Han wooden slips from Juyan
Before paper, a Chinese document was a bundle of narrow wooden strips tied with string. More than ten thousand were dug out of the Han frontier forts at Juyan, and almost none of them is literature. They are duty rosters, grain receipts and travel passes that say who may cross and how many go with them.
Based on Juyan Han slips held by Academia Sinica, Taipei.
Found: the Edsen-gol (Juyan) forts, Inner Mongolia and Gansu; excavated by Folke Bergman of the Sino-Swedish Expedition, 1930–31; now in Taipei.
What they are
Strips of wood a little over twenty centimetres long and about a centimetre wide, each holding a column of brush-written characters, laced into bundles with cord. The cord has mostly rotted, so the bundles come out of the ground as loose sticks, and putting documents back in order is half the work.
Why they survived
Because the forts were in desert. Wood and ink rot in wet ground, and the dry air of the Edsen-gol kept both. The same paperwork from a fort in a damp river valley would be gone.
Why the forts were there
The Han garrisons along this frontier came after the empire took the Hexi Corridor from the Xiongnu, from 121 BC on. Part of what turned the court's eyes west was one embassy's report. Zhang Qian had ridden out with more than a hundred men. Thirteen years later, two came back: Zhang Qian himself, and the guide who had set out with him as an enslaved man.
Reading them
Almost everything in them is ordinary: who was on watch, how much grain was issued, who was allowed through the gate. That is the Silk Road as its own officials saw it, which is mostly as a lot of paperwork.
- Lao Kan, Juyan Hanjian kaoshi (Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology, 1943–44)
- Loewe, Records of Han Administration (1967)
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.