Holding the staff for nineteen years
Held twice by the Xiongnu for more than ten years in all, the Chanyu gave him a wife and a home, hoping the years would wear away the envoy’s resolve. Zhang Qian lived on the steppe, herded, fathered children, and kept the Han staff at his side throughout. Thirteen years later he returned to Chang’an, only he and Ganfu remaining of the hundred-odd in the mission. Emperor Wu made him a grand palace grandee — not because he had completed his mission, but because he had brought back a world of which the empire had known nothing.
The chain reaction of opening the void
In the markets of Daxia (Afghanistan) Zhang Qian saw Shu cloth and Qiong bamboo staves, and asked their origin — resold from Shendu (India). From this he reasoned that Central Asia could be reached from Sichuan through India, and on returning urged opening a road through the southwestern tribes. This "Shendu road" was never opened, but the empire’s imagination of its outward routes took shape from then on: the northern route out through Hexi, the southern probing toward Yunnan and Burma. One envoy’s glance in a foreign market set off the empire’s geographic exploration in two directions.