撒马尔罕的金桃：唐代舶来品研究

by Edward H. Schafer, 薛爱华, 吴玉贵 (Translator)

本书是薛爱华《撒马尔罕的金桃》最新修订译本，内含24页彩色图片，另保留原书风格20幅黑白题图。本书是西方汉学的一部名著，被视为西方学者研究中国古代社会、古代文化的必读之作。本书选取中华民族最值得骄傲的朝代——唐代为研究对象，详细研究了当时的世界文化交流和文明引进。内容涉及了唐朝生活的各个方面，家畜、野兽、飞禽、植物、木材、食物、香料、药品、纺织品、颜料、矿石、金属制品、世俗器物、宗教器物、书籍等，共18类170余种，举凡生活所需、日常所用，几乎无所不包。此书不仅展现了大唐时期的社会文化、物质生活的生动画面，为认识唐朝的社会生活史和文化史提供了极有价值的参考，也是了解中华文明和文明交流史的必读书籍。

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Asia

800 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2016

About the author

An American sinologist and a noted expert on the Tang dynasty. Schafer's most famous works include The Golden Peaches of Samarkand and The Vermilion Bird, which both explore China's interactions with new cultures and regions during the Tang dynasty.

Schafer earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1947. He then became a professor of Chinese there and remained at Berkeley until his retirement in 1984. From 1955 to 1968 Schafer served as East Asia Editor of the Journal of the American Oriental Society, and from 1969 to 1984 he held the Agassiz Professorship of Oriental Languages and Literature at Berkeley. He is also known within sinology for his uncompromising belief in the importance of language skills and learning and his differing approach on this subject to John King Fairbank. His publications include over 100 scholarly articles and more than a dozen books.

Also known as 薛爱华

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun if highly specialized book that you'd probably love anyway once you dig your fangs into it. Simply put, this is a history of luxury items brought into the Tang court (roughly 600-900 CE) from all over the goddamn place. Europe, Japan, Korea, India, all those wacky barbarians--the work is a veritable catalogue of all the interesting things sent as tribute or gifts or sold outright to the high-faluters who could afford them. Organized by type of item (spice, people, art, aromatics (!)_), Schafer walks you through each one's specific offerings detailing what we know about demand and practical usage.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A study of Tang exotics by Edward H. Schafer is probably one of the earliest, if not the earliest, book written about the Tang dynasty. It's more encyclopedia than book, and for that reason it's the first book about China that I haven't read cover to cover in a long time. Each chapter is devoted to a different aspect of culture, metals, clothing, jewels, food, books, animals, etc. The book is concerned primarily with the exotic items given to the dynasty as tributes from the surrounding nations. So in a way it looks far more at the cultures around the Tang than it does on the Tang itself. A lot can be learned from this information about the upper class, it's sort of a reverse idea to the "everyday life" books.

The first chapter, "The Glory of the Tang" was in itself simply amazing and may be worth getting the book for just in itself. It gave descriptions of the major trade towns and transportation in rich and vivid detail and you could really feel like you were there and seeing it all for yourself. The rich prose continued throughout the rest of the book, Schafer borrowed from Poems, stories, and travel writings to illustrate his points. Each chapter contained a small overview of the subject being discussed before going into detail about each item. Unless it was an area I had particular interest in I have to admit I did skip much of the later descriptions.

The emphasis was clearly on the exotic however. While describing in great detail different objects and where they came from he left out a great deal of the practical side of things. When talking of salt for instance, he mentioned where it came from in china, and that a little was imported, but mentioned nothing about the formation of the salt monopoly or the merchants who gained from it, or the huge impact this had on Tang culture.

Still it will make for good reference, as it did contain a huge amount of information, about all sorts of things. There were lots of really interesting bits scattered throught the text, particularly about Empress Wu, and religious practices. It was an odd little book, well written, though with a definite touch of the "mystique of the east". It also seemed to be going to great lengths to point out how much China was influenced by it's neighbors, and how it was the neighbors who seemed to have all the really great things. I enjoyed it, though I wish it had been written in a less encyclopedic format. At times it felt like I was reading a role-playing product and not a history book. That can't be a good sign...

[Carlos Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

以前喜歡讀一些帝王將相或者是宏大敘事。
老了之後開始喜歡看一些微觀歷史，或者是生活文化的點滴。
薛愛華這本就屬於此類。
作者考證了唐代史上有紀載的各種可能存在的「舶来品」，並一一做解說。有很多雖然看起來荒誕不經，但其實背後隱藏著當時人對於一些尚無法解釋的事情的觀感。
書中常引用到的《酉陽雜俎》跟《唐傳奇》可以對照著看，會更有意思。

[Ian Slater · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author, a distinguished Sinologist, had a fine sense of English style, which he sometimes did not conceal behind professional-sounding technicalities, or awkward prose allowing for uncertainty in obscure matters. Besides his technical articles for Sinological journals, which established his reputation with colleagues (some of which, not surprisingly, I found pretty much impenetrable), he wrote a series of books on T'ang (Pinyin: Tang) dynasty China which are fairly accessible to the general reader who is willing to put in a little effort, including keeping track of foreign words and names (some of which, mainly book titles, he memorably translates).

Books with intriguing titles, like "The Vermillion Bird" (on Tang responses to then recently-conquered parts of South China), "Pacing the Void" (on Tang astronomy and astrology), and "The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens," on themes in Chinese myth and literature. These are all shorter -- sometimes much shorter -- than "The Golden Peaches of Samarkand," which is rather intimidatingly long, but worth the time for anyone who has ever wondered what a people exotic to use, such as the medieval Chinese, themselves found exotic, intriguing, and desirable -- or, in some cases, merely foreign and 'barbarian."

I could go on at length giving examples, but I will spare the reader. Suffice it to say that the Tang Dynasty covered some high and low points in Chinese history, came into direct or indirect contact with cultures of central, western, and southeast Asia, and left a large literary legacy with which Schafer seems intimately familiar.

So "Golden Peaches" is a book on a remarkable period in Chinese history, in which there was an open fascination with imported or rare products, some brought to the Imperial court in "tribute," some flatly presented for sale (although the Emperor's household might take a cut of the product), and some found inside the boundaries of the expanded empire. Interest was widely and openly expressed in Chinese literature and official records -- although the latter may also contain the puritanical remonstrances of Confucian officials about all this "foreign luxury" -- and sometimes, more to the pointed, on what the production of home-grown competing luxury items cost the ordinary Chinese.

There seem to be two editions of this book in its orignally English form which are noted by Goodreads, and currently available on Amazon (I haven't checked elsewhere). The current price of a new paperback copy from the original publisher, the University of California Press, may be more than you want to spend (unless you already know the book from borrowing and really want a copy to keep), but Amazon also offers a Kindle edition for about a tenth of the price.

I'm not sure the Kindle edition is actually authorized by the original publisher, and it has a few recurrent typographical errors ('life' for 'like,' and the reverse) which may indicate OCR errors that were not picked up by spell-checkers, even though the sentences no longer make sense. I can't be sure about the many Chinese and other foreign words in the text (the former all in old Wade-Giles transliteration, as was standard in 1963), although so far as I can see, after re-reading the first half in this format, the terms are at least spelled consistently. (And the names of specific T'ang emperors seem to be uniform, and they would be easy to garble beyond recognition.) Some care was taken to make the hyper-linked notes actually work, something large publishers, including academic presses, sometimes don't bother with.

[Patrick Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Golden Peaches of Samarkand
by Edward H. Schafer

tldr; this book has a whole sub-section on Dwarfs

...

Its 1962 and Edward H Schafer delves into ream upon uncounted ream of scholarship and records, all to make a list. Lists, beloved by RPG nerds, chroniclers, romantic writers and a Billy Joel.

If reams of DnD theory have been ejaculated from the question 'What do they have in their pockets?', birthing engines of devisment dedicated to the rapid simulation of a goblins pockets, and thence, by inference at least, also making query; what can we learn of Goblin culture from the contents of one Goblins pockets? Here now, are the pockets of a People, or an Empire, or at least a Dynasty; one of the big ones, the T'ang. Her is an encyclopaedia of all that the Emperor received. This shows us several thing;

First, it is an image of the world as perceived by the T'ang court. At its distant, wildest most suggestive western reaches, it brushes against 'Rum', but the more common Occidental foreigner is the ever-wealthy Persian, bringer of materials and artistic styles. To the East we hear of jungle islands, home of rare hardwoods, poisoned arrows and magical pearls. In the ocean lie the phosphorescent eyes of whales. To the South West is India; source of scripture, and of suspicious witchy alchemists who probably accidentally poisoned the Emperor that one time. South lies the known, but uncivilised aboriginal lands of continental China, malarial yet wealthy country. To the north, the ever-dangerous and very charismatic horse-riding barbarians; one Chinese noble larps so hard as a northern barbarian he ends up living in a tent erected on his family estate, wearing furs, drinking milk and eating near-raw meat, dreaming of the steppe

Second; it is an image of China and Chinese tastes and culture, as seen from the very _peak_ of the pyramid. Horses are desired. The Middle Kingdom has a massive thirst for Horse and is always drinking dry its own supplies. A centrally-mandated Horse-sustainment organisation exists, with vast government herds, but they never seem to have enough and tribute in horses is ever-desired. Some treasures have cross-cultural appeal; hawks, dwarfs and slave girls might be banned occasionally but the tribute always starts up again. One wise magistrate is honoured by his land; he elegantly evades the relentless Imperial demands for MORE DWARFS, taken from his small population, by claiming that since _everyone_ in his country is very small, and they are all pretty much the same height, he really can't choose anyone exceptional to be sent to the Imperial Court. Another wise one saves the nature pearl-farms by instituting fierce governmental controls, later he is deified as one who returns the pearls. Its only about 800ad but the environmental devastation and consumption of a massive civilised population is already a stark part of the story. China needs horses, but despite efforts, can't maintain them. She loves pearls, but over-fishes them. The exotic creatures from the borders of her lands keep going extinct or disappearing. This land is like a great terrible octopus, devouring whatever its can from the edges of its knowledge, but ever-spreading.

Third; it paints a suggestive and utterly deranged picture of what life might actually be like in the Imperial Palace; gilded squalor comes to mind. Wealth incalculable, chaos unending. The throne must have tribute and that tribute can come in many, almost in any, form. This means the Palace is filled with, is crammed with, whole zoo's and parks of rare and strange animals, often the only ones of their kind. Horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, asses, mules onagers, dogs, elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, cheetahs, sable, ermine, gazelles, marmots, mongeese, weasels, ferrets, hawks, falcons, peacocks, parrots, ostriches and several animals, the 'Doubtful Ungulates' or 'Doubtful Carnivores', whose name and nature is unclear. These creatures may be mythic, or extinct.

That's just the animals. If a foreign king sends the Emperor, for instance, an instrument, he will send the musician to play it, in fact, the whole band, actually send the orchestra, the dancers, backstage people, everything. Its not a holiday, they belong to the Emperor now. The palace holds entire third generation micro-communities descended specifically from such 'gifts'. Throw in prisoners, slaves, (Dwarfs of course), Hostages (the heirs to foreign kingdoms might end up joining one of several ritual palace guard companies), or other skilled workers in materials and crafts.

We _haven't even gotten to the objects_. For all the animals, imagine at least ten times the variety of plants, sent to wither or bloom in strange soil, then woods, foods, aromatics, skins, drugs, textiles, pigments, industrial materials, jewels, metals, weapons, lamps, books and sacred texts and yes of course when an Indian king sends a sacred Buddhist text in Sanskrit, he also sends along a sage who will spend the entirety of his life in the T'ang court, translating this One Book into Chinese, in one case with the Empress Wu hanging out directly over his shoulder (she liked to watch him do it).

Those are just the generalities, you must imagine, hidden and skittering amidst these grand illusions of systemic knowledge, just a bunch of _weird random shit_; a solid gold wine jug in the shape of a great goose, a 100 foot iron pillar holding at its top a 'fire orb' carved with the names of the Empress and her greatest Advisors. Asbestos robes.

Magic has no meaning here because everything is a bit magic by western standards. Nothing is ever just material. Amber, born from the coagulated glance of a dying Tiger, works well to seal wounds from weapons. Ground up Jade imparts its irresistible immortality to the taker, ground (whole, not pierced), pearls impart watery blessings. Of course, mysterious and distant foreign cultures, from places where blessings, icons, witches and ghosts are common, know the best ways to draw out these sacred abilities. Everything edible has properties that might verge on 'magic', and everything inedible can be made edible, or burnt as incense, or turned into a house, or clothes. Sleeping on a tiger-skin pillow obviously chases away bad dreams, but at some psychic danger to the sleeper. Those oppressed by Ghost Tigers, incubi or sex in dreams will be cured by eating Tiger Meat.

Some treasures have no modern cognate. What was 'Purple Gold'? Perhaps the same stained metal recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun? What is 'Myrobalan Wine'? Black as ink. The several kinds of 'Dragons blood', pigments, ointments, medicines and foods, are all the same? What of 'Gibbons Blood' pigment?

Excess also shapes the scene; some rare aromatic woods are supplied in such superfluity that, while rich Chinese might burn fragments as incense, and others have perhaps a single box, one noble contracts an entire pavilion from the semiprecious wood, inviting noble guests to midnight smell sessions, walking their aromatic decks, smelling the contents of their wonderful garden, filled with plants from a host of nations.

Imagine living in this. Specifically, in the Imperial Court. It feels like a lurid, lively Ghormenghast. What an insane mess of people. How did they live together? The endless rituals, bizarre entertainments, animal, plants, slaves, nobles. That palace guard? Yeah he's the third-hand heir to an empire somewhere, he's never actually been there though.

Schafers grasp of his overflowing subject and his ability, and willingness, to connect themes, facts and ideas across reaches of history, make many of these entries, about the most obscure kinds of treasures, little humanist windows, little perfect ink-sketches, of a strange and living world. As an example, here is the full entry for 'Amber', not the shortest and by no means the longest;

...

"Amber

The Chinese word for 'amber,' _*xuo-p'nk_, has been pleasantly explained as "tigers soul," a phrase which has the same pronunciation, the etymology has been rationalized by the tale that the congealing glance of a dying tiger forms the waxy mineral. This reminds us of the Greek notion that amber was the solidified urine of a lynx. But Tuan Ch'eng-shih, our T'ang bibliophile and collector of curiosa, has this to say:

"Some say that when the blood of a dragon goes into the ground it becomes amber. But the _record of the Southern Man_ has it that in the sand at Ning-chou there are snap-waist wasps, and when the bank collapses the wasps come out; the men of that land work on them by burning, and so make amber of them."

This strange and ambiguous tale seems to contain an allusion to the wasps and other insects, often found encased in amber, but the rest of it is incomprehensible. In any event, "tigers-soul" probably has nothing to do with the word _*xuo-p'nk_, which seems to represent a loan from some language of western or southern Asia, in its original form something like _*xarupah_, related to _harpax_, the "Syrian" form mentioned by Pliny.

Although the legend of the relation between amber and the vital essence of tigers and dragons persisted into medieval times, the true nature of amber has been known since the third century, of not earlier. This scientific knowledge was familiar to the T'ang pharmacologist, and preserved in their compendia. The _Basic Herbs of Shu_ for instance, states; "Amber then as a substance, is the sap of a tree which has gone into the ground, and has been transformed after a thousand years. Even poets knew this truth. Wei Ying-wu's brief ode to amber embodies it:

Once it was the old 'deity of chinaroot,'
But at bottom it is the sap of a cold pine tree.
A mosquito or gnat falls into the middle of it,
And after a thousand years may still be seen there.

The 'deity of chinaroot' is a precious fungoid drug found among pine roots; it was believed that this was an intermediate stage in the development of amber from pine resin.

The precious resin was known to be a product of Rome, and was imported from Iran. This must have been the famous amber gathered on the shores of the Baltic Sea. But closer at hand was the amber deposit of upper Burma, near Myitkyina (and near the jadeite mines which would be exploited mand centuries later); this material was acquired by the people of Nan-chao, where the nobles wore amber in their ears, like the modern Kachins. There were even gifts of amber from Champa and Japan. A commercial variety brought up by merchants through the South China Sea was thought to be especially fine.

Amber had a part in T'ang jewellery similar to that of coral, that is, it was readily converted into ornaments for ladies, and small but expensive objects of virtu for well-to-do households. Among the objects of Amber in the Shosoin are double six pieces, a fish pendant, rosary beads for a ceremonial crown, and inlays in the back of mirrors. Medicine also had a place for amber, as it had for all precious substances which might conceivably lend their beauty and permanence to the human organism. Venerable pine trees were revered in themselves and fresh pine resin was itself a life-prolonging drug. How much more so must amber be, which was pine resin suitably embalmed by a spiritual preservative. More specifically, it was prescribed for "bad blood" and affusions of blood caused by weapons. In short, recipes based on the ancient idea that amber was coagulated blood continued in use even in the T'ang, despite evidence of better knowledge.

The T'ang poets found 'amber' a useful colour word, signifying a translucent red-yellow, and used it particularly as an epithet of 'wine'. We have already seen it used by Li Po, in our discussion of saffron. A line by Chang Yueh is another case;

"In the Northern Hall they stress the value of amber wine."

Li Ho, the precarious ninth-century poet, went a step further, and made 'amber' stand for 'wine' by metonymy. This usage was part and parcel of his well-known interest in colour imagery for the intensification of emotion; he was unique in his abundant use of "golden", "silvery", "deep green", and in the way in which he used "white" to express intense illumination and emotional contrast in landscape descriptions (as in black and white photography, say): "the sky is white," and even "the autumn wind is white." Here is his "Have The Wine Brought In!"

In glass-paste stoup
The amber is thick -
From a small vat wine drips - true pearls reddened;
Boiling dragon, roasting phoenix - jadefat dripping.
Net screen, embroidered awning, encircle fragrant wind.
Blow dragon flute!
Strike alligator drum!
Candent teeth sing -
Slender waists dance -
Especially now when blue spring day is going to set,
And peach flowers fall confused like pink rain.
I exhorrt milord to drink besottedness by end of day,
Nor let the wine upset on the earth over Liu Lings grave!

Liu Ling, one of the ancient "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove," was a notorious winebibber, and bottles were buried with him; to spill wine on the ground now, was a libation, intended or accidental, would be like carrying coals to Newcastle."

...

Within one entry we go from a discussion on etymology, to a discussion of mythic origins, consideration of foreign word origins, perhaps explained or obscured by a pleasing poetic 'just so' story, this then contrasted with apparently already-known origins, this knowledge embodied by an ode, a brief line on some weird drug that never comes up again, a geographic analysis of likely sources of the raw material considering global trade routes, a paragraph on the use of this luxury and its integration with the lives of its final consumers, a loop back round in which magical properties are considered, then finally a little pleasing dive into the use of the 'idea' of the material in poetry, its effect on high language, and lastly a line about a famous legendary drunkard.

If this pleases you, then here you are.

This is the sort of 'Wunderkammer' book which used to go very hard in the OSR, (when I had any connection to it). Back in the day, bloggers would knife fight a monkey to be the first to post this kind of thing.

Its obvious use as a list of incredible treasures is only the first part. Every aspect of the book suggests adventure, perhaps not of the dungeon-diving variety, but certainly adventures of intrigue, travel and trade, as well as medicine and art. The tantalising but specific hints about the most curious elements of imperial and T'ang life have a vivifying effect, one wants to fill them in, to experience the world they describe. Who wouldn't want to run into the cosplay steppe-barbarian noble as an NPC? Or Ultimate Smell Guy? Or the Foreign Orchestra Tribe? Or even just they guy in charge of the Elephants?

It is the kind of text that feels like gloves; you want to grasp and manipulate its contents.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A discussion of foreign things brought to T'ang as tribute and in trade, and attitudes toward them.

Opens with a discussion about foreign relations -- normally they had their own sectors in cities, and could not live intermingled with native Chinese -- and various laws about the tribute and the trade. Emperors who wanted to appear virtuous or warlike might reject things as frivolous. Or slaves might be returned home on the grounds that such a breaking of family ties was unfitting.

Also a discussion of how the other lands were divided up -- as far as Rome. (The Greek legend of the war between the pygmies and the cranes certainly made it to China in this time.)

Then follows a catalog of the exotics, by subject. Though in discussion of food stuffs, medicines, and aromatics in particular, he talks of how arbitrary the divisions are.

Some entries are brief. One creature could have been a weasel or a ferret from the description, and we know nothing more. Others can be expanded on, such as the lion, and the tales of how one had frightened a dragon from a well, and other appearances in poetry. How perfume was compounded, and the various places it came from, and the heavy use of it -- Taoist legend in particular, but also Buddhist ones, were filled with perfume. And many more things.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 3 out of 5]

This famous book is a bit spoilt for me by his uncritical quotation of the Chinese on the Uighurs. In Schafer's text too they are 'arrogant, haughty' and nothing else, their behaviour when in China enough to disgust a civilized person. He doesn't seem unfair on other ethnic groups, so this sticks out for me.

On the T'ang and the foreign, and foreigners in China, I found such insight and understanding in this one: Ethnic Identity in Tang China.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is very innovative to study Tang attitudes towards Central Asia using poetry. The exotics imported into China during this time were plentiful and noted by Tang writers.

[Clyde Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

今年读过最好的一本非虚构，十分有趣的角度来了解唐朝历史，各种物品、故事目不暇接，眼花缭乱：唐朝就已经进口郁金香作为香料，也加入酒调味；唐玄宗和杨贵妃还有那只宠物狗的故事；神秘色彩浓厚的龙脑香；唐朝用猩猩血（其实应该是长臂猿）作为红色颜料；湖南曾经是大量犀牛的栖息地；唐德宗把大象送回栖息地；唐朝饮食只用酱油简单调味，不少食材直接生吃，反而像是当今日本的饮食习惯；唐朝的许多历史资料来自奈良的正仓院。
不管是想了解中国外交史，博物史，文学史，还是当作猎奇的读物，都很有趣的一本书。觉得作者的隐藏信息在于平等尊重其他文明，各种文明交替兴衰，互相影响。唐朝人对于外来事物爱不释手又充满对所谓野蛮文明的鄙夷的矛盾心理十分有趣。

[Wilmer Rezvani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Encyclopedic and engaging it is one of the earliest and best books written on Tang dynasty. A fascinating compilation of research about Tang imports (metals, clothing, jewels, food, books, animals,) and culture; an unusual way to study Tang attitudes towards Central Asia using poetry.

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object which we do not suspect."

[Hooper Bring]

LD asked for the best books on the Tang Dynasty and KB replied that this has been one of his favorites for years.

[PetitShya™ · Rating 4 out of 5]

按照品类做的……怎么说……目录吧，不喜欢的人可能觉得不够跌宕起伏，不过对于喜欢的人来说，可能会很有兴趣一点点去读的吧我想。

[KC Comal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting bits were hidden within lots of encyclopedic wordiness, and often it was unclear if the writer was stating opinions as facts, or quoting old texts.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

全面介绍唐朝衣食住行各方面的进口品。前面以诗证史的部分非常精彩，后面如金属矿物等就较乏味，但这些物品本来也不甚重要，与生活关系不大，所以史籍较少也是可以理解的。从进口品的角度看，开元盛世远非其他盛世可比，马来昆仑奴，非洲黑奴，粟特舞女，新罗乐师，交趾孔雀，印度龙涎香，罗马的家犬，回鹘吐蕃的马，西亚的狮子，真是让人眼花缭乱。

[Laicarus · Rating 5 out of 5]

an all-encompassing glossary of the material life of Tang Dynasty, by which can be imagined the huge and bizarre world that the people from Tang Dynasty lived in

[Hedyhohoho · Rating 4 out of 5]

一本以物观照社会心态的目录书，喜欢里面提及唐人小说的观点，大概意思是，在晚唐正常的舶来品贸易巨量缩减后，见过世面而又不得实物下催生的臆想。

[Jiro]

中古异域风俗大观，可惜比较感兴趣的武器部分不太详细

[Jonathan Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author describes it as more of a humanistic essay than a history book. I can't say I learned a lot of facts that I'll retain, but it was a pleasure to let the words wash over me

[Michael Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me several years to read. I have to admit, this is a very niche topic. Over the years I have looked for books that cover East-West communication over the Eurasian landmass. I am fascinated that the Roman and Chinese empires knew of each other, but never had direct contact. This book fits in that genre. It lists the different types of items presented to the emperors of Tang China as tribute gifts. It then proceeds to talk about where these items came from, who presented them, what they were used for in China and what they were used for elsewhere in the world. The items range from the exotic to the mundane. For example, one of the items was narcissus plants. The book talks about where they originated from and who used them for what. The book took me so long to read, because the writing is academic and there is no story to follow per se. So I had to struggle to read this book. It was easier to consume in small doses.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Schafer’s The Golden Peaches of Samarkand is basically a catalog of exotic good brought into the capital city of Ch'ang-an during the T'ang dynasty. Despite being published in the 1960’s, it continues to be cited by researchers and scholars. Initially, I found it hard to get in to this book. I had a difficult time with the Romanization of proper names and even some of Schafer’s English left me scrambling for a dictionary (when is the last time you used "brummagem" in a sentence?), but as I became use to it I actually found The Golden Peaches to be a soothing read. I learned a lot, not only about the political geography, arts and social customs of the time, but about the flora and fauna of the area as well.

[Sylvia Volk · Rating 5 out of 5]

More nonfiction should be like this. This is a book that, well, describes stuff ... but saying so is like walking out of a candy shop and saying, "Well, that was a place that sold sugar." Schafer has assembled chapter after chapter of gorgeous things from T'ang China: the horses, the books, the gemstones, the references to strange herbs now unknown to science. It's a book of wonders, a very old-fashioned thing, and so yummy that I could put on weight just leafing through the chapter on horses.

[carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

School Book.

[Admiral · Rating 3 out of 5]

More encyclopedic than a novel, but very valuable in that way.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing compilation of research about Tang imports, which manages to be both encyclopedic and engaging.

[Maury · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing compilation of research about Tang imports, which manages to be both encyclopedic and engaging.

[Eressea · Rating 5 out of 5]

非漢語母語者要看過數量如此龐大的史料
從中梳理出唐代各種外來器物的源流
並且還要對原始產地的語言也有了解
真心佩服!