The kingdom of Silla and the treasures of Nara

UNESCO Courier, July, 1991 by Francois-Bernard Hyghe

As UNESCO's Maritime Silk Roads Expedition set sail from the Chinese port of Quanzhou on 19 February 1991, crowds of school-children gave us a rousing send-off from the quayside, waving flowers, streamers, and cardboard lions and dragons. Our ship the Fulk al-Salamah's two visits to China had taken place in an atmosphere of constant festivity. In addition to our scholarly work, the marathon seminars and visits to historic sites, many less serious moments were still fresh in our memory. Whole villages had turned out to greet us. We had been entertained with firework displays (our arrival had coincided with the Chinese New Year) and acrobats. There had been many colourful scenes and much laughter.

Our hosts had spared no efforts to give the expedition a spectacular welcome. They had deepened a harbour so thaty the Fulk al-Salamah could enter, built a museum, and brought forward by several weeks the spring parade in which thousands of people take part. In addition to this generosity we would not soon forget the infectious joy and vitality of the Chinese.

Thus we began the last part of our journey. We were about to follow a branch of the maritime skill route that would lead to its easternmost extremity.

Before making for Japan, our ship sailed for Korea, where the links between China and Japan were forged in the ancient kingdom of Silla, once a meeting place for the peoples of central Asia and The Far East, for ther maritime route and the land route across the steppes. Our port of call was Kyongju, which was the capital of Silla for a thousand years. In the last century of the pre-Christian era, this region was settled by the Si-Ro, one of many tribes of obscure, possibly Ural-Altaic origins, which occupied the Korean peninsula. After a conflict which lasted several centuries and was often arbitrated by the Chinese, Silla conquered and subjugated the rival kingdoms of Paekche in 660 and Koguryo in 668, before driving out Chinese troops. This kingdom, known as "Unified silla", lasted until 935.

Sillla or the age of friendship

The golden age of Silla, from the seventh to the ninth centuries, coincided in China with the consolidation of the political power of the T'ang, who reunified the empire, and in Japan with the victory of the cnetral government over the clans. This period of political stability was also a period of intensive political, commercial and cultural exchanges which established via the Silk Roads what a speaker at one seminar in Japan was to call "the age of friendship" between the three nations.

The Unified Silla kingdom sent a hundred-odd ambassadors to the court of the T'ang, who were in theory sovereign rulers. China sent ambassadors in return. As a result of these diplomatic missions Silla came into possession of Chinese writings such as the Taoist classic the Tao-te Ching and important Confucian texts, and sent students to study in China, whence they returned with more treasures for Korean scholars.

Korean envoys also journeyed to Maracanda (present-day Samarkand), the capital of Sogdiana. Late-seventh-century wall paintings discovered in Samarkand show figures dressed in the Korean style among the delegations received by the ruler of Sogdiana. Perhaps, as a Korean scholar suggested during a seminar held at Pusan, they were envoys of the Koguryo kingdom who were in Maracanda to negotiate an alliance to counterbalance that which the rival Silla kingdom was working out with China.

By way of trade or tribute, Silla sent to China horses, artefacts produced by ots excelent jewellers and metalworkers, silk, which had been cultivated ever since the first tribes had settled in Korea, and medicinal plants. To Japan it exported its own products and merchandise which passed through its ports, including, oddly enough, horses and camels, whose presence in seventh-century Japan is mentioned in the "Written Chronicles of Japan".

But Silla was also in contact with the Persian and Arab world, and traded with the Muslim merchants who travelled through China, where some of them eventually settled. As early as the middle of the ninth century, the writings of Arab travellers and geographers tell of a fabulous kingdom, described by Ibn Kurdadbih who wrote that "Beyond China is a land where gold abounds and which is named Silla. The Muslims who have gone there have been charmed by the country and tend to settle there and abandon all idea of leaving."

Later, the Arab geographer al-Mas' udi also penned a description of Silla, which located behind the Great Wall which protected men from the demoniac hordes of Gog and Magog. He wrote that the kingdom had been founded by Alexander the Great, whose myth (which kept cropping up throughout the maritime Silk Roads expedition) here makes a surprising appearance. Other texts describe, with greater credibility, how Shiites sought refuge in Korea during the Umayyad period. Many objects discovered in Korea tombs were certainly brought to Korea by Muslim traders.

The Physical type and dress of two of the statues we saw guarding the tumulus of King Kwaenung at Kyongju suggest that Persian mercenaries may have served the Silla court.