Chang'an

Cháng’ān, “perpetual peace,” is the Chinese name of the Han capital, bestowed when the dynasty’s founder fixed his seat in the Wei valley in 202 BCE; the histories record the choice, and the name belongs to the established repertoire of programmatic Chinese place-names in which a government writes its hopes onto the landscape. Through the Han centuries the name meant the metropolis itself, its palaces, markets, and imperial university; the Shiji and Hanshu, both written in the city, are its fundamental attestations.

The name is the page’s only self-designation and the only one that means anything: the road’s name for the city, Khumdān, is an opaque label, but Cháng’ān is a legible political sentence, and its irony was visible within a generation, as the city fell to rebellion, fire, and the Xiongnu wars that the Sogdian letter on this page reports. The wish outlasted every failure of it. Restored as the Tang capital’s name, borrowed into Japanese for Kyoto’s ceremonial districts, Cháng’ān remained East Asia’s byword for the ideal capital, perpetual peace as a permanent aspiration rather than a fact.

ʾxwmtʾn, conventionally read Khumdān, is the Sogdian name of Chang’an, attested in the second of the Ancient Letters, written by the merchant Nanai-vandak around 313 CE and never delivered. The letter reports catastrophe in China, famine in the capital, the sack of Ye and Luoyang, the emperor’s flight, and names Khumdān among the cities of the disaster; the initial aleph of the spelling is the script’s way into a vowel (the second is partly restored in the manuscript, printed ʾxwmt(ʾ)n), and the name’s own origin is disputed, with no agreed Chinese or Iranian etymology despite long argument. It is, whatever its source, the road’s name for the city, used by the people who carried the road’s trade.

The form is the headwater of the page’s second family: for half a millennium after Nanai-vandak, travelers from the west called the city Khumdān and not Chang’an, the Byzantine Khoubdán on this page descending from exactly this Iranian shape, and the same name later greeting readers of the Nestorian monument. A capital so great that it bore two names at once, one for the empire that ruled it and one for the road that reached it, and the road’s name was the one the world to the west knew.

Khoubdán is the Byzantine Greek name of Chang’an, preserved in Theophylact Simocatta’s excursus on Taugast, his name for north China, written in Constantinople in the earlier seventh century from reports that had crossed the whole of Asia. The excursus describes two great cities: Taugast itself, whose ruler is titled “son of God,” and, a few miles away, Khoubdan, divided by two great rivers with banks of cypresses, which the account improbably credits to Alexander; the details are garbled in transit, but the name is recognizably the road’s Khumdān, and the identification with Chang’an is standard.

The entry closes the longest transmission line on any page of this atlas: a city in the Wei valley, named in Iranian by the Sogdian merchants who worked it, the name relayed caravan by caravan across Central Asia and the steppe until a Greek historian on the Bosphorus wrote it down, six thousand kilometers and at least four languages from home. Greek, which named so much of the world in this atlas from autopsy or conquest, here records a name it received at maximum distance, the far terminus of the road heard faintly at the near one.

The Arabic name for Chang’an in the merchant literature of the ninth and tenth centuries, most famously in the Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind of 851, the earliest surviving Arabic account of China, compiled from the reports of traders on the sea route through Sīrāf. The form does not transcribe the Chinese name at all; it is the Iranian caravan name, Sogdian Khumdān, carried into Arabic along with the trade itself, the same shape the Nestorian monument at Chang’an had rendered in Syriac letters in 781.

Arabic thus completes a pattern this page already displays: Byzantine Greek Khoubdán and now Arabic Khumdān are parallel westward branches of the Sogdian name, and neither Rome’s heirs nor Baghdad’s merchants ever called the city anything the Tang court would have recognized. The Chinese name traveled with the empire’s documents; the Sogdian name traveled with the road. When the road reached the Arabic-speaking world, it delivered its own name for the greatest city on earth, and the empire’s name arrived centuries too late to compete.