Slave trade along the silk road was a very common occurrence. Slaves were traded along with horses, camels, silk and other commodities. Slaves were used in households, royal courts, and in other ways. Slaves were bought with coins, bartered for goods, and silk bolts. There was no age limit on slaves and most of them were children from poor families.[1] Valerie Hansen talked about the purchase of a thirteen-year-old Chinese boy who was sold for twenty-one bolts of raw silk. He was sold by his mother.[2] This was a common practice. Hansen explained the culture of child slaves in the following quote, “Children put up for adoption constituted a group between slaves and free people. Sometimes the adoptive parents made a payment, usually a horse, called a “milk payment”. If they did so, then the new family member joined the family as an equal. But if no milk payment was made, then the adopted child was treated as a slave.”[3] Women practiced this regularly. They adopted children and give them away. This gave women the opportunity to get milk payments and make sure that the children were treated well. If they found that the children were being mistreated, they sued the adoptive father and made sure that the child was being treated as a member of that family and not as a slave.[4]
During the Tang Dynasty slave trade and other practices were monitored and governed by the government. The Tang Dynasty developed a Tang Code of requirements for record keeping for slave purchases and trade.[5] The code included the inclusion of the names, and ages of the seller, the slave and five guarantors. The Tang enforced the code in the entire area.[6] The Tang Dynasty forbad the enslavement of people for the repayment of a debt. “The only legal slaves were those who were born to slave parents or who had been purchased with a contract registered with the authorities and who had the proper market certificate to show for it.”[7] Proof of slave contracts were found in Turfan in the burial sites from the bodies which were wrapped in recycled papers. The papers were old contracts, purchase agreements, receipts, etc. Some of the purchase contracts found in Turfan included the standard Tang information of gender, place of origins and the names of the sellers and buyers.[8]
Professor Jonathan Skaff of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania lectured at an event on the Slave Trade on the Silk Road and concentrated on the Turfan area. He stated that during the Tang Dynasty, the Central Asian merchants and the wealthy families bought, sold, and traveled with slaves. Professor Skaff also stated that the Sogdians were the most active slave traders on the Silk Road. He discovered that eighty percent of the caravans on the Silk Road dealt with slaves.[9]
A disturbing document that Valerie Hansen covers in her book talks about the rights of a slave girl that was purchased by a monk. Her book quotes this about the rights of the monk and his family and how they can treat the girl. “They may at will hit her, abuse her, bind her, sell her off, pledge her, give and offer her as a gift, and do whatever they may wish to do to her.” She also had no ties to her birth place and no other claims can be held as legal over her.[10]
The slave trade was popular on the Silk Road but the Tang Dynasty controlled the type of enslavement which took place and made sure that owners had legal right to possession to that slave.
[1] “Exploring the Silk Road: Slave Trade at Turfan.” NYU Shanghai, October 31, 2016. https://shanghai.nyu.edu/news/exploring-silk-road-slave-trade-turfan. Smith, Terry. Contemporary Art: World Currents. Prentice Hall, Pearson, 2011.
[2] Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road. Oxford University Press, 2017., 305.
[3] Ibid., 67.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 305.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 166.
[8] "Exploring the Silk Road".
[9] Ibid.
[10] Hansen., 181.
-Marcus Hale