The Ethnic Merchant Along The Silk Road From The Wei To The Tang Dynasty

From Han Dynasty to Sui&Tang Dynasty, the alien merchants were recorded in history for many times. In one word, the business profit was the main force to drive these businessmen to have hard journey along the Silk Road. Considering the long and hard journey, these merchants always preferred to organize the trade caravan to travel along the Silk Road. In recent years, the sarcophaguses unearthed in Anjia tomb, Shijun tomb, the North-QI one in Miho and the painting of Tubo unearthed in Qinghai province, were painted with the merchant's trading activities, these painting and carving provided us rich materials on image research. In addition, the documents unearthed in Tulufan gave us the details about the Sogdian merchant's trading, and also the wall-painting in Dunhuang and Quecha. Analyzing these archaeological materials, studying the literature, tracing the merchant's footprint, we can get some information about the merchant's caravans scale and trading activities.If you want to analyze the activities of the ethnic merchants, first you should define the concept Hu and ethnic merchant. Because in different times the concept Hu and ethnic merchant have different meanings.From Wei&Jin to Sui&Tang, the tombs buried at that time always unearthed the camel figures and the alien figure pulled camel, horse and donkey, and a serial of different figures. From the great number of the untombed alien figures , we can predict the prosperous trading activities along the Silk Road. Furthermore the writ unearthed in Tulufan provided us the trading details of the Sogdian merchants. The relevant records also can be seen in the wall-paintings in the grottoes in Dunhuang and Quecha.At that time the countries in Serindian and Central Asia traded with mainland ruler in two ways: the contribution trade and the common trade. And the merchants from these countries settled and traded in the main trading center and along the main road. From the North Dynasty, the central government began to set the official-Sabo to rule the merchant's settlement which had some self-governing power to some extent. To Tang Dynasty, the management for these settlement was enforced again. Every Sogdian trader must have the trading license-Guosuo awarded by the government, so the Sogdian merchants attached themselves to certain political power to insure their trading.The alien merchants mainly traded the luxury goods for its small size, easy to carry, the high prize and profit. They always organized the caravan for the long, hard journey and the constant robbery. This journey was very hard and dangerous even for the caravan.The luxury goods was not the only thing that the alien merchants carried, they also promulgate the language, art, techniques and religion. With the introduction of the alien goods, the alien culture was also introduced to the inner land such as the blooming religion Zoroastrianism, Manicheism and the Nestorian. The dignitary entered the inner land with the help of the trading activities. In addition Chinese culture was also promulgated to the Central Asia. The exchanges of the materials and culture between Orient and West, were fulfilled by the merchants. Therefore, we can say the ancient alien merchants played an important role in the exchanges between East and West.