An imperial attendant of Hanzhong who answered an advertisement for a man who could get there. Captured on the way out and again on the way back, gone thirteen years in all and more than ten of them in Xiongnu hands, he reached Ferghana, the Yuezhi, Bactria and Kangju and brought back the west as information.
I am the Han's envoy to the Yuezhi; the Xiongnu closed the road on me and I have got away. Send a man to conduct me on, and what Han will send you will be more than can be counted.Zhang Qian to the king of Dayuan asking for conductors and interpreters, c. 128 BCE; Shiji, juan 123, Memoir of the Peoples of the West; Hanshu, juan 61, Memoir of Zhang Qian and Li Guangli
Appears in
Relations
- Emperor Wu patron — The emperor advertised for a man who could reach the Yuezhi through Xiongnu country, and then spent twenty years of the treasury believing his answers.
- Tangyi Fu allies — His guide and bowman, a Xiongnu-born slave of the Tangyi household: of the hundred-odd men who rode out of Longxi, the two of them came back.
- Junchen enemies — Held by him ten-odd years, given a wife and a son, and never once parted with the Han staff with the three tufts on it.
Myth vs record
Zhang Qian opened the Silk Road, so that caravans of Chinese silk went west to Rome and the world began to trade.
The name is modern: the geographer Richthofen coined Silk Road in 1877. What the histories say he did is zao kong, boring a hole through, and what moved west was state traffic: embassies of several hundred men carrying gold and silk goods worth tens of millions in cash, sent to buy alliances against the Xiongnu. Rome is in none of his reports; the farthest named place beyond the last state the Han reached is second-hand, and the Book of the Later Han states plainly that earlier Han envoys all turned back and not one of them got there. He died in 114 BCE, a year or so after being made Director of Ceremonies, and the west kept coming mainly because it wanted the market.