Contacts and cultural exchanges

For more than 5,000 years, the Chinese people developed a unique and self-contained society at the extreme eastern end of the Eurasian land mass. This society, like others in Asia, was based on agriculture rather than trade, and governed by landlords and bureaucrats rather than by merchants and politicians. It was a distinctly self-centred and self-assured society that regarded the rest of the world as inferior and subordinate.

The Han people had a very long history of agricultural production and their handicrafts also reached a fairly high level at an early stage. Their inventions, such as printing, the compass, gunpowder and the manufacture of porcelain, tea, silk and paper, have long been famous throughout the world. Han culture is extremely rich in ancient books and records, literature and history. Many great thinkers, scientists, inventors, statesmen, military strategists, writers and artists have appeared in the course of Chinese history, and great revolutionary movements have taken place. The Han people have made a very great contribution to the development of Chinese society. In Chinese history no one ethnic group has developed in isolation from the others. Each has contributed to the creation of Chinese history and each shares the destiny of the nation as a whole.

So the emperors of the Tang Dynasty maintained closed ties with the nationalities Bohai in the northeast, with the Turks in the northwest, with the Uygurs (Hui-he), a nomadic tribe inhabiting the north of the Gobi Desert, and with the Tufans, the ancestors of modern Tibet.

The Tufans had made the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau their home from time immemorial. In the early Tang period, Tibet witnessed its height of prosperity under the rule of King Songzan Gambo. When Li Shimin married Princess Wen Cheng of the Tang house to Songzan Gambo, she took with her large quantities of silk fabrics, handicrafts and farm tools to Tibet. During the reign of Emperor Zhong Zong, the Tibetan King Chide Zugdan married another member of the Tang royal house, Princess Jin Cheng, who also took with her many silk fabrics and artisans as well as Confucian classics such as the Book of Odes, Book of Rites and Zuo Qiuming's Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. These two marriages made it possible for the technology and culture of the Han people to find their way into Tibet.

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