Lux Veritatis Lecture / EALC Speaker Series
On Oct 3, Prof. Xin Wen (Princeton University) will give the 2nd Annual Lux Veritatis Lecture /EALC Speaker Series titled "An Envoy State: Turfan and the Integration of Medieval Eurasia" 5:00 pm in Levis Faculty Center 210. The lecture will be followed with a reception open to public.
Lecture Abstract:
Large political entities such as the Byzantine and Tang empires are often seen as the main upholders and drivers of medieval trans-Eurasian connections. But even at the height of their powers, these empires controlled only small parts of this vast territory—so who was maintaining connections in the spaces between? This lecture focuses on the Central Asian kingdom of Turfan from the fifth to the seventh centuries. Its history is known to us because its inhabitants clothed the bodies of their dead with used papers, including government documents, and its arid climate preserved these texts. From them, we can see that an extraordinary number of travelers from the Mediterranean, India, China, and the Steppe world converged in Turfan, not as a destination, but en route to other large states. To provide for their needs, the kingdom devoted outsized resources to receiving, accommodating, and protecting these travelers. In this way, Turfan fashioned itself into an “envoy state”: a state whose administrative functions disproportionately served travelers from other, larger states. States like Turfan were thus indispensable agents in maintaining the long-distance connections that enabled the cultural and political integration of early medieval Eurasia.
Xin Wen (Ch. 文欣) is a historian of medieval China and Inner Asia. He received his BA from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), MA in Pre-modern Chinese history (focusing on the Tang dynasty) from Peking University, and MA in Regional Studies, East Asia and PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, both from Harvard University. He teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Department of History at Princeton University since Fall 2017.