Tulipomania - Mike Dash [2]
Nearly half of the 120 known species of tulips grow wild in this forbidding terrain. Together the Pamirs—Russia’s “Roof of the World”—and the Tien Shan—the “Celestial Mountains” that run along China’s western border—form not only the backbone of Asia but also an all-but-impenetrable barrier several thousand miles long and hundreds of miles wide. Thousands of years ago these mountains were the reason why the ancient civilizations of Rome and China remained almost entirely ignorant of each other’s existence; today they remain among the least explored regions on earth. As late as 1900, when Britain had occupied India and Russia had subdued the fastness of Siberia, this inner Asian citadel remained all but unexplored by Europeans. Bordered to the east by impassable bone-dry desert, to the north by barren taiga, to the west by warring, hostile khanates, and to the south by mysterious and unwelcoming Tibet, the fortress of the Tien Shan was as inaccessible as any place on earth. Even the valleys of this immense range were found at such altitudes that the few outsiders who visited them had to acclimatize themselves to the lung-searing mountain air, and the passes that led to more hospitable country could not be crossed during eight or nine months out of each year. When, at the height of summer, the worst of the snows did melt, the Tien Shan remained inaccessible to all but the hardiest travelers, a sea of gneiss and granite that contained no settlements, no soil worth cultivating, and little or no water. Today the mountains remain dry, infertile, and unwelcoming—true desert in stretches, in the sense that they are incapable of supporting either plant or animal life.
Yet even the Celestial Mountains and the Roof of the World boast occasional oases and foothills where life can flourish. In the case of the Tien Shan, the valleys lie predominantly on the north side of the range, and the oases and settlements and the trade that they attract along the foothills to the south. These towns were a considerable lure for the Turkish nomads who have peopled the Asian steppe lands since the beginning of recorded history. Pasturing their horses in summer in the rich valleys of the north and crossing the mountains through little-used passes, they would descend occasionally on the cities of the south—sometimes pillaging and raiding, sometimes trading with the civilizations of the oases for their learning and their silk.
As pastoralists, the Turks would have encountered the tulip where it grew wild in the valleys of Tien Shan; as invaders, they would also have found colonies growing at much higher altitudes as they crossed the passes leading south, for the tulip can flourish in very mountainous terrain and even winter under a blanket of snow. The simple beauty of these unsophisticated wildflowers, with their petals colored yellow or orange or cinnabar, must have been considerably enhanced by the bleak surroundings in which they were usually encountered, and that would have made them attractive. But for nomads who had survived another howling, freezing Asian winter, the year’s first tulips were more than just oases of beauty appearing in the wilderness. They represented life and fertility. They were the heralds of spring.
Tulips, then, became an important symbol for the Turks. And as they moved westward across the endless steppe, the nomads found colonies of the flower growing wild all across the central Asian plateau, from Tien Shan to the Caspian Sea, and then along the farther reaches of the Black Sea coast and south among the Caucasus. These tulips had spread westward naturally, thousands of years earlier. But by the time the Turks appeared in numbers in the Middle East, in the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D., at least some of the flowers that they encountered were growing