What did Asia look like in the thousand years before the voyages of discovery, when the world started to shrink in ways that seemed impossible at almost any point before the middle of the second millennium ce? This is one of the opening questions of Stewart Gordon's absorbing new book When Asia Was the World, which seeks to sketch out this vast geographic tableaux in the centuries before Columbus and Da Gama. Gordon has not aimed this book at researchers and specialists, for the most part—this is a popular history, though I say that with a smile and not a sneer, because I think (and hope) that this book will reach many more people than the average historical monograph. The author has organized most of his nine substantive chapters around a single person, and the narrative carries us from the Chinese traveling monk Xuanzang in the seventh century all the way up to the Portuguese apothecary Tome Pires nearly nine hundred years later. This unusual architecture works and it doesn't. When Asia Was the World is easy to read, and it is intimate because of Gordon's choice to pivot his story around individual human beings. It sometimes feels a bit diffuse, however, as we are moving between widely disparate places without much connective tissue to keep the entire organism together. Readers hoping to get a sense of the broad outlines of Asia for these thousand years might do better to read more didactic works. Yet that is not to say that this book is not worth reading. Gordon's narrative is, in fact, an absorbing study—and one that suggest all kinds of possibilities in writing the histories of large spaces.
Our extant records for these thousand years of Asian history are generally quite poor—monumental architecture, archaeological detritus, religious scrolls, and court records make up most of the surviving caches of historical documentation for this time. Religion, trade, and statecraft are likely the three easiest windows to crawl through if one wants to understand what Asia felt like during this period, and Gordon shimmies through all three, to our collective benefit. Thus, in the wanderings of Xuanzang, the first of the author's messengers, we are transported to a world where religious journeying is normative travel, though Xuanzang's particular itinerary took him farther than most other spiritual seekers. Xuanzang's caravans traversed the inner kingdoms of Central Asia—he moved through Turkik, Mongolian, and Uighur lands, Gordon tells us, and eventually spent some five years of his life copying Buddhist sutras in Nalanda, the great center of religious study in India that sat in the Ganges Valley. Because Xuanzang's travels corresponded with the birth of the T'ang dynasty, his sojourn is a particularly important record of the rise of maturing states in East Asia, and of the transmission of Indic religions to these states, two phenomena of great consequence to Asia as a whole. Gordon tells this larger story, but he is also at pains to reveal Xuanzang as a man, as when he outlines the monk's glum apology to the emperor for having left China illegally. The court forgave our protagonist, and he ended up getting a full escort back to the Middle Kingdom. Yet the fact that the emperor's reply took three months in coming to him also tells us something interesting about Asia at this time, when travel on such routes was no easy thing and information—and, indeed, the people bringing such information—did not always reach their final destinations.
Not all of Gordon's travelers were moving by land across the steppes of Eurasia. A good part of his narrative also takes place at sea, and his chapter on the thousand-year-old Intan shipwreck off the coast of West Java is one of the most interesting of this rubric. No one is quite sure why this metal-less Southeast Asian ship sank—it was in an area without rocks or reefs, and the craft was not too far away from shore when it went down, probably in a storm. Yet the artifacts preserved in the Intan shipwreck show the great variety of places in this medieval world of Asia that could be connected to a single cargo. Gold was found in the hold, likely hailing from Southeast Asia. Silk came from southern China, as did silver, mirrors, and ceramics, all from different sources. Buddhist objects lay in the mud from India, and there were other ceramics and glass traveling all the way from the distant Middle East. One ship and one cargo, yes—yet there were many provenances from which these commodities originally hailed.
Three centuries later, other maritime journeys catch Gordon's eye, the great Moroccan jurist Ibn Battuta among them. Ibn Battuta's travelogue or rihla may be the best-known document of its kind by now outside of the explorers of the Western world—he is often invoked as an Asian “Marco Polo” in world history surveys. Yet the Moroccan traveled longer and also farther, though the particulars of some of both his and Polo's destinations are still in doubt. For Gordon, Ibn Battuta represents the possibilities of travel in the medieval Asian maritime world, when one's contacts could place you in courts stretching from Jeddah to the Maldives, and possibly quite farther afield even to the gates of China. The Chinese sailed in the opposite direction, too, of course: Chapter 9 of When Asia Was the World focuses on Ma Huan, the great record keeper of the Zheng He voyages in early Ming China. If Ibn Battuta traveled farther than the ships of the Dragon Throne, then he could not compete with them in what they brought back home—Ibn Battuta, after all, had only his tales. The Zheng He voyages that connected much of the known world of Asia only a century after Ibn Battuta traveled brought back a live East African giraffe to the Chinese court, an event still immortalized in a painting that adorns Gordon's book.
As exciting as these oceanic voyages are, one gets the sense that Gordon's heart resides most thoroughly in the overland empires of this medieval world, and particularly in the broad swath of territory connecting what is now India with the Middle East. In his chapter on Ibn Fadlan (921–22 ce), a mid-level courtier chosen by the Baghdad court to lead a mission to the Russian steppe, Gordon sketches out how travel and ethnography worked in the beginning centuries of Islam. Ibn Fadlan was not a terribly important person, but his account of his travels on that expedition survived, and from that account, we can make out how Islam started to move overland through the lands that currently make up its geographic center point, halfway between Morocco and eastern Indonesia. Ibn Fadlan seemed to have a natural curiosity, and he wrote down a detailed account of all the people he met on his trips into the interior of the world's largest continent.
Similarly, Gordon is fascinated by Babur, the great warrior-king who lost a huge kingdom and then regained it, straddling fertile valleys between Afghanistan and India in the time right before the ascent of the Mughals to power on the Indian Subcontinent. The author delineates the pan-steppes culture of horses, elite fealty, and battle that connected this part of the world all the way to Turkey in the west and China in the east. He shows how Babur was a man of his times, though ultimately special in the sense that his actions laid the groundwork for the founding of one of Asia's greatest empires. Yet in addition to his horsemanship, Babur also wrote poetry and waxed philosophically about love and sex; he was not averse to the finest stimulants money could buy, and he enjoyed the many privileges of his exalted position. In other words, he was a flesh-and-blood human being as well as a general whom history remembers, and Gordon is at paints to keep him this way. One of the major aims of When Asia Was the World is to walk this balance line between the personal and the larger structures of history, and Gordon does this quite well in a number of places. This is not a pedagogical book in its essence, in my opinion, but is one that allows you to feel the shape of history, both in personal and in structural terms. For that, all of us—whatever our historical stripe may be—can certainly be grateful.
