian sources, including most of its descriptions of drugs. In fact, the book is probably a translation of now-lost Central Asian sources. The following discussion of castoreum is but one example. In typically Arabic Medicine style, the text not only tells the value and details the classification of the medicinal, but even tells how to tell the real product from the fake, and how to counter potential poisoning, frequent concerns in other Arabic medicine texts. The product itself is called for repeatedly in the recipes of the manual found in other sections of the book. (Castoreum actually came from a gland near the genitals, not from the testes.):

For an ingredient take gundbidastar [castoreum], another name is mīyān-e khizā [“middle of (beaver’s) testicle.”]. This is castoreum. Rub this material on the body. It can cause body heat to dissipate, and disperse its wind. All castoreum has a pair of attached skins. This is the real thing. Castoreum with only a single attached skin is mostly fake. The fake uses Jāwashīr [resin of Opoponax chironium] ([Subtext] Jāwashīr) and ṣamgh ’arabī [gum arabic, including from Acacia sperocarpa] ([Subtext] This is a resin found in a plum tree in the Arabī land). Take a little castoreum and grind up completely. Combine with blood, and store inside of a bladder. When sun dried then it holds the false castoreum. Also, castoreum, in terms of is original nature, is third to fourth rank in being heating, is class two in producing drying. Also, when castoreum has a dark color approaching black, it is then a poisonous substance. If people take it, they must have damage from this. However, although it does not do damage, it will produce sarsān [brain membraine fever] head swelling symptoms ([Subtext] Also symptoms of mental confusion). One needs to counteract the poison. Take juice squeezed from an orange, or vinegar made from grapes, or donkey milk and consume it. All can counteract [the poison]. If one uses other medicinals, do so along with these substances. If one lacks these substances it is also possible to use sweetflag rhizome or black pepper, [143] half the quantity, as replacements (12, 142-3).³²⁵

Most of the 121 food and animal items and almost 300 herbal categories in the HHYF are discussed in Avicenna. Quite a few are also Chinese. Most of these appear to be local substitutes for unavailable West Asian drugs. Some are used in Chinese ways, showing that the doctors who compiled the HHYF were quite willing to fuse traditions. The following is a typical recipe from the text (complete with subtexts often including Arabic-script entries):

A Jālīnūs [Galen] ([Subtext] This is an ancient Muslim medical man) proven recipe. It can treat tendon artery swelling epidemics such as [Ar.] faliqamūniyā [phlegmonia] swelling ([Subtext] faliqamūniyā). If used the swelling will be aided.

Qalqadīs [red oxide of iron, iron pill] ([Subtext] This is dried yellow potash alum. One qian 錢, one and a half fen 分.)³²⁶

“Golden thread soda” ([Subtext] Nine qian, four and a half fen)

Copper powder ([Subtext] Two liang 兩, two and a half qian)

Frankincense skin ([Subtext] One and a half liang)

Bārzad [galbanum, resin of Ferula galbaniflua] ([Subtext] bārzad. One liang)

Yellow wax ([Subtext] Seven liang)

Za’it [olive] oil ([subtext] This is oil produced from the za’itun tree [olive tree] tree of the Shāmi [Syria] land. Nine liang)

Grape liquor vinegar ([Subtext] 45 liang)

[436] First take the dry medicines and grind for ten days. Afterwards take the powdering medicines and after powdering, combine. Propagate to the entire system where there is a wound. Do it twice a day or three times. When using the medicine also add warm or hot za’it [olive] oil on top. After that take a fur cloth and dip the vinegar with the za’it [olive]. Warm-hot apply to around the place that is wounded. Moreover, one must tabu [exposure to] cold and chill. The reason is that which the tendon arteries fear is only chill together with stiff things (34: 435-36)³²⁷

While Western medicine was flowing to China, Chinese medicine was flowing west. The Tanksūq-nāma-yi Ilqānī dar funūn-i ‘ulūm-i Khitāy, “Treasure book of the Ilqans on the Sciences and Learning of China,” probably slightly earlier than the Huihui Yaofang, contains a translation of a Chinese book on pulse diagnosis³²⁸ as well as much about Chinese foods and medicinals. Rhubarb, white pepper, cassia (Chinese cinnamon), and other Chinese nutraceuticals were introduced to the West.³²⁹ East Asian rice and rice-growing technology also spread west, presumably with nutritional beliefs associated. Europe and Africa had their own native rices; these continued to be cultivated even if the East Asian (and Indian) variants were better.

Iranian medicine, which continued to influence that of the Eurasian heartland, has been chronicled by Cyrus Elgood, who supplies a great deal of information on medicinal eating and drinking.³³⁰ Iran is still firmly committed to heating and cooling—garmi and sardi—as basic medical realities, as described in detail by Jill Benham.³³¹ Humoral medicine is alive and well in much of the world.

By the time of the Mongol conquests, what with all the travelling and cultural exchanges of the period, our witnesses proliferate. Books, including recipe books and home encyclopedias, become important too.

A rare Chinese record of Mongol food was provided by the Daoist monk Changchun 長春, who was summoned to the court of Cinggis Khan to inform him about Daoism. He found himself fed on barley and millet, melted butter, and clotted milk; wheat flour was brought from afar, and was expensive³³² Later, the Uighurs regaled him with melons and watermelons, as well as vegetables similar to China’s; they called one fruit a-li-ma, alma, Turkic for “apple”³³³.Farther on, the Daoist’s party reached Samarkand, where he had rice, flour, salt, oil, and oasis foods, as well as wine.³³⁴ On the steppes there were no such fruits and vegetables. Changchun made the acquaintance of almond trees: “They are like small peach-trees. In the autumn the fruit is picked and eaten. It tastes like walnuts.”³³⁵ He also met with impressively large purple eggplants³³⁶ And, of course, kumiz was served.³³⁷

At this point we must turn to European observers. There is a lack of more detailed accounts by Central Asians of the time.

William of Rubruck, who went all the way to Qaraqorum, has left one of the finest ethnographies ever written on the Eurasian heartland and the Mongols. He has a great deal to say about liquor use among them. Rubruck, for example, notes that the “Tartars”—a term he uses for Turks and Mongols indiscriminately—had effigies in the ger, and:

When they gathered for drinking, they first sprinkled some of the drink on the effigy above the master’s head, and then on the other effigies in succession. Following this the steward leaves the dwelling with a goblet and some drink, and sprinkles it three times towards the south, genuflecting each time, in honour of fire; next towards the east, in honour of the air; next towards the west, in honour of water; and some is thrown towards the north for the sake of the dead.³³⁸

Daily sprinkling milk or liquor to the four directions—the tsatsal ritual—is still done in every traditional home in Mongolia (see below).

Rubruck reported “comos” (kumiz) as the usual drink. More specifically, “In the winter they make, using rice, millet, wheat and honey, an excellent drink, clear like wine, and wine [itself] is brought to them from distant parts. In summer comos is all they care about.”³³⁹ Paul Pelliot thought the grain drink was just the cooking water from the grains, but it is evidently beer or ale, made with the grains themselves. They lived on comos as much as possible. It was made by milking the mares with their foals beside them, as is still done in many areas. They then put it in a bag and churn it to get the butter before fermenting it. “While one is drinking it, it stings the tongue like râpé [low-grade] wine, but after one has finished drinking, it leaves on the tongue a taste of milk of almonds.”³⁴⁰ Caracomos—black kumiz (kara kumys in Turkic)—is kumiz allowed to stand till the solids precipitate out (this probably took some procedure Rubruck does not record). The slaves eat the solids; the clear remaining liquid is the black kumiz. They also use cow’s milk, churning out the butter and souring the rest. Today it is often distilled, the cow’s milk more than mare’s milk. They also boil kumiz down for the curds Rubruck calls “grut,” the Turkic qrut.

In his account, Rubruck continues to give a most unflattering picture of “Tartar” drinking and drunkenness. His images of their food are not much better: “They eat all their dead animals indiscriminately.”³⁴¹ “With the meat of a single sheep they feed fifty or a hundred men: they cut it up into tiny pieces on a dish along with salt and water (since they make no other sauce)…,”³⁴² and eat it with small forks.

He does admit some good: “With the horses’ intestines they make sausages that are superior to pork ones, and eat them when fresh.”³⁴³ People eat what is assigned, taking some home if necessary:

The great lords own villages to the south, from which millet and flour are brought to them for the winter…. The slaves fill their bellies with dirty water, and with that rest content. They [all the Tartars, not just the slaves] also catch mice, of which there are a great diversity and a plentiful supply. They do not eat mice with long tails, which they give to their birds [falcons] instead; dormice they consume, and every kind of mice with short tails. In addition there are plenty of marmots there…twenty or thirty at a time collect in one hole and sleep for six months; of these they catch a great number. Also to be found there are conies [cuniculi] with long tails like a cat, which have black and white fur at the end of the tail.³⁴⁴

The long-tailed mice would be regular rats and mice; the short-tailed ones would be hamsters (Cricetidae), pikas (Ochotona, which are short-eared rabbits), probably voles (Microtus, many species), and possibly other genera. The dormice would be any of several genera in the family Gliridae. The “conies” are identified by their two-tone tailtips as jerboas (Dipodidae); they are not related to rabbits (cuniculi), even though, like them, they have long ears and hop. The Mongols had plenty of choice; Central Asia is an enormous center of rodent diversity. One assumes that ground squirrels (suslik in Russian; Sciuridae) were also eaten, since they abound in the area. Giovanni di Plano Carpini and many readers have expressed a low opinion of Mongol mouse-eating, forgetting dormice were delicacies in old Europe. Marmots (Marmota) still are eaten in much of their range, which includes parts of United States and Canada. In Central Asia today, this can be dangerous, since marmots are important vectors of bubonic plague, although apparently not in Mongol times since our sources say nothing about this.

Rubruck saw no deer. Instead he saw a few hares and many gazelles,³⁴⁵ as well as wild asses (kulan, Equus hemionus) and “arcali” (argali) sheep.³⁴⁶

On the Don he saw rye (he calls it siligo) bread. This account of rye and millet growing is possibly the first reference to rye in Central Asia.³⁴⁷ Wheat did not flourish under the cold, dry conditions.

Rubruck heard that “towards the Northern Ocean dogs are used, on account of their great size and strength, to draw wagons, like oxen;”³⁴⁸ this is an early reference to sled dogs, distorted by indirect transmission. The annotators of the modern edition of Rubruck dismiss as “legend” a perfectly reasonable statement about the huge dogs of the Alans, and their ability to attack even bulls and lions. The Alan or “Alaunt” dogs were famous in Medieval Europe for those characteristics. Their modern relatives, such as the Turkish kangal, are truly daunting animals.

Rubruck himself was continually short of food when traveling. He and his companions had brought a great deal of “biscuit,” which were largely for gifts and used to subsist on. They got millet, millet soup, meat with broth, and rarely other things; the meat was often nearly raw from lack of fuel to cook it. There was no way to avoid meat on Catholic fast days. At the great Khan’s court, they got, for one week, “one small, scrawny ram…and each day a bowl full of millet and a quart of ale made from millet;” all of which they had to share with destitute local people.³⁴⁹ They also got fried millet,³⁵⁰ unleavened bread, and “pasta,” dough cooked in water with butter or milk.³⁵¹ Interestingly, Rubruck’s observations confirm those of Chang Chun.

They did better occasionally, being at one point regaled with “wine, terracina (rice wine), or caracomos (“black kumys,” distilled kumys) … or bal (honey mead).”³⁵² Rubruck noted especially the fondness for drink of the Nestorian Christian clergy. When Rubruck and his group were given wine, everyone, including the Nestorian clergy, “who spent the entire day drunk at court,” crowded around for a share, “with the utmost effrontery, like dogs.”³⁵³ He disliked the Nestorians not only as heretics but also as people. (Franciscan though he was, Rubruck was very often pushed beyond Francis-like tolerance.) They claimed, among other things, to have some of the flour used by Jesus himself. They made their Communion host from it, “and they always replace the same quantity as they remove.”³⁵⁴ Rubruck saw the irony.

The most famous passage in Rubruck is his description of a vast booze dispenser made by his friend William Buchier of Paris, a goldsmith who had somehow gotten to the Mongol court. It shows that the Mongol already liked their liquors and had a variety of them available:

William of Rubruck on Möngke-qan’s Tree of Life

Mangu himself has a great court at Caracarum near the walls of the town. It is closed off by a brick wall, just as the priories of monks [are closed off] among us. There is a large palace there in which Mangu holds his drinking parties twice a year, once around Easter when he passes by there, and once in the summer when he returns. And the second drinking party is the greater since on that occasion there convene at his court all the nobles from anywhere as far away as two months’ journey. And on that occasion he bestows attire, and favors, and shows his great glory. There are there many other houses, long as barns, in which are stored his food provisions and treasures.

 At the entrance of this great palace, because it would be unseemly to introduce skins with milk and other drinks, master William of Paris made for him a great silver tree, at the roots of which are four silver lions each having a channel spurting out white mare’s milk. And pour pipes are led into the tree leading to the summit of the tree, and the tops of the pipes are bent back downwards and over each of them is a gilded serpent, the tails of which envelop the trunk of the tree. And from one of these pipes pours forth wine, from another caracosmos, that is, clarified mare’s milk, from another boal, that is, a honey drink, and from another rice beer, called terracina. And for each drink there has been prepared at the foot of the tree its own silver vessel for receiving the drink, between the four pipes. At the very top master William has made an angel holding a trumpet, and below in the tree he made a crypt in which a person can hide. And a channel ascends through the middle of the heart of that tree as far as the angel. At first master William made a bellows, but it did not provide enough wind. Outside the palace there is a room in which the drinks are stored, and there stand there officers ready to pour them whenever they hear the angel trumpeting. And the tree has silver branches and leaves and fruits.

 Therefore, whenever there is need of drink, the master of the waiters calls to the angel to sound the trumpet. Whereupon, the one who is hidden in the crypt, hearing this, blows strongly into the channel leading to the angel, and the angel puts the trumpet to its mouth, and the trumpet sounds extremely loudly. Whereupon, the officers in the room, hearing this, each of them pours out his drink in the appropriate channel, and the pipes pour them from above and below into the vessels prepared for that purpose, and thereupon the waiters draw them and bear them through the palace to the men and women.³⁵⁵

He also has left us a description of Mongol “grut” (qrut), using the Turkic and not the Mongol word aaruul for the product.³⁵⁶ This is also translated below:

William on Rubruck on Cheese and Cheese-making among the Mongols

The left-over milk which remains from the butter they permit to sour as sharp as it can, and then they boil it so that it coagulates from the boil and what coagulates they dry in the sun. Thereby they make it become as hard as iron slag and this they store in bags for use in the winter. During the winter when they are short of milk, they put this sour coagulant which they call grut into a skin bag and pour hot water on top…and this liquid they drink in place of milk.³⁵⁷

Writing half a century after William of Rubruck, Marco Polo (1254-1324) has less to say about individual foods. Instead he makes up for it in detailed discussions of such things as drinking and eating ritual. From his account, it is extremely clear that such social ritual and eating were of great importance in and of themselves, and for the exchanges of clothing and goods that took place during them, resulting in veritable potlatches.³⁵⁸

Among things consumed at court were the new distilled liquors almost universally known in the Mongol world as arkhi, still a widespread word today, from Indonesia to Turkey. The drinks were in use earlier, but the earliest occurrence of the word arkhi is in the liquor section of the imperial Mongol dietary Yinshan Zhengyao 飲膳正要 of 1330, thus dating the word (but used is a palatalized Turkic form, araji). It is derived, ultimately, from the Arabic word ‘araq, “to sweat,” referring to distillation. Besides arkhi itself, the YSZY also lists other distilled liquors. Stills used to make arkhi appeared even earlier, and there are actual archaeological examples surviving.³⁵⁹

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Grut

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Marco Polo on Feasting at Qubilai-qan’s Court in the late 13th Century:

And when the Great Kaan has his table for any formal court occasion, he sits thus; for his table is considerably higher than the others. He sits positioned to the north so that his face is directed south, and his pri­mary wife sits next to him on his left side. And on his right side, a lit­tle lower, his sons sit; and his nephews, his relations, those who are of the imperial line. And they are so low that their heads are at the level of the feet of the grand lord. And after that the other barons sit at tables still lower. And the same thing is true for the women; for all the wives of the sons of the overlord and of his nephews and of his other relations sit on his left side, but lower. And next sit all the other women of the bar­ons and of the knights, still lower; for each sits in his place as ordained by the overlord. And the tables are [arranged] in such a manner that the grand lord can see them all, from one head to the other, such as there are in such very great numbers. And outside of this hall there are more than 40,000 persons; for many people come bearing many presents for the overlord. And these are people from foreign countries who bear for­eign things.

 And in a certain place in this hall, where the Great Kaan has his table, there is a pot of fine gold which contains easily as much wine as a large cask. And at each corner of this great pot there is a similar smaller one, so that the wine from the great pot goes into the smaller ones which surround it, likewise full of good beverages [made from] very fine spices of great quality. And the wine is drawn from there with handle­less bowls of fine gold, which are easily so large that there would be enough for ten persons to drink. And one of these bowls is set between every two persons, as well as two other small drinking goblets with han­dles, so that each gets wine from the bowl placed between the two. And the same arrangement holds for the women. You should know that these bowls and goblets are worth a great treasure; for the Kaan has such a great quantity of such dishes and other things of gold and silver such as no one would dare claim; and no one would believe unless they have seen.

 And know that those who serve the Great Kaan with food and bever­ages are various great barons. And their mouths are covered, likewise their nostrils, with beautiful napkins of gold and silk in order that their breath, nor their odor, enters neither into the food, nor into the bever­ages of the great lord. And when the grand lord would drink all the in­struments, of which there are a great quantity there of every manner, begin to sound. And when he takes his cup in hand, all the barons, and all of those who are present, kneel down and give indication of great humility. And then the great lord drinks and each time that he drinks it is done just as you have heard.

 Concerning the foods I will say nothing since each of you must believe that there is an abundance of every manner.³⁶⁰

By Marco Polo’s time, or shortly there after, among the major written sources available to us is the 14th century household manual Jujiabiyongshilei 居家必用事類. Translated as “Things that One Must Use when Living at Home,” it is multi-volume, and appeared in a number of editions. It provides substantial confirmation of what the travel accounts tell us: not only information on the culturally-mixed foods of the time as consumed by Chinese, but also purely Mongolia and Turkic foods. Many of these also appear in the Yinshan Zhengyao. Among the samples given below (and there are many other examples of such foreign recipes from the Jujiabiyongshilei), we find the following recipes: sweets, one a börek, one a honey paste, a classic halwa (as that is still eaten today), and a güllach, “flower food” (a proto-baklava). There is also a recipe for fritters. Also described is a stuffed noodle, tutum-ash; this version of the recipe does not make it clear that this is usually a large, stuffed noodle flavored with yogurt. (We have already encountered Tutmāj, a variant, above. It can also be noodles in a yogurt soup.) There are several classic Iranian stews, and the unique “West of the River Lungs.” There is a sour soup made with mei 梅, Chinese sour apricots.

Like most classic recipes, a great deal is left up to the cook. Spices are, in fact, barely mentioned. Fortunately, we know some standard combinations from elsewhere in the Jujiabiyongshilei. One such combination calls for processed stinking elm (Ulmus macrocarpa; the seeds were used, probably fermented), lesser galangal (Alpinia officinarum), long pepper (Piper longum), greater galan­gal (Alpinia galanga), small and large cardamoms, Sichuan peppercorns (Zanthoxylum sp.), dried ginger, roasted cinnamon, dill (under an Arabic name, zhira), fennel, Mandarin orange peel, and apricot kernel. All are typical Chinese spicing, but many are also exotic South Seas spices. A more Chinese spice combination calls for parsley (under an Arabic name), black pepper, fennel, dried ginger, cinnamon, and Sichuan pepper (see the Jujiabiyongshilei, juan 卷 14).

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Sweet Börek

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Sour soup

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“Muslim” Foods in the Household Encylopedia Jujiabiyongshilei (quan ji geng ji) 居家必用事類 (全集庚集), ch. 13, 17A-19B³⁶¹

1. [Turkic] Chäkärli Piräk [“Sweet Börek”]

Recipe: Walnuts, 32 Chinese ounces (remove walnut skins using warm water). After cleaning and drying pulverize in a mortar, add 16 Chinese ounces of cooked honey and 16 Chinese ounces of roasted kürshäk {millet] cakes crushed in the hand. Combine ingredients evenly and work into small patties. Use roasted kürshäk cakes to adjust consistencies of the patties. Use dough skins to cover the patties. Knead into [Persian] sanbusak [samosa] shapes. Put into the oven and cook stuck on the walls of the oven until done.

2. Rolled Thin Pancakes

Recipe: Spread out thin [dough] wafers. Prepare for use walnuts, pine-nuts, peach kernels, hazel nuts, tender lotus seeds, dried persimmons, lotus rhizome, ginkgo fruits, prepared chestnuts, and badam [Persian for almonds]. Excluding the yellow of the chestnuts, later to be cut into strips. Chop ingredients finely. Combine with crystallized honey. Add the following: minced lamb, ground ginger, salt, and onion. Combine. Make a filling. Put into the thin wafers and fry in oil.

3. Kogurma

First cook a sheep’s head. When it has been cooked to pieces, bone. Add chick peas to the juice. When they are cooked and soft, add powder of glutinous rice to form the korgurma paste. Add butter, honey, pine-nuts, and walnuts. Mix evenly and serve.

4. “Sour Soup”

Take wumei 烏梅 (black—i.e. pickled—mei 梅), as many as you want, sugar, and vinegar, and boil together until well done. Remove dregs and wumei kernels, and put into a sand pot. Add honey. Taste to test the balance of sourness and sweetness. Add pulverized pine-nuts, walnuts, and cream. Bring to a boil. The walnuts will turn black from exposure to the wumei. Use a meat broth for the broth. Adjust flavors again. Served with cooked mutton ribs and knuckles, meat kebabs, and chick peas.

5. Tutum-ash

These are similar to salma [“water polished noodles”]. Combine ingredients to make small balls. Trim and allow to soak up water. Work with the hand into small thin cakes. Put into the pot and cook until done. Remove from the pot. When the cakes have absorbed the juice, fry “sour meat” [meat basted and cooked with yogurt, a standard Central Asian delicacy]. Eat as desired.

6. Baldy [“Honeyed”]

Take one large cup of water and bring to a boil. Add 8 Chinese ounces of honey. Remove the froth. Take 6 Chinese ounces of bean power and mix into a paste. Put into a pot. Watch the consistency of the paste adding water where necessary. Cook using a dish and sesame oil. Oil the pan. Baste with butter when ready. Slice with a knife and eat.

7. Halwa

Roast dried flour. Spread out and roast again. Add honey and a little water. Stir to form the halwa and cut into slices. (See the parallel recipe by Gao Lian 高濂, below.)

8. Güllach

Evenly mix egg white, bean paste, and cream to make a dough. Spread dough out and fry into thin pancakes. Use one layer of white powdered sugar, ground pine-nuts, and ground walnuts for each layer of pancake. Make three to four layers like this. Over the top pour honey dissolved in ghee [“Muslim oil”]. Eat.

9. Qoresh-e

Use 20 chicken eggs. Break and combine evenly. Cut up finely 32 Chinese ounces of mutton, and add 8 Chinese ounces of fine spices and 10 bulbs of crushed onions. Roast in sesame oil. Cook until dry and stir in egg white. Mix evenly. Use a cup of vinegar and half a cup of liquor, and 2 Chinese ounces of bean powder. Make a paste. Combine together again with dried meat using egg white. Pour into a liquor pot. Fasten the mouth with a bamboo cuticle. Put into boiling water and cook until done. When the jar is cold, break it. Cut into slices and, after basting with butter and honey, eat.

10. Julapia [Fritters]

Combine bean paste with flour. Make a thick paste and fry in boiling oil. Eat when soft. As a variant leave out the bean paste. Use only flour and sweet meats and form into a paste in cold water. Fry.

11. Qarisa (Arabic harisa, still the name of this dish)

Take a bowl of wheat and pound. Remove skins. Cut 64 to 80 Chinese ounces of mutton into slices. Cook into a fine meat paste. Put into a bowl and spread out. Baste with the rendered fat of a sheep’s tail or sheep’s head oil. Serve with yellow roasted buns. [Textual note] add pine-nuts.

12. “West of the River Lungs”

Connect together a sheep’s heart and a set of sheep’s lungs. Clean in water. Use 4 Chinese ounces of bean paste and broth, and work into meat. Use 4 ounces of flour and juice of scallion and work into the meat. Use 3 Chinese ounces of honey, 8 Chinese ounces of butter, pine-nuts, and walnuts. Remove the skins of the nuts and pound with a 10 Chinese ounce mortar. Finely filter and remove dregs. Combine, stirring together. Pour ingredients onto the lungs. When the lungs are completely covered, put into a cooking pot. Cook until done. Serve in a Tatar plate. First baste and marinate lung. Put excess broth into sesame paste. Cook until done. Make into treats.³⁶²

A man of the time, powerful through food, was Hu Sihui 忽思慧, court nutritionist of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in Beijing (Qanbaliq) in the early 14th century. He was probably a Sinicized Turk, making him more acceptable to the Mongols. Nutrition was important for the Mongols themselves, and they may not always have been as hard-drinking as John Smith has claimed—following Chinese traditions that attribute dynastic decline partly to besottedness.³⁶³ At the same time, nutrition and dietetics was properly regarded by the Chinese as the most important branch of medicine. Hu was probably the leading medical officer in qanate China during his lifetime.

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Tutumash

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Güllach

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He, most notably, served as editor of the Yinshan Zhengyao, a monumental food and nutrition work. Officially presented to the throne in 1330, it covers all aspects of nutritional medicine as found in China, or for that matter a larger Mongolian world at the time and beyond. More important for our purposes here, it includes hundreds of recipes, most of them Central and West Asian. They range from purely Arab and Persian, to Mongol, to Indian, and Tibetan. There are even European recipes, including a recipe for poppy-seed rolls that, on testing, proved indistinguishable from those in Los Angeles delicatessens:

Buns with “little black seeds”

White flour (five jin 斤), cow’s milk two sheng, liquid butter (one jin), poppy seeds (one liang) slightly roasted.

For ingredients use salt and a little soda. Combine with the four. Make into buns (1, 49b).³⁶⁴

There are many similar Chinese recipes. Most interesting are a small group of recipes that combine Central Asian and Chinese foodways in strange and unique, and creative ways, to produce a true Mongol imperial cuisine. We have studied this cuisine in detail in our A Soup for the Qan, and thus can be brief here. Suffice it to say, Anderson kitchen-tested almost all the recipes, including pit-roasting a whole goat (but not making those lung recipes, or trying a recipe for sheepskin noodles), and found them uniformly good. These strange fusion-cuisine recipes turned out to be the best of all. Examples are given below.

9 History after the Mongols

The following Ming 明 Dynasty (1368-1644) continued a forward policy, but had already lost Central Asia to resurgent Mongols and the Turkic dynasties. The Mongols (largely the Oyrats, a mobile and warlike subgroup) continually harrassed Ming, even taking the emperor hostage at one point. At this point, food and medicine introductions from the West dried up; we are not aware of significant exchanges. Instead, the spread of Persian culture was overwhelmingly strong, especially in the south and west, and Indian culture (including foodways) moved north into Afghanistan.

In Turkistan, small Mongol successor groups existed before the Turk Tamerlane (1336-1405) instituted a new era of the history of the area with the large Timurid Empire. It dominated or at least assaulted all surrounding areas. A campaign was even being planned against Ming China at the time of Tamerlane’s death. An attack on Mongol Russia was highly destructive, but ultimately abortive. It hastened the decline of the Golden Horde as a unified empire.³⁶⁵

Tamerlane built up his capital at Samarkand into a world city. The city is still full of his monuments. The Timurid Empire was the last great empire of the Eurasian heartland, although various Timurid and Oyrat groups were very powerful in their days and even threatened China. Trade by land continued, particularly under the Timurids. But when Babur, descendent of Timur and Cinggis, got serious about empire-building, he had to go to India; Central Asia was so violent and its rulers so unstable that he could not get a foothold. The Mughal Empire that he built lasted until the English brought down its last leaders.

By the 15th century a new maritime age dawned, culminating in Vasco da Gama’s voyage around the southern horn of Africa to India in 1498. Even before this, Ming China had attempted to reassert China’s influence in the Indian Ocean in a series of great voyages led by eunuch admiral Ma Zhenghe 馬鄭和 (1371-1433). The times were ripe for maritime adventure.

Once arrived, the Portuguese went on to seize strategic points such as Hormuz in Iran, Goa in India, and Malacca in Malaysia in order to control the entire Indian Ocean by careful trade policies, and military intervention. The Portuguese reached China in 1517, and some 40 years later established Macao, which became the foundation for an important trade with Japan. Japan had a surplus of silver, which it was willing to use to purchase Chinese silk and other products carried in Portuguese bottoms.³⁶⁶

While the Portuguese were developing their connections with China and Japan, the Spanish established their base in the Philippines and penetrated the Pacific. In 1565, they established a regular shipping route across the whole Pacific: the Manila Galleon, going from Manila to Acapulco and back.³⁶⁷ If there is a single date for the end of the Silk Road as an economically viable route, it is 1565. The Eurasian heartland was henceforth a backwater, the situation changing only recently. Nearly all the important commerce was now ocean-based. What had been the Silk Road trade, even to the extent that it still existed, had become irrelevant. The Manila Galleon was part of an interconnected world trade; the commerce along the surviving Eurasian heartland routes was not. The Spanish and Portuguese immediately began introducing New World crops into East Asia. Fastest-spreading was tobacco. Actual foods very soon followed, with maize, sweet potatoes, and chiles being among the quickest to win adoption. Maize and sweet potatoes opened vast areas to cultivation, since they grow in soil too dry for rice and too hot or otherwise unsuitable for wheat. Chiles fitted into the extensive spice world of Asia, being instantly popular for their nutritional and medical virtues, as well as their taste and heat. In all these ways, they competed most directly with long pepper (Piper longum, a very close relative of black pepper), which they drove out of use, often usurping its very name, as in Indonesian lada.

Following this last burst of conquest, Central Asia broke up into local qanates and dynasties. Empires broke down into the qanates of Bokhara, Samarkand, and other cities—each khan holding an oasis and its centering city. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Russia conquered these one by one, eventually controlling all western and northern Central Asia. Little is recorded of foodways during the difficult times between Timur and the Russian conquerors. Notable at this time was the power of the Sufi orders, originally devotional and mystical but heavily involved in politics from early medieval times. Their shared ceremonies and learning made them a logical center for political action, often opposed to narrower Islamic traditionalists and to secular power. A Sufi cookbook from Turkey reveals a simple, quite Central Asian cuisine.³⁶⁸

10 Travels and Excursions after 1500

The western steppes did not greatly change their foodways. Anthony Jenkinson, a British trader who went through Russia in the 1550s, reported kumiz and horseflesh as major foods of the nomads, as they are today, at least among the Kazakhs. He related of the Tatars: “They eate much flesh, and especially the horse, and they drinke mares milke, wherewith they be oftentimes drunke…. Corne they sowe not, neither doe eate any bread, mocking the Christians for the same, and [saying it is] disabling our strengths, saying we live by eating the toppe of a weede, and drinke a drinke made of the same….”³⁶⁹ Though Muslim, they retained some shamanist traits, including sacrificing a sheep and then telling omens from its scapula: “…they took certaine sheepe and killed them, and tooke the blade bones from the same, and first sodde [boiled] them, and then burnt them, and tooke of the blood of the saide sheepe, and mingled it with powder of the saide bones, and wrote certaine Characters with the saide blood” for magic charms; he dismissed their predictions at first but found the predictions were true.³⁷⁰ Scapulimancy links these 16th-century Tatars with the Shang 商 Dynasty Chinese and was once almost universal in Eurasia. Farther south, in the oases of Central Asia, he found yellow melons and watermelons, and sorghum, “whose stalke is much like a sugar cane,”³⁷¹ and incidentally notes the presence of the guinea worm,³⁷² now long eradicated.

A Portuguese traveler named Benedict Goens went to China via Persia and high Central Asia in 1603, unfortunately dying in what is now Xinjiang. There he encountered Mongol or Turkic nomads: “These Tartars make use neither of wheat nor of rice, nor of any kind of pulse, for they say such things are food for beasts and not for men; they eat nothing but flesh…”³⁷³ We have noted above his folk remedies for altitude sickness. The lack of mention of dairy products reminds us of their near-absence from the Yinshan Zhengyao. Mongols do not talk much about this everyday staple.

Also appearing in our early travel accounts are many specialized accounts of food production, including the distillation of kumiz to make milk brandy. Peter Pallas (1741-1811) provides incredibly detailed descriptions of such distillation for several groups. Today, Pallas is perhaps best known today for the many species of birds and other animals which he was the first to describe scientifically, and others that are named after him, either scientifically or popularly. These species include the Pallas cat or Manul Otocolobus manul; Pallas’s reed bunting, Emberiza pallasi; a pheasant, Phasianus colchicus pallasi; and many other birds large and small. He also described some bats, a squirrel, a pika and many fish. This list runs in the hundreds, a major contribution for one collector. Also ascribed to Pallas’s discovery is Pallasite, a meteoric iron, whose composition he was the first to analyze. He likewise described many plants, large numbers of which also remain named for him.

Pallas also made major contributions as a geographer and, most important for us here, ethnographer. Particularly important in this regard are his Bemerkungen auf einer Reise in die südlichen Statthalterschafter des Russichen Reichs in den Jahren 1793 und 1794, Leipzig, 1799-1801), “Notices of a Journey in the Southern Administrative Units of the Russian Empire during the years 1793 and 1794,” and the earlier Sammlungen historischer Natchrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften (St. Petersburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig 1776-1801), “Collection of Historical Notices of the Mongolian Peoples.”

Pallas was a Berliner, born on September 22, 1741. He died too in Berlin, on September 8, 1811, and is buried there. His was a relatively long life for those days. He was the son of a professor of Surgery, Simon Pallas, and studied first in Germany, at the University of Halle and then the University of Göttigen. He then moved to the University of Leiden, in Holland, where he received his doctorate, at age 19.

From the beginning Pallas was a naturalist and quickly began publishing in that area. A major change in his life occurred in 1767, when he was invited to Russia by Catherine the Great to become a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In was in this capacity that he began to participate in expeditions to various parts of Russia, which led to his Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs. Such expeditions along with zoological and botanical contributions continued until the end of his life, and beyond in posthumous publications. Pallas finally returned to his native Berlin and his headstone can be found in a beautiful church cemetery in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where it was seen by author Buell.

Pallas’s Sammlungen historischer Natchrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften (our focus here), is a massive work of some 600 pages. It is profusely illustrated with carefully-drawn plates—some 29 of them. Nearly always when a concept or thing is introduced, including diseases, accurate Kalmuck or Mongolian vocabulary is given in transcription. Few other early works on the Mongols from the period are as well documented.

The Sammlungen are in two parts. Part one is a general introduction to the Kalmucks of the Volga, the Buriats of Siberia, and the Mongols of Mongolia. This includes illustrations and descriptions of Kalmuck and Mongol distillation equipment. That on the Kalmucks is particularly full. Part two focuses on religion and religious practices (Aberglauben, “superstition”). Much of what is described is Lamaist Buddhism, but shamanism is not neglected.

Pallas speaks of Kalmuck distillation as follows,³⁷⁴ in the earliest description of its kind, in the following terms. (It is clearly eye-witness testimony. In the case of his Mongol still, such equipment is still in use today):

To come to the usual excess in brandy of the Kalmucks, the same is, as the cooking of food, solely the business of the women. The equipment includes, as is clearly shown [in the figure below], the following: a large iron kettle with a little water is placed hanging over a small fire on a tripod in the yurt and warmed and filled up with processed sour milk up to within two finger widths of the rim of the kettle. Such kettles hold for sure three Russian buckets or more.

 Placed on the kettle (Chaistin) is a top (Charchaq) that fits the kettle and its somewhat hollowed out. It is made from one or two pieces of wood and has two square openings. To the rim and the joints one is accustomed in the steppe to applying fresh cow dung when there is no fine clay or sod in the vicinity to seal the apparatus, or when it cannot be obtained due to the freezing of the earth. The Stawropolisch group, that is, the baptized Kalmucks, who have grain meal in more abundance, that is well-milled, use during the winter time, instead of clay, a rough­ly-kneaded dough of crude grain meal. Among most steppe peoples, including the Mongols and Buriats, always gathered are fresh animal droppings, which they find near their housing, without effort. That is the most common and the best [sealant]. As a recipient [vessel] during the distillation there serves a small kettle with a cover which must only have a large opening and a small air hole and which is well smeared around the rim. This one, one places next to the tripod into a cooling trough containing snow or cold water.

 The tubes (torros, Mongol torgo) which are intended to conduct the milk brandy from the big kettle to the production vessel is one that normally consist of tree bark bent into a semicircular shape, which is split, with one gutter hollowed out on both sides and refitted one to the other, and which is covered over with raw leather or gut. One end is attached to an opening of the production vessel and the other end is attached to one of the cover openings of the great kettle. It is smeared.

 Finally, a couple of large bullets (araten, chapchal) of clay or cow dung mixed with ashes and sand must be prepared in advance in whose size and beauty one house wife seeks to be superior to the other, because they believe that the foals of the mares, from which the milk comes, will increase in beauty and size proportionately to the bullets. In this there are a number of these bullets more than are necessary. and later left on the fireplace.

 As soon as the preparations are completed, a fire is made whereby one pays attentions through the uncovered opening of the large kettle until the milk is boiling in the same and the strong-smelling vapor which can even catch on fire through the distillation arises out of the opening. As soon as this happens one of the previously prepared bullets is put on this opening and pressed down and the fire reduced. The small opening of the production vessels remains alone uncovered, although many spirit vapors escape through the latter because without this [loss], say the Kalmucks, the distillation will not be successful.

 The vapor decreases after an hour and a half. When this happens all the brandy (arrki) has been driven out and of cows’ milk there remains a 30th part, at most, a 25th part, and of horses’ milk a 15th of the entire milk mass. The product is clear, very watery and cannot catch on fire. However, it can be preserved in glass bottles like weak corn whisky, without spoilage.

 Rich Kalmucks allow the milk brandy to be fortified through repeated processing and have various names which refer to the product after each rectification. The brandy produced from re-distillated arrki the first time is called dang. It is called arsa after a second doubling and chorza after the third. They go no farther as a rule, although they have special names up to a sixth rectification, whereby the first [additional distillations] are schingza and dingza.

 The Kalmucks enjoy the product of the first distillation communally. One pours the brandy from the production vessel, which has been removed quite warm into a wooden cup with a spout, and from this into a small bottle made of leather or bottle gourd.

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A modern Mongolian still of metal

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Regarding the Mongols (and Buriat distillation, although he notes that the Buriats do not do much distillation) Pallas first notes the similarity of what they do to the practices of the Kalmucks, but also notes differences in the distillation vessel:³⁷⁵

A hollow wooden cylinder is attached over the milk kettle in which there is a miniature bottom. An opening in the middle allows the vapor to rise into a cooling area above. The brandy that runs together, collects and is led off through a pipe.

Thus, Mongol distillation is different from Kalmuck in that there is no separate vessel to cool the output. It is cooled in the distillation unit, and then the finished product is led off. From these descriptions, one may notice the portability of the distillation equipment. Even the Kalmuck apparatus with its two metal vessels is relatively portable, as is the Mongol vessel, partly of wood. The tripod upon which the vessels are placed is a part of yurt equipment to begin with, and is not used specially for distillation. Note, incidentally, the passing mention of cows’-milk distillation, since fermented cows’ milk was not frequently in use in the steppe since its products are inferior. Apparently the Kalmucks used cows’ milk to make milk brandy only when mare’s milk was out of season (much of the year), or otherwise unavailable.

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A Kalmuck still

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Mongolian still Wooden version of that illustrated above.

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The reference to multi-distillations among the Kalmucks is particularly interesting because the products of such distillation loom large in Mongolian folklore. Steppe heroes have produced for them a special milk brandy, distilled again and again, until the product of a whole herd of mares is taken up in a single cup. This, the hero must drink it right down to show his manhood, at which point one of two things happens: he either dies or survives more powerful than before. If he dies, his lady friend must go to the other world to rescue his soul, and bring him back to life. Of course, this is dangerous; she can die too. In this case, the hero’s super-intelligent horse must do the deed. It is unheard of for horses to fail; they are not only stronger than humans but smarter too.³⁷⁶

And from the East….

The Qing 清 Dynasty took over China in 1644, during a cold, dry period, which, as Qiang Chen³⁷⁷ points out, recapitulates the tendency of semi-nomadic, but agriculturally-based marginal states, or armies, to conquer China during climatically harsh times. Qing aggressively expanded into Central Asia.³⁷⁸ The Manchus felt that they were allied, as a people, to the Mongols and Turks, and possibly the Tibetans. They formed relationships of domination by every means possible, from peaceful marriage to bloody genocide.³⁷⁹ They did everything possible to promote Tibetan Buddhism among the Mongols and other groups, in hopes of pacifying them with the Buddha’s message of nonviolence. This seems to have had some effect. It certainly provided a bulwark against the spread of Islam, already the dominant religion in Turkestan. It was the Qing Dynasty that took over eastern Central Asia and named it Xinjiang, “New Borders.” The takeover was a slow process, despite self-conscious desire to restore the old Han Dynasty borders and even expand them. “Chinese Turkistan” was a peripheral, nonetheless still important, pawn in what the British called the “Great Game”—the rivalry between the British (expanding north from India) and the Russians for control of Central Asia. The Russians especially flirted with the local warlord Yaqub Beg in the 19th century. However, the Chinese won that round; while Russia took the western khanates, the British managed to keep Afghanistan independent.

Qing also took over Tibet (again, in spite of British machinations), finally effecting a conquest long desired by China. Under the Qing, Tibet remained legally a separate realm from China. It was ruled directly by the Qing Dynasty and there was no Chinese civil administration. This circumstance is one basis of Tibet’s claim to independence; the other being the fact that Tibet was an independent country for thousands of years before Qing and the latest PRC forced takeover. Nonetheless, its hope for self-determination is now increasingly forlorn, as China floods the country with Han settlers and makes every effort to destroy Tibetan culture. The same pattern is present in Xinjiang with its Uighurs. Mongolia was ruled in the same way, but Outer Mongolia successfully broke off, thanks to support by the USSR in the 1920s. Mongolia managed to survive as an independent country instead of becoming an SSR, though it was a satellite of the USSR until the collapse of that empire in 1989-90. Once it was genuinely independent, the communists were quickly replaced in Mongolia by a more democratic, outward-looking regime, which prevails (with various tensions and vicissitudes) today.

Enormous Qing extensions still farther north and east, into Siberia and the Amur-Ussuri, gave China—or rather the Qing Manchus—control of all eastern Central Asia. These extensions were the objects of predatory imperial expansion by Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, costing China an area almost as large as the western United States. The incredibly rich Amur-Ussuri was pried away from China through sharp, but rather shady, diplomacy in the mid-19th century. Nikolay Muraviev, who ran a virtually independent state in Siberia, negotiated the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 with the Qing government, and subsequently proceeded to take over the area, winning himself the title of Count Amursky. He supposedly was not totally open with the more cautious branches of the Tsarist government until this treaty was drawn up and in force. It is worth noting that Muraviev ran a virtual independent court by using as advisors, and sometimes even staff, the formidable brainpower of the Russians who had been exiled to Siberia, including the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. This extra intellectual power helped greatly with the takeover, exploitation, and policy development of this former major and rich part of Qing East and Central Asia.

Qing records show the enormous amount of fish and mushrooms taken from these Mongolian and Siberian realms. Even the incredible wealth of fish and the incredible productivity of the mushroom mycelia of the area could not sustain Qing luxury tastes. Countless tons of fish and mushrooms, as well as furs and other products, were extracted.³⁸⁰ The highly developed conservation ideology of the local people was not able to stand up under Qing pressure.

In short, the Qing Dynasty was as imperialist as the European powers. Westerners have sometimes wondered why China did not expand overseas and create a maritime empire. The reasons are twofold. The first, and by far the most important, was that China was threatened by Central Asia and needed to expand, conquer, and pacify in that direction—not south or east. The second was that China had peaceful trading relations with all the Nanyang 南洋 (“southern oceans,” i.e. lands reached by sailing thereon), and had no reason to waste lives and money on conquests. It lacked the naval resources as well.

Illustrative of the era are the Turkic, Mongolian, and Middle Eastern food words that reached Manchuria. The following is an excerpt from Jerry Norman’s A Concise Manchu-English Lexicon (Seattle, 1978) (They appear here in the Manchu language, but would have been known to the Chinese at court as well):

arcan, “cream, milk thickened with wine and sugar” (Mongol agharcha, translated in Russian as tvorog: curds, cottage cheese)

arfa, “barley” (Turkic arpa)

arki, “distilled liquor” (Mongol araqi <Arabic ‘araq);

arjan, “liquor made from milk,” (might be another form of Mongol araqi

borchilaha, “dried beef and mutton cut into squares and used to make soup” (Mongol borcha, jerky)

bosoro, “dates” (<Arabic busr, unripe dates)

ejihe, “a food made from dried cream” (Mongol ejegei, a cooked-down milk product)

kishimishi, “small green seedless grapes” (<Arabic kishmish)

kūru, “a type of sour cake made from cow or mare’s milk and liquor” (Turkic qurut, dried yogurt)

mentu, “steamed bread (usually round in shape, i.e. mantu or manty)”

sile, “meat broth, soup” (Mongolian silon, shulen, etc; this word has also spread widely among the Manchu-Tungus speakers of the Khabarovskii Krai)

NB: The Chinese pastry name shaqima 沙琪瑪 —another borrowing—is from the passive participle of the Manchu verb sachimbi, “to chop.” It is virtually identical to the Central Asian pastry chakchak: little chopped pieces of dough fried and held together, rather like Rice Krispies Squares.

Meanwhile, by 1700, the old Inner Asian heartland was increasingly penetrated by Russia, as Pallas’ accounts show. At first it moved across Siberia and then south into Turkistan. Turkistan was under Russian control by the late 19th century. To the east, Eastern Turkistan gradually became the Chinese province of Xinjiang, while in the 18th century the Qing conquered all of Mongolia in part through use of new technology and mobile arms that the Mongols could not match.³⁸¹ The Inner Asia heartland was definitively broken up into zones of control for China and Russia. Farther to the south the Indian Ocean was dominated by Great Britain. Some indication as to why the Russians could succeed so well is found in the politics of Kokand just before Russian takeover: “[a new qan] reigned for only 14 days, after which he gathered up all the state’s valuables and fled… [His replacement] began a decade of despoliation of his own people, a decade filled with plundering and murder of all kinds.”³⁸² The long breakdown that began with Tamerlane’s death had run about as far as it could. Such governance took a toll on food production.

Settlement and actual functioning governance fell back to the local level. Travelers and explorers began to attest to local foodways as opposed to empire-wide ones. Johan Peter Falck traveled in Central Asia between 1768 and until his death in 1774. He recorded a great deal about food and ethnobotany of groups he met. The Bashkirs, for instance, were so noted as the best beekeepers in Russia, a folk etymology traces their tribal name back to bash, “head” and kurt, “bee”—an etymology with more food interest than believability (the kurt or qort is almost certainly a circumlocution for “wolf, ” and not bee). In any case, they not only kept enormous numbers of bees in tree-trunk hives, but they lived to a significant extent on honey, honey water, and mead. They provided most of the beeswax for Russia. They grew rye, wheat, barley, oats, peas, and spelt³⁸³—note that rye had replaced millet as a staple. They had large herds and made kumiz, butter, and cheese; it is unclear if they drank fresh milk. They ate nettles and other plants, including wild fruits and roots. Like their relatives 800 years before, they drank birch sap which was probably fermented. In summer they “lived mostly on sour horse milk or kumis, and the men who were lazy visited each other, and on most evenings they were all drunk.”³⁸⁴

Further on, Falck met the “Kazaks” (sic) and other true nomads. He recorded: “A Kazak nobleman owned on average 100 camels, 3,000 horses and up to 1,000 cattle, 5,000 sheep, 1,000 goats and more than 100 donkeys, [and a]round 50 slaves.” Even ordinary people, he goes on, had 1,000-5000 horses, though some had many fewer (down to 50).³⁸⁵ Again, kumiz, butter, and cheese were staple, and fat-tailed sheep fat was widely used. They took game with eagles but ate little wild food. They did not cultivate, meaning their diet was largely livestock products. Like modern Kazakhs, they loved horsemeat, including smoked horse ribs and horse sausages. They ate the contents of sheep stomachs, though they did also have flour from trade as a substitute.³⁸⁶

Farther east, and later (in the 1890s), the Russian explorer Petr Ostrovskikh found the Khakass Turkic people eating bird cherries as a major food. This wild cherry (Prunus padus) is pan-Eurasian and also almost identical to the wild cherries of North America. The Khakass ate the fruits, often making powder of them, which was made into pancakes fried in butter; bird cherries are still eaten in Siberia. They also ate lily bulbs, both martagon (Easter-type) and avalanche (dogtooth) lilies, wild onions, and various roots.³⁸⁷

Explorers who traveled in Central Asia in the 19th and early 20th century speak of plain food: nan and similar breads, the inevitable mutton and dairy, and dried or fresh fruit (especially melons, grapes, and apricots). Few vegetables were available, and game was already confined to relatively remote areas. Persian influences were abundantly obvious in the towns and among elites; Russian and Chinese influences had yet to penetrate on any scale. Khiva and Kokand reported more diverse crops: “Wheat, barley, oats…sorghum, maize, rice, māsh [green dry beans], sesame…melons, water melons, cucumbers, and squashes. In the orchards grew grapes, apricots, peaches, apples, pears, quinces, walnuts, plums, and cherries; and kitchen gardens provided onions, carrots, beetroot, turnips, etc. Wheat was the main cereal crop.”³⁸⁸ Rice and chiles were also grown. Taxes were extracted on land and flocks. Conditions were similar in other oases of Central Asia.³⁸⁹ Thus, when the Qing Dynasty took what is now Xinjiang. They found the land to be held by the state, landlords, free farmers or Muslim charitable institutions; the crops were the same as above, adding hyacinth beans, but lacking chiles. The farming tools were simple. Weeding was ignored, and fertilizer was used extensively.³⁹⁰

Explorers soon learned to provision whenever they could and to bring as much with them as possible. Food was frequently hard to find even in relatively fertile areas. Enough food to maintain a serious expedition was simply impossible to find in remote areas.³⁹¹

The Russian exploration and conquest of Siberia—including, in the 19th century, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and neighboring areas—still needs a thorough history in English. An incredible range of brilliant scientists and explorers followed Pallas.

One, the great Russian scientist Pyotr Semenov, explored what is now eastern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan in 1856-57. In southwest Siberia, now eastern Kazakhstan, he found pioneer Russian settlers doing very well: “Peasant food was unusually plentiful… Meat meals, which consisted of beef and veal, poultry and game, as well as fish, were half of their week-day food. This was combined with wheat and rye bread, pel’meni, the favourite dish of Siberian people, vegetables and dairy products, the latter in unlimited quantity.”³⁹² Russian pioneers in southeast Kazakhstan irrigated, and “planted wheat, oats, rye, iaritsa (unidentified) and some maize and sorghum, but millet did not thrive satisfactorily…. Peach-trees and vines planted in orchards were growing very quickly, not to mention apple trees….”³⁹³ He saw apparently wild apple and apricot orchards in the Tian Shan foothills.³⁹⁴ The Turkic leaders gave him feasts, typically involving “a very tasty pilau made with sheep’s-tail dripping, mutton, raisins and onions.”³⁹⁵

Some of the story of Russian exploration of the Amur-Ussuri (east of the Heartland, but relevant for the food lore) is told in the wonderful book Dersu the Hunter, by V. K. Arseniev.³⁹⁶ A Russian geographer, Arseniev tells the story of exploring the Amur-Ussuri around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries with the Tungus guide Dersu. The stories are lightly fictionalized but still very true to the ways of the Tungus of the China border in those days. Food there ran heavily to millet, with game and wild plants very important. Livelihood was more a matter of hunting and of collecting medicinal herbs—especially ginseng—than of agriculture. Arseniev emphasises the strong conservation ethic of the people, a point that might be dismissed as romanticizing if it were not confirmed by many other observers, including the authors of this book.

The Russians essentially won the “Great Game,” holding all power in most of Central Asia, although British involvement in Afghanistan was intense and long-lasting. Readers of Kipling will know how impressed, and even daunted, the British were with the fighting abilities of the Afghanistanis. And readers of Conan Doyle may remember that Sherlock Holmes’ first recorded bit of mystery-solving was spotting Watson’s recent visit there. Since that time, the people of Afghanistan have had many further occasions to impress and daunt other outsiders. One result of British presence was wider Indian influence. Traders brought more spices, and more Indian foodways, to the landlocked and mountain-girt country. Indian influences on Afghanistan food became stronger and more widespread.

At some point in the 18th or 19th centuries, New World foods began flooding into Central Asia. Our sources are amazingly silent on when this occurred. Tobacco arrived before, being popular immediately—it was common in Siberia by the 17th century. Turkey was an early adopter of New World crops, growing tomatoes and chiles long before Europe did, and becoming so identified with maize that it was known as “Turkey corn” in 16th-century Europe; and the New World answer to the chicken is still “turkey” in English. (In Turkey it is more reasonably called the bird of the Indies.) These items all spread east as well as west, moving early into the Caucasus and Black Sea region not reaching far into Central Asia till later.

Potatoes appeared in Eastern Europe by the mid-18th century. Folklore has it that Catherine the Great popularized them by wearing wreaths of potato flowers in her hair.³⁹⁷ Potatoes did not reach Central Asia until considerably later. From the 18th century on, white potatoes widespread in Western China. They were a staple food in Eastern Europe by the 1840s, when the infamous potato blight that ruined Ireland caused equally great disasters there. Central Asia seems not to have been potato-eating enough to be affected. In any case, it has a less optimal climate for the blight.

Tomatoes, chiles, pumpkins, summer squash, maize, common beans, and other crops slowly moved in. Chiles and maize were very rapidly adopted in India and China, being common before 1700; they probably reached Central Asia from those areas quite early. The Soviets actively promoted tomatoes and other fresh foods. Nonetheless, in striking contrast to the enormous importance of New World crops in China, Turkey, and parts of India, the core areas of Central Asia never really took to them. They were fairly minor crops, more flavoring than staple. Today they are commonest in the outward-looking oasis cities such as Kabul and Tashkent, and least common in remote uplands. Many of the New World foods that transformed China do not grow, or at least not well, in Central Asia (e.g., sweet potatoes and peanuts). Crops like maize demand too much water, so their scope was limited.

As a guess, we may hypothesize that maize spread slowly, surely from Turkey (it was very popular there as early as the 16th century), and from India, during the 17th and 18th centuries; chiles probably had a similar course. They came later, and stayed uncommon, especially north of Afghanistan. Potatoes moved in from China and Russia in the late 18th century, and into the 19th. The other vegetables did not come in any significant quantity until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

European crops are even less well documented. West Asian crops spread very early—many of them with the Neolithic—but there are mysteries. We have noted above the silence of the record as to when rye turned from a rare, half-wild crop in early Medieval times to a staple food in Eastern Europe, and in western Central Asia by the 17th century. Other crops are even less discernible in our sources. No doubt there are Russian records that would repay searching.

11 On to the Twentieth Century

Throughout Central Asia, the twentieth century brought revolution: the overthrow of Qing in 1911, the Communist revolution in Russia in 1917, and the long-lasting subsequent one in China that finally succeeded in 1949. Between these was essentially constant war in Chinese Central Asia. Russian Central Asia became a set of soviet socialist republics which are today the now-independent “stans.” This was not a peaceful process, and WWII did not improve the situation. Peace and relative prosperity came in the 1950s. Mongolia entered the Soviet orbit with the usual bloodshed; possibly 5% of the population died in purges, especially of the Buddhist clergy, in 1937.³⁹⁸

Nonetheless the area remained poor, and ecological destruction replaced war as a driving force for poverty. The post-independence period has not been easy or pleasant. It brought brutal dictatorships, poverty, and violent, repressive regimes to all except Kazakhstan, and even that republic had strong-man rule. Afghanistan, as all the world knows, has been in a state of almost continuous civil war since the overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973.

With the decline of the old Soviet Union, new states have emerged in the Inner Asian heartland: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Control of Afghanistan by the USSR was very brief, but most of the other countries were Soviet socialist republics from the 1920s to the breakdown of the USSR in 1989-1990; the “-stans” became independent in 1991. Before that, they were treated, de facto, as Russian colonies. Mongolia, nominally independent, was another de facto Russian colony. Russian food influences remain strong in all these areas, although in Kazakhstan there are now many Korean food influences as well.

At present all the major Inner Asian nationalities have at least autonomy, with the notable exception of the Uighurs. They are still controlled by China, which also has large Kazakh and Mongolian minorities.

Starting with Qing, but becoming far more intense after 1949, Chinese culture penetrated eastern Central Asia. Contacts along the Silk Road had already brought foodways ranging from noodle soups to rice. Rice was slow to spread. Barley was the main grain for pilau until recently.³⁹⁹ Now, all sorts of Chinese products have flooded in, and diets, especially in the cities, are changing fast.

Even so, the food of the area remains astonishingly un-Sinicized, with ­Uighur food being closer to Persian than to Chinese. These include: Persian-style breads, stews, fruit, nuts, and the like; Turkic-style dumplings; Central Asian and Persian ways with dairy products; and Near Eastern desserts such as halwa dominate the cuisine. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Persian cooking was developed in and for a continental desert ecology. It uses the plants that do best in desert-oasis conditions: wheat, barley, apricots, grapes, and the like. It uses the animals that flourish in the steppes, notably sheep and goat. Chinese preferences are for plants and animals of wet, warm conditions. Also, Qing’s relatively light hand—or simply weak control—of the region after 1800, and its tendencies to administer outlying areas as subject to Qing, but not part of “China,” meant that Chinese influences were minimized. This is no longer the case; Han Chinese now outnumber Uighurs in Xinjiang and have ruthlessly repressed Uighur culture—partly under a not-wholly-unjustified fear of resurgent militant Islam.

Mongolia remains its own little world different from the Turkic societies. Outside influences in the last century have come overwhelmingly from Russia. This is now changing. Korea, for example, has an active relationship with Mongolia, in part through the many Mongolian students studying there.

In the late twentieth century, globalization reached Central Asia, with the usual snacks, processed starches, canned drinks, and excessive amounts of salt, sugar, white starches, and vegetable oil. Outside of China, most of these come from Russia, though the countries in question are now making their own versions. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer have followed apace, and replaced infectious disease as major killers.

Today’s successor cultures to the old peoples and movements of the Inner Asian heartland are spread from one side to the other, along what used to be the Silk Road. They also go vertically inland, through links to former and still existing centers. There are also pockets of Silk Road culture located far beyond the actual zone of the Silk Road, thanks to the influences exerted by Silk Road cultures, some of them quite distant and indirect. India was long ruled by the Moghuls, ultimately from present day Uzbekistan, and Turkic influence remains strong in the subcontinent’s northwest. China was entirely conquered by the Mongols. Mongol influence remained strong well into the Ming, and even in Qing, whose ruling dynasty was half Mongol by intermarriage and alliances. Russia also, like China, has never rid itself of Mongol and other Central Asian influence (thanks in part to an Islamic migration from the former Central Asian republics that is growing rather than waning). Turkey was also a more distant recipient of Silk Road influence. It was European in most ways, but the Turks had originally come from Central Asia. Ottomans enjoyed the advantages of the major long-distance land and sea trade that existed during the Mongol era. In fact, such trade, at least the land side, pre-dated the Ottomans. It was well established in Roman and Byzantine times.

In the end, Central Asia has remained the last place to take up the new global foodways. In the back blocks and expanses of Mongolia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, one still depends on local foods even if frozen French fries have invaded the shülen (as Buell and de Pablo saw in a restaurant deep in Mongolia). In 1974 in Afghanistan, from Bamiyan through the high Hindu Kush, Anderson found that the only available food for sale was bread. It was made from locally grown hard mountain wheat, ground on stone mills (leaving some rock flour in the product), and baked in huge village tandur ovens. It was superb, despite the occasional rock flour (Anderson, personal observation). Even in Kabul in those days, there was almost nothing in the markets from the outside world, except for spices and other minor items from India. Things today are not quite so simple. Even the most isolated towns of Mongolia have shops with a range of Russian or Korean snacks. Still, the dominance of bland, packaged, mass food is not yet at hand.