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Like so much else in eighth-century China, the production of ceramic figures like these was controlled by an official bureau, just one small part of the enormous civil service that powered the Tang state. Liu Tingxun, as a very high-ranking official in that state, brought two ceramic bureaucrats with him into his tomb, presumably to take care of the everlasting admin. Dr Oliver Moore has studied this elite bureaucratic class, which has become so synonymous with the Chinese state that we still refer to senior civil servants as mandarins:

Administration combined very old aristocratic families with what we could call new men. They were divided into various ministries – public works, the economy, a military board; and the largest of all was ritual. They would organize recurrent annual or monthly rituals, celebrations of the emperor’s birthday, or princes’ and princesses’ birthdays, seasonal observances – things like the ploughing rite, where the emperor would open the agricultural season by symbolically ploughing a field somewhere in the palace. There was a very small group, whose significance grew throughout the dynasty, who took examinations and competed for state degrees. Later on, this system became magnified, so that by the year 1000, you had something like 15,000 men coming to the capital to take exams, of whom only around 1,500 would get a degree. This is a system in which the largest number, well over 90 per cent, will fail – repeatedly for the whole of their lives – and at the same time this is a system which fostered loyalty to the dynasty – which is quite remarkable.

Liu Tingxun was a loyal servant of the dynasty, and the whole assemblage of his tomb – figures, animals and obituary text – sums up many aspects of Tang China at its zenith, showing the close link between the military and the civil administration, the orderly prosperity that allowed, and controlled, such sophisticated artistic production, and the confidence with which power was exercised both at home and abroad.

PART TWELVE

Pilgrims, Raiders and Traders

AD 800–1300

Medieval Europe was not isolated from Africa and Asia: warriors, pilgrims and merchants regularly crossed the continents, carrying with them goods and ideas. The Scandinavian Vikings travelled and traded from Greenland to Central Asia. In the Indian Ocean a vast maritime economic network connected Africa, the Middle East, India and China. Buddhism and Hinduism spread along these trade routes from India to Indonesia. Even the Crusades did not prevent commerce flourishing between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. In contrast, Japan, lying at the end of all the great Asian trade routes, chose to cut itself off, even from its neighbour, China, for the next 300 years.

56

Vale of York Hoard

Viking objects, found near Harrogate, England

BURIED AROUND AD 927

On the surface, everything is idyllic: a broad green field in Yorkshire, in the distance rolling hills, woods and a light morning mist. It’s the epitome of a peaceful, unchanging England, but scratch this surface or, more appropriately, wave a metal detector over it, and a different England emerges, a land of violence and panic, not at all secure behind its defending sea but terrifyingly vulnerable to invasion. It was in a field like this, 1,100 years ago, that a frightened man buried a great collection of silver, jewellery and coins that linked this part of England to what would then have seemed unimaginably distant parts of the world – to Russia, the Middle East and Asia. The man was a Viking and this was his treasure.

With the next five objects we’re sweeping across the huge expanse of Europe and Asia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. We will be dealing with two great arcs of trade – one that begins in Iraq and Afghanistan, rises north into Russia and ends in Britain – and another in the south, spanning the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to Africa.

When you use the words ‘traders and raiders’, one group of people above all springs to mind: the Vikings. Vikings have always excited the European