How a Forgotten Religion Shaped China

[Randy W]

How a Forgotten Religion Shaped China
In a small temple in the southeastern city of Quanzhou, half a world away from his birthplace, visitors can find one of the last still-standing representations of the Persian prophet Mani.

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How a Forgotten Religion Shaped China
In a small temple in the southeastern city of Quanzhou, half a world away from his birthplace, visitors can find one of the last still-standing representations of the Persian prophet Mani.

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At its peak from the 10th through the 14th centuries, Quanzhou drew a diverse array of merchants from across Eurasia, including Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians. After settling in the city, they dedicated altars to their faiths, built temples, and erected statues — many of which still stand today.

Among the most noteworthy of these sites is the Cao’an Temple and its Radiant Buddha Mani wall carving. Its name is somewhat misleading: The carving does not depict a Buddhist deity, but the third century Persian prophet Mani, the founder of the Manichaean faith. The story of how his likeness wound up on a temple wall half a world away from where he was born is one of persecution, resilience, and the vast networks of exchange that make Quanzhou worth remembering now.

Mani was born in Babylon in A.D. 216 and grew up in the city of Ctesiphon, near modern-day Baghdad. After working as a painter and healer, he began preaching the tenets of a new religion that divided the world into light and dark. The Sassanids’ Zoroastrian ruler Bahram I did not welcome this new faith, and Mani was hanged from a tree outside the capital in 274. Under mounting pressure, large numbers of Manicheans fled east to Central Asia, where they settled in important cities like Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan and Merv in modern-day Turkmenistan.

At the time, Central Asia was under the control of the nine city-states of Sogdiana — politically independent entities that shared the profits of the Silk Road trade that crossed their borders. Markets prospered and different faiths were generally tolerated, allowing Manicheanism to flourish.

This would last until the eighth century, when Arab armies reached Central Asia. Their invasion of Sogdiana created the conditions for Manicheanism’s next — and final — great migration. Followers of the faith split in two. One branch moved south, following the Amu Darya river to India before setting sail along maritime trade routes and eventually arriving in Quanzhou.

The other branch fled east along the Silk Road, over the snowy Pamir Mountains. They traversed the Taklamakan Desert before ultimately arriving in Turpan, in what is now Northwest China.

In Turpan, the Manichean elders successfully persuaded Bögü, the third Khagan of the Uyghur kingdom of Qoch, to promote their faith. In this, they benefitted from an unusual skill: Manichean prayers unearthed at the nearby Silk Road entrepot of Dunhuang and written in the Sogdian script indicate that Manichean sages were known for their ability to conjure rain, a powerful tool in the arid regions around the Gobi Desert.