Before 640: the Evidence from Turfan (and Select Other Localities)

Textiles functioned as money at Turfan very early on. At the time of the earliest excavated documents, in the third century ce, the Jushi kings governed from Jiaohe, where different Chinese dynasties stationed garrisons. The earliest surviving Chinese-language contract, dated 273, records the purchase of a coffin for 20 bolts of degummed silk (lian 練) most likely by a deceased Chinese-speaking migrant.Footnote ⁸ When using silk as money, the people of Turfan consistently preferred lian-degummed to plain silk (shengjuan 生絹) or to silk that had not been degummed, and was accordingly heavier (as Angela Sheng explains in her article).Footnote ⁹ This contract may not record an actual real-world transaction: Wu Zhen, an archaeologist who had worked for many years at the Astana site, suspected that this contract served as a cheaper substitute for an actual coffin.Footnote ¹⁰ Even if symbolic, this contract shows that the residents of Turfan conceived of lian-degummed silk as a means of payment.

After 327 Gaochang became a separate centre of command governed by a series of short-lived regional dynasties, all based in Gansu province: the Former Liang (317–376 ce), the Former Qin (350–394 ce), the Later Liang (386–403 ce) the Western Liang (400–421 ce) and the Northern Liang (397–439 ce).Footnote ¹¹ A contract dated 367 records an exchange of camels; since this is an exchange, no money changes hands, but the fine for reneging on the agreement is ten rugs (tan 毯).Footnote ¹² The lack of detail about the dimensions of the rugs in this example suggests that a standard-sized rug was used in payments. Early Turfan contracts also chronicle transactions in bolts of cloth, sometimes recording details about the cloth – its dimensions, type of textile, pattern – and at other times giving standardised lengths with no descriptive details at all. The absence of detail points to the use of a standard length of cloth, usually a bolt, in payments.

During the third and fourth centuries, the residents of Niya, then an independent oasis kingdom on the southern Silk Road, also used rugs for their exchanges. Some of the Niya documents similarly record fines and payments in bolts of silk, but these are usually made by outsiders to the village, often royal envoys, and not by the villagers themselves.Footnote ¹³ At Turfan, silk also appears as an alternative to rugs. One early affadavit, dated 423, describes the payment of a bolt of wideloom plain silk (dajuan 大絹) to an agricultural worker.Footnote ¹⁴

An inventory from the same year lists “100 bolts of” (baipi 百匹) a missing item, most likely some kind of textile, since only textiles were measured in bolts.Footnote ¹⁵ The first certain reference to textiles, 1,000 bolts of coloured silk (sebo 色帛), appears in an inventory dated 437, and is probably symbolic since it is unlikely that the tomb contained such a large quantity of silk.Footnote ¹⁶ Later tomb inventories mention even larger quantities of silk, such as 99,999 bolts, that must be fictive.Footnote ¹⁷

In 439, after the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 ce) eliminated the Northern Liang dynasty, two brothers from the fallen royal house of the Northern Liang, Juqu Wuhui 沮渠無諱 and Juqu Anzhou 安周, fled from Dunhuang to the Shanshan kingdom (south of Lop Nor), and then went northwards and conquered Gaochang in 442. Kan Shuang 闞爽, whom they drove away, fled to the Rouran Qaghanate in Mongolia. The Juqu brothers established the Daliang 大涼 kingdom in Gaochang, which was allied with the Rouran confederacy. In 450, Juqu Anzhou's army conquered Jiaohe (Yar-khoto), the stronghold of the Jushi 車師 kingdom, which was allied with the Northern Wei in China, and unified the Turfan Basin. Then for some unknown reason, Juqu Anzhou turned against the Rouran confederacy, and the Rouran attacked Gaochang and destroyed the Daliang kingdom in 460.Footnote ¹⁸ According to the account in Beishi [History of the Northern Dynasties], in the chapter on the Western Regions, Gaochang “was annexed by the Ruru (i.e. Rouran) in the first year of Heping 和平 era (460 ce). The Ruru helped Kan Bozhou 闞伯周 to become the king of Gaochang” (Heping yuannian, wei Ruru suobing. Ruru yi Kan Bozhouwei Gaochang wang 和平元年，為蠕蠕所并。蠕蠕以闞伯周為高昌王).Footnote ¹⁹ The author's emphasis on the fact that Gaochang was annexed by Rouran indicates that although the kingdom under Kan Bozhou was the first to actually use “Gaochang” as its name, it was nonetheless a puppet authority under the control of the Rouran Qaghanate.Footnote ²⁰ And Kan Bozhou, though himself the king of Gaochang, adopted the same reign year as the Rouran, a clear sign of political affiliation. Kan Bozhou died around 477 and was succeeded by his son Kan Yicheng 闞義成. In the next year, however, he was killed by his brother Kan Shougui 闞首歸, who then became the king of Gaochang. In 487, the Fufuluo tribe of Gaoju rebelled against its former powerful ally, the Rouran, and migrated from the northern Taklamakan desert westwards to the north of Gaochang. In the next year, or soon after, it replaced the Rouran as the controlling power of Gaochang kingdom, and Afuzhiluo 阿伏至羅, the king of Gaoju, killed Kan Shougui, the king of Gaochang and his brother, and chose Zhang Mengming 張孟明, who was from Dunhuang, as the king of Gaochang.Footnote ²¹

During this era of political uncertainty, the residents of Turfan used silk, both degummed and not, rugs and cotton as money. Cotton (xingdie 行疊) appears for the first time in a contract dated 477 for the purchase of a 30-year-old Iranian slave from a Sogdian merchant for 137 bolts of cotton.Footnote ²² Historical records mentioning cotton coupled with archaeological finds at Niya point to its arrival in the Western Regions sometime during the third or fourth centuries.Footnote ²³

A document recording the different expenditures by government officials, dating to approximately 482, provides the earliest evidence of the simultaneous use of different forms of money (see Document no. 1 in the Appendix). The document was found in tomb No. 90 of the Karakhoja graveyard. Since the text was not finished on the front page, it continued on the back. It is an account book listing the arrangements and supplies provided for envoys by Zhang Wan 張綰, Recorder 主簿 of Gaochang kingdom. Since another document dated in the 17^th year of the Yongkang 永康 reign period (482) was discovered in the same tomb, one may assume that this account book dates to roughly the same time:Footnote ²⁴ thus, approximately the period of Kan family rule in the Gaochang kingdom. In the document, there are some titles and names of the Rouran Qaghanate, such as Ruomin Teqin, Wuhushen, Zuodushi Mohebo, Tudi Teqin Wugen, Chulun Wugen and Toutou[fa].Footnote ²⁵ The Gaochang government ordered its officials to pay textiles to the Rouran envoys from Mongolia as either tax payments or tribute gifts.

Fragmentary, Document no. 1 in the Appendix to this article lists 17 payments and gifts of carpets, cotton, red wei leather and jin brocaded silk from Shule (modern Kashgar). One payment combined three different commodities: “one bolt of cotton”, “five carpets” and a certain number of “pieces of red leather” (the exact amount is illegible).Footnote ²⁶ Several other fragmentary lists of carpets and bolts of silks, undated but from 460–488, confirm the simultaneous use of these different textiles as money.Footnote ²⁷ We can surmise that officials donated these particular items – cotton, carpets, red wei leather – to the Rouran because they received them as taxes from the local residents.

Unusually, two contracts from central China, which survive from roughly the same time period, shed light on the use of textiles as currency under the Northern Wei, the first dynasty to implement the equal-field system. One, dated 477, is from Lingtai county, Gansu and records the purchase of 35 mu (sixth-acres) of land for 40 pecks (dou).Footnote ²⁸ This unit of volume must have been unfamiliar, because the contract also gives the equivalent by weight (50 pounds, or jin 斤), and – more important for our purposes – its equivalent in textiles (40 feet of cloth, or bu 布). At this early time, people living in central China knew how to calculate the value of a certain amount of grain in cloth. The other contract, from Zhuozhou in Hebei (or possibly from Chang'an – the provenance is not entirely certain), dated 507, records the sale of a funeral plot for nine bolts of juan-silk.Footnote ²⁹ This, like the contract for the purchase of a coffin, may be a fictive transaction, but, if cloth was thought to function as money in the netherworld, surely it did so as well in the world of the living.

After a period of disturbance, the Qu family ascended to the throne of the Gaochang Kingdom in 502, and the Gaochang Kingdom under the Qu family continued for over 100 years. The first mention of silver coins, 100 of them, at Turfan comes in a grave inventory dated 543, fully 41 years before the earliest real-world contract refers to silver coins.Footnote ³⁰ Interestingly, this document lists six different types of cloth: 10 sheets (zhang) of Persian brocaded silk (Bosi jin 波斯錦), 10 sheets of Chinese brocaded silk (Wei jin 魏錦), 10 bolts of wideloom heman (合蛮) silk ling-twill, ten bolts of narrowloom silk twill with a stone pillar (shizhu 石柱) pattern, 40 bolts of plain white juan-silk and 200 bolts of cotton (budie 布疊). The terminological distinction between Persian and Chinese brocaded silk suggests that people knew the difference; so too with silk twill woven on a wide or narrow loom. This is an extravagant list; it is as if the author has imagined all the most valuable commodities on this earth and then decided to have them – or perhaps models of them – placed in the tomb for use in the next life.

As the tomb inventories make clear, textiles were thought to function as money in the realm of the dead, but there was no single type of textile that people used in their real-life transactions. A few contracts from the Gaochang period (502–640 ce) document the use of brocaded silk. In 506 the younger brother of a monk borrowed a textile from a man named Di Shaoyuan 翟紹遠, whose family name suggests that he belonged to the Gaojue people, the indigenous residents of Turfan. The loan contract specified that a sheet of “Chinese brocaded silk with a yellow background of the Kucha type made in Gaochang” (Gaochang suozuo huangdi Qiuci zhong jin 高昌所作黃地丘慈中錦) had both warp and weft made from spun silk (jinjing jinwei 錦經錦緯) and measured 9 feet 5 inches by 4 feet 5 inches.Footnote ³¹ In 514, Di Shaoyuan lent another piece of brocaded silk to a different Buddhist monk; in this case too, the contract specifies the dimensions, indicating that the loan was of a particular piece of cloth and not simply a piece of brocaded silk.Footnote ³² Yet, in both these transactions the monks promised that, if they failed to return the specific piece of cloth on time, they would pay interest in brocaded silk. As it was standard practice that interest was payable in whatever form of money a loan was originally made, it is clear that brocaded silk also functioned as a form of money. And when Di Shaoyuan purchased a female slave in 509, he paid a price of 3.5 sheets of Kucha brocaded silk.Footnote ³³ A contract dated to 551 denominates a loan of brocaded silk in feet (it does specify that the brocaded silk had a cypress-tree leaf pattern) in addition to one of 60 feet of cotton (with no pattern specified).Footnote ³⁴ These transactions suggest that the brocaded silk functioned as money some of the time but as distinct pieces of textiles at others.

These early materials do not reveal why the local people preferred one form of money to another. Only in the late 500s and early 600s do sufficient materials survive that shed light on this problem. Six Turfan documents were reused to make a paper shoe, discovered in Tomb No. 84 in the Astana graveyard. They share the same style of writing and have similar contents, indicating that they belonged to the same original group of documents. On the front faces of Document 2 (a fragment of the record from year 14 [574] of the Yanchang 延昌 Era of the Gaochang kingdom) and Document 4 (a fragment of the record from the Gaochang kingdom concerning a fine for harbouring stolen goods [zangqian 臧錢, literally “illicit money”] paid to the government), in the areas of the documents that were glued to the next sheets, we find identical signatures reading “Xuan 暄”,Footnote ³⁵ indicating that these fragmentary documents made up a series, dating from 574 (See Document no. 2 in the Appendix.)

The significance of qian (coin) in the term zangqian 臧錢 is controversial, essentially because the metal of the coin is not specified. Lu Kaiwan noted that zangqian does not indicate whether the coins were made of silver or copper, adding that if silver, then the income would be very considerable.Footnote ³⁶ Zheng Xuemeng thought that it was indeed silver coinage, and drew attention to the text of lines 6 and 8: “1 bolt of Deva brocaded silk, equal to 50 coins. . ., . . . bolt of . . ., equal to 51 coins”, which seems to show that 1 bolt of Deva brocaded silk was worth 50 coins, and 3 bolts 153 coins. Citing the text in line 9 “2 bolts of red brocaded silk, equal to 90 coins”, he pointed out that the coins mentioned here are silver coins, and that the term ping qian 平錢 was also presented as ping yinqian 平銀錢.Footnote ³⁷ Jiang Boqin also thought that zangqian was paid in silver coins, because of the “official zang 臧, 13 and a half silver coins” mentioned in the document: “Account of the receipt of silver coins from Kang Ji [missing character] 康雞□. . .and other people in the Gaochang kingdom”.Footnote ³⁸

What, then, was this zangqian? In the past, several scholars have argued that it was a tax that was levied on business transactions in the Gaochang kingdom. Non-resident Sogdian merchants were also required to pay this kind of tax.Footnote ³⁹ However, after detailed examination of the evidence Lu Xiangqian came to the conclusion that the term zangqian 臧錢 (“good money”) was actually a homophonous substitution for the original zangqian 贓錢 (“stolen money”), meaning a fine imposed for stealing or harbouring stolen goods. He demonstrated that Zhang Agou and the hu (Sogdian) merchant WojiyanFootnote ⁴⁰ were accused of being accessories (zuocong 作從), and after assessing the value of the property that they were harbouring, the local government fined them half of its total value. This is why Zhang Agou had to “pay zangqian of 50 and a half coins” and Wojiyan had to “pay zangqian of 157 coins”. We follow Lu's interpretation of the text, and his restorations are indicated by square brackets in the appendix.Footnote ⁴¹

Gaochang (Turfan) was a transfer point on the east–west trade route. Both the local resident Zhang Agou and the Sogdian merchant Wojiyan obtained Deva brocades from Long Zhezhina. His name indicates that he was probably from the kingdom of Yanqi (Karashahr), which had a close relationship with Gaochang, and many people from Yanqi resided in Gaochang, as residents, sojourners or travelling merchants.Footnote ⁴²

In this period, large quantities of Sasanian silver coins entered Turfan, and it seems likely that they displaced textiles in many transactions. An additional 35 contracts survive for the leasing of land between 584 and 640; the rents are denominated in grain (15 examples), silver coins (11 examples) or the information is missing (6).Footnote ⁴³ The same pattern – payment in grain or coins but not in textiles – holds true of the six labour-hire contracts that survive from 565–637.Footnote ⁴⁴ Overall, the surviving contracts from Turfan from the Gaochang period confirm the use of grain or Sasanian silver coins to make purchases, to borrow money or to hire labourers. In the decades before and after 600, the local people used textiles only occasionally when making payments.

This limited use of textiles as money may reflect the small scale of the transactions recorded in contracts (many sources indicate that textiles were reserved for major expenditures only), and the correspondingly low social position of those signing the contracts. One example of expenditures at the absolute highest social level survives from 630, some 10 years before the Tang conquest of Turfan. In that year, when the Gaochang king bade farewell to the monk Xuanzang (c. 596–664 ce), he gave him 24 letters of introduction to the kaghan of the Western Turks and ample money for his travelling expenses: 100 ounces of gold, 30,000 silver coins and 500 bolts of plain silk and silk twill.Footnote ⁴⁵ The huge size of the gift indicates that the Gaochang kingdom did not suffer from a shortage of coins as did the Tang dynasty, probably because an ample number of Sasanian silver coins circulated in Turfan.Footnote ⁴⁶ Presumably the silks occupied a middle range: the monk could use silver coins for smaller purchases, silks for medium purchases such as an animal or a slave, and gold for major expenditures.

Also from a higher social level is the sole surviving Sogdian-language contract from Astana, documenting the sale in 639 of a female slave for 120 “very pure” silver coins.Footnote ⁴⁷ Very limited information about the use of textiles as money survives from the homeland of the Sogdians, the immediate area around Samarkand. Multiple artworks depict Chinese-style silks, but these textiles did not necessarily function as money.Footnote ⁴⁸ When the city of Samarkand surrendered in 712 to the caliphate armies, the residents agreed to pay 2,000,000 silver dirhams on the spot and an additional 200,000 dirhams each year. They gave the value in dirhams of slaves (200), large garments, most likely of brocaded silk (100), small garments (60), and strips of silk (28).Footnote ⁴⁹ The scarce data suggest that silver coins, not textiles, were the primary currency in the Sogdian world in the seventh and eighth centuries when coins, grain and textiles all circulated in Turfan and China.

While the Turfan contracts indicate that before 640 the local people used grain and silver coins far more frequently than textiles in their daily spending, textiles did function as money but not among the lowest reaches of society, who used coins and whose transactions the Astana materials capture. Since no document from before 640 gives the exchange rate between coins and textiles, we must piece together the surviving evidence to form a hierarchy of currencies. Xuanzang's travel expenses indicate that the wealthiest people used gold, silver coins and silks, whether juan-silk or ling-twill. During these same centuries, ordinary people used grain and silver coins for most of their daily transactions, reserving textiles for only a few real-world exchanges and continuing to list them in inflated quantities in their grave inventories.

Turfan's Economy under Tang-dynasty Rule

In 640, the Tang armies defeated the Gaochang kingdom and brought the oasis under direct rule, along with Beiting (Jimsar) and Hami. After 658, the Tang dynasty created the Anxi Protectorate to exercise military and administrative authority in the Western Regions. Recognising grain, coins and textiles, the Tang authorities used an aggregate unit — silk bolt—hemp bolt—hank—string of coins—picul (pi-duan-tun-guan-shi 匹端屯貫石, as explained in Arakawa Masaharu's article) – to calculate the government's total revenue and expenditures. Over the course of the dynasty, there were never enough coins, and one regulation, which survives from 734 in The Collected Statutes of the Tang Dynasty (Tang Huiyao) but probably echoed earlier, now lost regulations, specified that all purchases of houses, slaves and animals had to be paid for in textiles.Footnote ⁵⁰ The state's logic is clear: if purchasers used textiles to purchase costly items, which would free up coins and help keep them in circulation.

The Tang sent enormous payments of textiles to support its troops stationed in the north-west. The documents from the grave of a single militia soldier named Zuo Chongxi (c. 616–673 ce) clarify the impact of these subsidies at Turfan.Footnote ⁵¹ Militia soldiers were ordinarily farmers who served as soldiers in wartime, and this particular soldier happened to be wealthy. His tomb preserves two copies with identical content of a ledger detailing how he spent government funds on an expedition to Khotan that passed through Tumshuq, Aqsu and Kucha. Both copies are partially preserved, with different parts missing from each. Since it is not possible to restore perfectly all of the missing parts by comparing the two fragments, we give the transcription and translation of each copy separately in the translation of Document no. 3 in the Appendix.

Among the documents from Zuo Chongxi's tomb, the contract of Zhao Chouhu 趙醜胡, an enlisted member of the Xiyu Dao (Western Regions Circuit) campaign, records that he asked for a loan of some lian-degummed silk from Zuo Chongxi, the fubing (the Assault-resisting Garrison) soldier of Qianting fu 前庭府 in Gaochang county. We know that around the 15^th day of the 8^th month in the 2^nd year of the Linde 麟德 Era (665 CE), the Tang government conducted a military campaign in the Western Regions. The Tang sent armies to the north-west to take Khotan back from the Tibetans. The campaign was directed by the Governor of Xizhou Prefecture, Cui Zhibian 崔知辯, and the General of the Left Wuwei Guard, Cao Jishu 曹繼叔. Judging from the place names mentioned in the text, such as Jushide (Gyāźdi, modern Tumshuq),Footnote ⁵² Bohuan (Aqsu) and Anxi (Kucha).Footnote ⁵³ This document seems to be an account book listing the expenses in coins and silk from the entire campaign. Since it was found in the tomb of Zuo, an enlisted member of the campaign, it is not too much to posit that this account book was used by the military of the Xiyu Dao campaign.Footnote ⁵⁴

Zuo recorded his expenditures day by day. Just as the later laws required, Zuo used bolts of lian-degummed silk (not coins) to buy horses and a sheep (lines 1, 5). When he bought a slave, he did not have a single bolt of cloth, and had to pay in coins instead (the price is missing) (line 6). Half-bolts or whole bolts of lian-degummed silk were used to purchase husked millet (mi 米), rugs and horse feed. Whenever he made smaller expenditures, for example, to pay for a vegetarian feast (zuozhai 作齋) (line 10), alfafa (line 12), meat (line 6), leguminous fodder (line 2), vinegar and bowstrings (line 4), he paid using coins. The ledger mentions both silver and copper (probably copper alloy rather than pure copper) coins. The silver coins are Sasanian silver coins, while the copper coins are Chinese, or locally made coins. In Turfan Chinese bronze coins replaced Sasanian silver coins only around 700, but Zuo must have encountered them because of his position in the military.Footnote ⁵⁵

While the ledgers shed light on Zuo's expenditures while on duty, the 14 intact contracts buried in his tomb document evidence of his moneylending activities. The burial of intact contracts is itself unusual: almost all the other Turfan contracts survive because they were recycled as shoe soles or other items of clothing for the dead. Zuo, or his living kin, must have buried these contracts in the hope that Zuo could recover unpaid debts in the courts of the underworld that he had not been able to collect during his lifetime.Footnote ⁵⁶ These contracts, which record a variety of transactions, raise the issue of choice: why did Zuo use coins for so many of his transactions and textiles for so few?

Six contracts are for straightforward loans of silver coins (in amounts ranging from 10 to 48) and charge interest of around 10 per cent each month (sometimes with a 10-day grace period). Four other contracts record the rental of land; in three instances Zuo gives out only coins, while in the fourth he paid a combination of grain and coins. An eleventh contract records the purchase of grass for silver coins. Another intact document from the tomb – a letter, not a contract – indicates that Zuo kept a large number of coins in his house. In an effort to clear his name (and possibly to prevent Zuo from pursuing him in the underworld courts), a household servant wrote a letter to the deceased in which he denied stealing 500 silver coins.

The three contracts requiring payment in textiles involve larger amounts. Zuo made two loans in cloth: one of 30 bolts of lian-degummed silk (with 14 per cent interest each month to be paid in degummed silk) and one of 3 bolts of degummed silk with no interest for the first 10 days.Footnote ⁵⁷ When he purchased a 15-year-old slave (named Jiade 甲得, possibly a boy), he paid six bolts of degummed silk (shuilian 水練) and five coins. Why the combination of coins and silk? As Tang government regulations specified, the purchase of a slave was a major expense requiring the use of silk. A bolt of silk was a large denomination and the five coins functioned as a kind of change.

A few other documents in the tomb illustrate Zuo Chongxi's patterns of spending. His tomb inventory gives a sense of which goods he (or his descendants) thought useful in the next world: 10,000 pieces (duan) of white degummed silk (bailian 白練), 50,000 piculs of grain and three pounds of pure silver coins (baiyin qian 白銀錢). (On this occasion the quantity of silver coins is given by weight and not by the number of coins.) There are no surprises here in the use of these imaginary currencies: silk, grain and silver are precisely the three forms of money in use in the equal-field system of Tang-dynasty Turfan. This document also informs the underworld authorities that Zuo paid an unspecified number of silver coins to 500 monks as payment for the recitation of texts.

The materials from Zuo Chongxi's tomb offer a vivid picture of the Turfan economy during the period of Tang-dynasty rule. As a paid militia soldier, Zuo received bolts of cloth from the government for his expenditures while on military campaign; he used these bolts to purchase horses and sheep. He converted them into coins for smaller expenditures (and for when he bought a slave or when he had no bolts of cloth available). His own household often used coins; we know that, on at least one occasion, when he was robbed, he had 500 coins in the house, and that most of his loans and purchases were in coins. In only one instance he combined grain with coins to rent some land; he used silk to buy a slave and for two loans.

Although the materials in Zuo's tomb provide no information about exchange rates, a few later documents from Turfan give specifics. A receipt for a horse used for long-distance transport relay (changxing ma 長行馬) in 692 (1^st year of the Ruyi 如意 reign period in Empress Wu Zetian's reign) records that the officer of the residential ward (or village elder) Shi Xuanzheng 史玄政 received money for purchasing horses: “two silver coins, equal to 64 copper coins” (yinqian erwen, zhun tongqian lushisi wen 銀錢貳文，准銅錢陸拾肆文) which shows that in 692 the exchange rate was one silver coin to 32 copper coins.Footnote ⁵⁸ “The Account of harmoniously purchasing (hedi 和糴) highland barley during the Tang period” states that “one hank of cotton floss equals five silver coins at a lesser price; two hanks of cotton floss equals one bolt of plain lian-degummed silk” (mian yi tun zhun ci gu zhi yinqian wu wen, liang tun dang lian yi pi 綿壹屯准次沽直銀錢伍文，兩屯當練壹疋).Footnote ⁵⁹ This tomb is dated to the reign periods of Emperor Gaozong (649–683 ce) and the Empress Wu Zetian (690–705 ce), so the exchange rate at that time was 10 silver coins to one bolt of lian-degummed silk. During the Tang army's march in the Western Regions, they used silk, copper coins and silver coins to make purchases, and clearly lian-degummed silk was the most valuable of the three forms of money.

Following the exchange rates in the two documents above, we can calculate that in 692, one bolt of silk was worth 10 silver coins, or 320 bronze coins. This was still the approximate rate in 731–732, when another set of documents records the exchange rate as 300 bronze coins for one bolt of largeloom degummed silk (see lines 18–19 in Document no. 4 in the Appendix). In 1973 a group of records of receipt of expenses such as salaries and other items, dated from 731–732 (19^th and 20^th years of the Kaiyuan Era), were found in Tomb No. 506 at the Astana graveyard, and these record in detail the payment of the Tang officials’ salary (liaoqian 料錢 or yueliao月料), travel allowances (chengliao 程料) and the bills for lodgings provided to envoys (tingliao 停料). One of the two documents in the Appendix is dated 731 (19^th year of the Kaiyuan Era); the other does not give a year but can be assigned to the same year on the basis of the day and month which it mentions. They both consist of long lists of payments, with one entry following another.Footnote ⁶⁰

Han Guopan has investigated the relationship between coins and silk in these two documents, and found that there are 22 instances of the receipt of coins and 21 instances of the receipt of lian-degummed silk. One example seems to be scribal error, and mistakenly records a payment of coins that was actually made in lian-degummed silk; therefore, the real figure is 22 instances of lian-degummed silk and 21 instances of coins. The first document records the receipt of 48 bolts of lian-degummed silk in total, while the second one records even more. The total sum of payments in coinage from both texts is only 1,390 coins; since one bolt of lian-degummed silk was equal to 300 coins, it is clear that the value of the payments in lian-degummed silk was considerably higher. Han Guopan sought to argue that lian-degummed silk was used alongside coinage as an alternative currency even in the first half of the eighth century, when copper coins were widely used.Footnote ⁶¹

Recently an article by Huang Lou has focused on these documents, pointing out that these texts found at Turfan seem to originate from Beiting, judging by the official titles and place names mentioned in them. He examined every entry in the document and sought to define the three kinds of liaoqian mentioned in the texts: (1) the yueliao (monthly salary), which served as part of the local official's salary during the initial stages of the Tang period, and includes yueliao, keqian 課錢 (income from service fees paid by the population in place of various services they owed officials) and zagei 雜給 (miscellaneous expenses); (2) the chengliao, which was the travel allowance allocated to envoys and their attendants for the return journey after the completion of a diplomatic mission and payable by the local governments of the regions that they passed through; and (3) the keshi tingliao客使停料, sometimes abbreviated to keshi liao or tingliao, which apparently referred to money for the expenses on food and lodging incurred by envoys staying at state-run guesthouses. Here ting means “to lodge”.Footnote ⁶² The yueliao payments mentioned in this document have also been studied in a recent article by Lin Xiaojie.Footnote ⁶³ These documents show that the state paid salaries, travel allowances and the costs of room and board at the state-run guesthouses using lian-degummed silk and not coins in Beiting during the Tang period.

The best information about exchange rates comes from the two price lists from the summer of 743 for the Turfan markets studied first by Ikeda and more recently by Éric Trombert and Étienne de la Vaissière.Footnote ⁶⁴ Following the stipulations of The Tang Code, they give three prices (high/medium/low) for each item listed. The prices of horses and camels are in broad bolts of degummed silk; everything else (oddly, including cattle, which is contrary to government regulations) is priced in coins. (By 743, the coins are definitely Tang-dynasty bronze coins; no one in Turfan was using Sasanian or Arab-Sasanian coins any longer.) This list of over 350 commodities includes 33 different textiles sold variously by the bolt, piece, section or foot. The officials start with a wideloom bolt of degummed silk first: 470/460/450 coins per bolt. The price of plain silk was exactly the same per bolt as for a broad bolt of degummed silk (470/460/450), but the prices of other textiles varied enormously. The highest price was 630/620/610 coins for a bolt of Henan plain weave shi silk using threads of varying thickness (Henan fu sheng shi 河南府生絁). The lowest was 390/380/370 coins for a bolt of Zizhou (Sichuan) degummed silk woven on a small loom (Zizhou xiaolian 梓州小練).

Some of these textile types – shi-silk, plain silk dyed red (manfei), lian-degummed silk, juan-plain silk – also occur in P3348, the document dated 745 that lists the textiles shipped to the Dunhuang garrison (discussed in Arakawa Masaharu's article). Dunhuang was 550 km from Turfan, and it is likely that the soldiers garrisoned at Turfan received the same, or at least a similar, mix of textiles from the central authorities. These payments from the central government were huge: the two payments of 10,000 bolts of silk dwarf all the individual transactions recorded in the Turfan documents, which involve at most a few hundred bolts of silk.Footnote ⁶⁵ The payments to the military could be even larger: Niu Xianke, Vice Military Commander of Hexi, who served from 729 to 737, mentions a one-time payment of 200,000 bolts of silk, which was ten times higher than the annual payment to the Dunhuang garrison recorded in P3348.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Turfan documents show what happened when these payments entered the local economy. The authorities issued these textiles to local officials for multiple purposes: to individual soldiers like Zuo Chongxi, to envoys for their various expenses and to purchase grain for those serving in the garrisons or for their salaries. Once the government officials disbursed the bolts, they circulated in the local economy, which is why 33 different textiles were for sale in the Turfan market in 743.