In the Indian high school political science textbook "Political Theory and Practice", there are a few words about China: "China, located in the north of the Himalayas, is the most populous country in the world, and one-fifth of the world's population lives in China." Like India, China is one of the oldest countries in the world. "Historically, China has always benefited from India, and Indian civilization has given Chinese knowledge of the spiritual and spiritual realms, and the two countries have strengthened economic ties through trade." "In the eyes of Indians, as early as BC, China's trade with India existed. This point, which has also been confirmed by modern archaeology in China, is that in the Sanxingdui era, there may be a road in southwest China, and the destination is India, indicating that the two countries have a long history of cultural and trade exchanges.
The existence of the secret passage
Most Chinese archaeologists have a habit of speaking more cautiously and carefully, although the word "possible" is used here, but this road originally exists, and Zhang Qian's experience is a good illustration, but it is not recorded in detail and clearly in the historical records. The Khyber Pass, the largest and most important mountain pass in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it has historically been the most important passage connecting South Asia with West Asia and Central Asia. In ancient times, because of the Pamir Plateau, the Empires of West Asia and Central Asia generally settled in Afghanistan, and then chose the Khyber Pass to enter the Indus Valley, and after crossing the mountain pass, it was the endless Great Plains and hundreds of small states on the Great Plains. As a result, the Khyber Pass became the only passage from Central Asia to South Asia, but it was not the earliest channel for China to communicate with India.
In 122 BC, Zhang Qian returned from the Western Regions and reported to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty that he had made a peculiar discovery in Bactria (present-day northern Afghanistan): "When he lived in Bactria, he saw Shubu and Bamboo Sticks, and asked where he came from, and the southeast was poisoned (present-day India). This means that when he was in northern Afghanistan, he saw a lot of "Made in Sichuan" and asked about it, only to know that it was from India. Zhang Qian's report made Emperor Wu of Han feel very strange, because there had never been a record of trade with India through the Western Regions in previous official records. Zhang Qian said that he had inquired about it, and that the southwestern part of Shu (present-day Sichuan Basin) had taken the route of poisoning to Bactria and suggested to Emperor Wu of Han that he send envoys south from Shu to the southwest, and to open another route directly to the poisoned and Central Asian states to avoid the danger of passing through the Qiang and Xiongnu regions.
Subsequently, there were exploration teams connecting the southwest during the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty: Chief Expert Zhang Qian sent four exploration teams from Chengdu and Yibin in Sichuan to southern Qinghai, eastern Tibet and Yunnan. The final destination is poison. The 4th route messengers traveled about 1,000 or 2,000 miles each, and were hindered by the ethnic minority areas of Yu, Ju (southwest Sichuan) and Yu and Kunming (around Dali, Yunnan), and failed to continue to advance, and returned successively. Obviously, although Zhang Qian failed to walk through this path, this also made people at that time increase a lot of knowledge.
Records of the Chronicle of History
According to the report of the Han envoys, one of the details of this exploration activity is as follows: the Envoys of the Han Dynasty went out of the Yunnan Kingdom to continue to look for a trade route to India, but due to the obstruction of the Yiren tribe, they could not continue to move forward, and the Han Dynasty emissaries inquired that there was an "elephant country" in the "more than a thousand miles to the west". Sima Qian said: "The genus of Kunming has no ruler, is good at thieves, and kills some Han envoys, and finally cannot be understood." However, for more than a thousand miles to the west, there is a country of elephants, known as Dianyue. "Meaning: Tribes such as Kunming Yi did not have a ruler, were good at robbing and stealing, and robbed the envoys of the Han Dynasty, and the emissaries did not arrive after all. But I heard that there was a country that rode an elephant more than a thousand miles west of the [Dian Kingdom], called Dian Yue.
Of course, this pathfinding activity also let the people of the southwest know the size of the outside world and created the famous idiom - night lang arrogance. The Han Dynasty sent emissaries to Yelang, passing through Yelang's neighboring country of Dian on the way, and the King of Dian asked the emissary, "Which is the greater of the Han Dynasty than my country?" The emissary was shocked when he heard this, he did not expect that this small country would be self-righteously compared with the Han Dynasty. In the Kingdom of Yelang, the Envoy of Han encountered the same problem again, because the King of Yelang did not know that the country he ruled was about the same size as a county of the Han Dynasty, nor did he know that the heavens and the earth asked, "Which is the greater of the Han Dynasty and my country?" ”
It doesn't matter if Zhang Qian didn't go through, what mattered was that because of the existence of this spirit of exploration, the Han Dynasty has since strengthened its ties with the Dian Kingdom, Yelang and other tribes, and in 111 BC, it officially set up five counties such as Fat Ke, Yue Yu, Shen Li, Wenshan, and Wudu, and later set up Yizhou, Jiaozhi and other counties, basically completing the development of the southwest region. "Jiaotong" was originally a word used by the ancient northern Central Plains people to describe the national customs of the "Southern Barbarians" in ancient texts, and was later used to refer to the area south of the Central Plains where the Southern Barbarians lived. In the Han Dynasty, the "Jiaotong" County was set up, and in the southern part of Xiang County, which was set up in the Qin Dynasty, that is, the Red River Delta region in present-day northern Vietnam.
Who's in the way?
In the pre-Qin Dynasty, the Jiaotong Territory belonged to one of the 15 divisions of Luo Yue under the Baiyue Branch. In 257 BC, the last prince of the Shu kingdom led his people to northern Vietnam and established the state of Ouluo, proclaiming himself the King of Anyang. The Ouluo state is composed of Xi'ou and Luoyue, and its indigenous residents, along with Luo Yue, are the ancestors of the Zhuang, Dong, Li, Buyi, Dai, Maonan, Mulao, Shui and other ethnic groups, and they also blocked the wayfinding activities of the Han Dynasty.
Today's experts have drawn a rough sketch of this route that did not pass through that year: starting from Chengdu, going south to the west, crossing the Lancang River to Baoshan through Dali, crossing the Nu River in the west, leaving Gaoligong Mountain to Tengchong, and then traveling southwest from Tengchong to Bagan in central Myanmar and on the east bank of the middle reaches of the Irrawaddy River. From Bagan up the Pro-Dun River, through the Hukang Valley from Manipur into Asami, and then south to present-day Bangladesh, from the Ganges to the west, from land into India. In India, through Patna, it traveled north to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and was connected to the Khyber Pass, the only passage from Central Asia to South Asia.
Judging from the current map, Zhang Qian's pathfinding activities have some direct southward travel meanings, and the intention to fold west is less. However, the fact that Zhang Qian has not been there does not mean that there are no Chinese footprints on the road to the west. The Mon are the fifth largest ethnic group in Myanmar, belonging to the South Asian language family, with a population of about 1.45 million (2004 estimate), accounting for 2.8% of the total population of Myanmar. It is one of the oldest ethnic groups in Myanmar, mainly distributed in Mon, Kayin, Tanah Sarin Province, Bago Province, Yangon Province. According to historical records, the Mon were the main ethnic group of the Mon-Khmer speakers who first entered Burma from Chinese mainland, entered Burma around 2000 BC, and finally settled in the southeastern part of Lower Myanmar. If Zhang Qian could fold to the west, the Meng people might also be a nation that stood in the way.
Relationship with Sanxingdui
The Mon are an ancient burmese people belonging to the Mongol race, and the Mon language branch of the Mon-Khmer language family in South Asia. They were the indigenous inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau, who first came to Myanmar to integrate with the local indigenous inhabitants, the Negrits (dwarf blacks), and then the Tibetans and Burmese of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau moved south along the mountains to Burma, gradually mastering the trade routes between China and India. Therefore, Myanmar's cultural influence from China seems to be above the source, and it can even be said that Burmese culture developed on the basis of absorbing Mon culture. At that time, in addition to the coastal areas into the central plains of Burma, according to the Records of the State of Huayang in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, they also entered northern Myanmar along the mountainous areas of Ledo (a border town between India and Burma, which is the only way for India to burma, Southeast Asia and China). Therefore, Myanmar is also deeply influenced by Indian culture.
Here, the route of the Silk Road has been along the two sides of the western plateau of China, drawing an oval, and the road from southwest China to India, known in later history as the "Southern Silk Road", is also known as the "Shu body poison road", that is, starting from present-day Sichuan, leaving Through Yunnan into Burma and Thailand, reaching India, and then from India over the mountains and seas to Central Asia, and then to the Mediterranean coast. On this ancient trade route, Chinese merchants exchanged goods with merchants of Bactria through shan merchants (present-day Burma) or poisoned (i.e., India), exchanging silk or qiong bamboo sticks for gold, shells, jade, amber, glass products, etc.
Zhang Qian saw it in Bactria more than 2,000 years ago, and finally had the answer. Does all this have anything to do with sanxingdui culture? Sanxingdui is located in Sanxingdui Town, Guanghan City, Sichuan Province. The upper age limit is 4500 ± 150 years, and it extends roughly to about 3000 years ago, that is, from the late Neolithic period to the Central Plains Xia and Shang periods. According to the fact that the ancient culture of the Sanxingdui site is widely distributed in the Sichuan region and has many special instruments that are different from any other archaeological culture, the excavators suggest that this archaeological culture be named "Sanxingdui Culture".
As a representative of the ancient Shu civilization, Sanxingdui and Jinsha sites have left too many unsolved mysteries, especially the sea shells and ivory excavated in the sacrificial pits have surprised countless tourists, which is unexpectedly encountered with the residents of the South Asian subcontinent who used tooth shells as currency and the records of ancient India's abundant elephants, which in the eyes of the academic community has become the direct evidence of the ancient Shu people's foreign exchanges three or four thousand years ago. It is extended that China's earliest Silk Road was made by the southwest, not the northwest.
We do not want to put the energy of arguing about who is earlier and who is later in this text, in any case, the ancient Chinese Shu people's communication with India through the "Shu body poison road" is a fact, and there are indeed some records about this in the historical records.
A topic that extends from this
The Mon people come from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and settle in Burma, which reminds us of a very key word - Kunlun. When the historical records have not yet been clearly recorded, where does Kunlun refer to? Is it today's Kunlun Mountains, Qilian Mountains, or the source of the Yellow River? It seems, but not all, because in the southwest of the "Southern Silk Road", people can also see a lot of place names related to the Kun people and Kunlun.
For example: Kunlun Pass. It is located at the junction of Binyang County, Nanning City, Guangxi Province, and Kunlun Town, Nanning City, 50 kilometers away from Nanning City, the capital of Guangxi. One of the top ten famous passes in China, it has a dangerous geographical location and profound historical and cultural resources. In 819, Pei Xing established the first stone as the Guan, and in 1035, guancheng was built, which has been reinforced and rebuilt in successive generations. It has always been a place where soldiers must fight, and there have been 9 battles in history, the biggest and very tragic is the "Battle of Kunlun Pass" during the War of Resistance Against Japan... This place should be Kunlun Mountain, but why do people still call it Kunlun Guan?
Another example is "Kunming". As a place name, Kunming was in 1276, after the Emperor Ofedian chi, officially established the Province of Xingzhongshu in Yunnan, set up Kunming County, and ruled the land for Zhongqing Road (kunming naming began here), and moved the administrative center from Dali to Kunming. Since then, Kunming has officially become the political, economic and cultural center of Yunnan. Before the Han and Tang Dynasties, some descendants of the Qiang people and other local ethnic groups intermingled to form the "Kunming ethnic group", most of them settled in the western part of Yunnan, which in turn made Kunming appear as a place name. As for the meaning of the word "Kunming", the answer given by the history books is: "Yiren people plant Rikun, small seeds Rishuo." And what kind of relationship does this have with the Western Queen Mother Nation, which lived in the Kunlun Mountains in history and was called "Kunyi" and called herself "Kunren"? At the same time, as a presence today, what kind of relationship does the Kun people in Jingdong and the nearby areas of Jingdong and the eastern Shan State of Myanmar have with "Kunlun"?
And Kunlunnu. According to modern research, their main source is asian blacks from Saigon (Chai Stick). According to Indian history, Saigon has been the largest slave market in Asia since the third century AD, mainly selling slaves to China, and this slave trade continued until the Ming Dynasty. Some people say that because the ancients did not pronounce it accurately, they mistakenly read "Chai Stick" as "Kunlun", which gave rise to the name of "Kunlun Nu". However, how to explain the island of Kunlun Island, also known as Kunlun Void, which is now the southern island of Vietnam? Is there also a relationship with "Kunlun"?
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The Classic of Mountains and Seas says that the mountains of western China are all out of Kunlun. Do these seemingly unrelated place names and ethnic names today have the same deep connection as the Mon and the Tibetan Plateau?
Conclusion: The Road Traveled
As mentioned in the previous text, indians once entered Burma from Ledo, thousands of years ago. During World War II, Rido was one of the Allied garrisons, and the new 38th Division of the Chinese Expeditionary Force led by Sun Liren and the new 22nd Division that later bypassed the Hukang River Valley retreated to northeastern India due to defeat. At the same time, Redo is also the starting point of the Stilwell Highway. However, before the Allies arrived, Ledo had only one tea plantation, one coal mine, and one brick kiln. In addition to the dense jungle, there are occasional indigenous villages, only the most primitive hunting aboriginal Nagars and jade smugglers pass by by accident. After such a long time between the two, the road still cannot become a broad road, and it is still a very difficult task to pick up the footprints of the predecessors.
What we have to say is that history is always so long that people are about to forget, but it does not mean that it does not exist. Perhaps, in those times when it was not yet fully understood, people on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau made one or more great migrations through the Sichuan Basin to the Great Southwest.
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