When Kucha Met Tang – It Happened Today, January 19 2017

Am I allowed to mention that on January 19 of 649 AD the forces of Kucha surrendered to general Ashina She’er, giving the Tang control of the northern Tarim Basin? Or would I just be wasting your time?

Lists of historic events tend to contain such things, partly perhaps to illustrate the vanity of much worldly ambition as readers go "I thought Tang was bad-tasting orange juice substitute that emerged from the Apollo moon program" and partly, I think, to be politically correct and avoid charges of "Eurocentrism". But seriously, folks, would the world be different if this one hadn’t happened? Before you answer, close the book, step away from the keyboard and tell me where the northern or any other bit of the Tarim Basin is.

Exactly. So now let me dive deep into the pool of political correctness to fish out Hendrik van Loon’s sweeping 1921 The Story of Mankind, a panoramic history especially for children of the sort people tend not to write any more because it all makes sense and has heroes and villains. At one point in the book he says that when deciding what to include "There was but one rule. ‘Did the country or the person in question produce a new idea or perform an original act without which the history of the entire human race would have been different?’ It was not a question of personal taste. It was a matter of cool, almost mathematical judgement. No race ever played a more picturesque rôle in history than the Mongolians, and no race, from the point of view of achievement or intelligent progress, was of less value to the rest of mankind."

In fact I would quibble a bit with his remark about the Mongols, whose impact on Russia I consider to have been disastrous for that country and, by extension, for the world because of the malevolent role an anti-Western Russia has played including in its time as the Soviet Union. (To be more exact, a half-Western Russia conflicted about its identity and rarely more vigorous than when rejecting the side of its heritage it desperately needs to embrace for its own sake and ours.) But I agree with van Loon about the larger point. A great many "historical" events are nothing of the sort, in that they contribute nothing good or even bad to the state of the world, merely perpetuating patterns harmful and repetitive wherever they occur.

OK, you could try to make a case that if China had been less or indeed more successful in its military campaigns against the various Turkic statelets in its northwest, including Kucha in Xinjiang (yes, I Googled it) its own history might possibly have been different. But it’s hard to see how, or how such a result might have occurred, let alone how the specific case of Kucha mattered either way. It was just a bunch of rhubarb on the borders of a large, somewhat amorphous civilization involving convoluted politics and chaotic military actions on behalf of dynasty that later collapsed.

It did happen on January 19. But if it hadn’t, pace van Loon, nobody would know the difference. Not even people who now live there.