Qarakhanid roads to China: A history of Sino-Turkic relations

Dilnoza Duturaeva ’ s Qarakhanid Roads to China presents us with a challenge of breaking down epistemological barriers and the importance of bringing Chinese sources and scholarship together with Russian and Western works. She devotes her work to the role of the Qarakhanid dynasty of the tenth – twelfth centuries CE, and she o ff ers a model for how to study this dynasty ’ s history when the written sources are scant and court histories absent. Over three centuries of rule, the dynasty commissioned only two literary projects. Beyond these we are left to rely on the hostile information of neighbouring dynasties and the notes of travellers who often presented unreliable information. However, the dynasty gives us a sense of the men of action, rather than the men of court historians. This is why before any revised and fuller political history of the dynasty, we are presented with the history of Qarakhanid architectural endeavours by local and European architectural historians (Imankulov and Konkobaev 2014; McClary 2020), the history of coinage detailed by Soviet scholars (Kochnev 2006), and now the history of trade and exchange by Duturaeva. This book focuses on more than Qarakhanid trade and exchange as detailed via descriptions of Sino-Turkic relations. It also fea-tures the history of the Silk Road before the Mongol Empire ’ s globalization , and it is, indeed, the fi rst Silk Road account during the Qarakhanid period written in any language. By focusing on trade and diplomatic relations between Central Asia and China, Duturaeva deconstructs earlier Silk Road decline theories, which posited that trade substantially declined after the Tang dynasty only to revive after the Mongol conquest. The work contains six chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. Duturaeva begins with the discussion of the existing literature and earlier approaches in understanding the pre-Mongol history of Central Asia, which often relied on one sort of historical evidence, mainly Islamic sources.