Tarim Basin Dev Diary (Part 2): Tocharian Flavor
This dev diary is part 2 of 3 covering RICE’s upcoming, chunky
Tarim Basin flavor pack - today, we’ll cover the
Tocharians in the northern part of the Tarim Basin and other miscellany (the third and last dev diary, hopefully in about a week, will cover Khotan and the southern Tarim Basin). Please note a lot of this is WIP and subject to change.
For those who haven’t seen my previews on discord, I'll quickly mention that I hope to finish this update a few weeks before Fate of Iberia comes out, so that you'll have a time to enjoy RICE's new content before the DLC drops and everyone focuses on Iberia instead.
Lop Nur
On the eastern edge of the Tarim Basin proper is a largely dried up lake called Lop Nur. In antiquity, the lake was lush and even supported forests and was home to Krorän, a flourishing Tocharian kingdom which is also known as Loulan and later Shanshan in Chinese sources, and was a major trade center along the Silk Road. However, around the 4th to 6th centuries, it suffered a severe dry period that caused the kingdom to decline significantly. Centuries later, the famous Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described much of former Loulan as abandoned and desolate. For centuries up until now, the lake’s water levels have fluctuated, but gradually declined and the region never returned to its former glory.
To represent this environmental history, counties around Lop Nur all get a county modifier,
Fluctuating Lake Levels at Lop Nur, that has a few minor negative effects. These counties include Charkliq, Loulan, Miran, and Kumtag, which form the Duchy of Charkliq.
If you are playing with
The Fallen Eagle, there’s more, as the 395 CE bookmark is smack dab during the kingdom’s decline as mentioned above. Counties in the Duchy of Charkliq/Shanshan instead start with the
Dry Period at Lop Nur county modifier, which has real brutal debuffs. If you play in the Kingdom of Shanshan, it
will cripple you. There’s sort of good news, however. At some point in the late 5th or early 6th centuries, a random event will trigger to change the modifier to the default Fluctuating Lake Levels modifier. Not great, of course, but it’ll make things more manageable.
Prophetic Animal Fights
Characters of Tocharian culture or a Tocharian descended culture of Tocharian heritage have access to a decision to
Stage Animal Fights to Predict the Harvest. It can be done at the start of the calendar year, before April.
Historically, the people of Kucha, one of the most influential Tocharian city-states at its height, had a custom of staging large animal fights at the beginning of the year. These games and competitions would be used to predict the results of the harvest or the fertility of herds.
As such, after taking this decision, you'll choose what kind of animal fights to focus on, with different personal bonuses and county modifiers your capital can gain in the subsequent events if there is a positive outcome. For example, if you focus on horses, your capital might get a boost in levy reinforcement or you might get slightly increased martial and prowess for a while.
Kizil Caves and Bezeklik Caves
Two new special buildings have been added in the Tocharian region: the
Kizil Caves in Kucha, and the
Bezeklik Caves in Bezeklik (in Toksun). Though not as extensive or remarkable as their counterparts in Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, they are still two of the more notable Buddhist cave systems in the region, and are thus represented this way.
The Kizil Caves were one of the earlier cave complexes in the region, while the Bezeklik Caves are arguably the foremost example of Uighur Buddhist religious art and worship.
Silk Road Communities
Now onto something broader in scope. A new decision,
Reinforce Relations with Silk Road Communities, is available to most rulers in Asia and the Middle East. Taking the decision lets you choose to work on improving your relationship with one of five ethnic/cultural groups in your realm, each giving you a distinct character modifier for 10 years. It wasn’t unheard of for people of different origins to travel across the so-called Silk Road to settle in distant lands - sometimes voluntarily, sometimes under duress, sometimes with no choice. As a result of this, ideas, beliefs, art styles, customs, words, and more were exchanged, the legacy of which still remains today, even if it isn’t readily apparent at first.
Anyways, this decision can only be taken once unless if your dynasty has the Caravan Networks dynasty legacy (discussed in the previous dev diary), or the Cosmopolitan Ports legacy from the Maritime Trade legacy track already in RICE.
As for the decision’s effects, the choice of community isn’t just for a simple modifier, either. While the modifier you chose is active, you have a chance of receiving various boons from the communities. These usually come via flavor events and can vary from a nice bit of gold or piety, to free courtiers and troops, and different communities offer different advantages. Each community also unlocks a unique, simple decision that gives further advantages for a price.
The five groups, and their associated decisions, are:
- East Asian: Bring In Chinese Specialists
- Steppe: Recruit Steppe Warriors
- Middle Eastern: Bring in Middle Eastern Merchant Settlers
- Himalayan: Recruit Himalayan Warriors
- Indian: Bring in Indian Artisans
In the future, if I have time, I may add in alternative groups for parts of the Indian Ocean.
(For those who played the CK2 Dunhuang mod, this is similar to the Dunhuang Communities decision but now applied to a wider scope.)
Silk Road Entertainers
Although the so-called Silk Road is most often associated with silk, many other products were traded, and at times, silk might not have even been the most valued commodity. One such product was people - not just slaves, but skilled people like entertainers. Diplomacy often relied on exchanges of people to demonstrate one’s status and authority - a truly powerful king or queen is one who can control the lives of such talents.
To represent this, there is a new character interaction,
Present Skilled Silk Road Entertainers. It is available to anyone whose dynasty has the Envoys and Explorers dynasty legacy (from the new Silk Road legacy track mentioned in the previous dev diary), or the Cosmopolitan Ports legacy from the Maritime Trade legacy track already in RICE. Like other similar character interactions already in RICE, you’ll pay some gold to gain some prestige and dynasty prestige, and the recipient gets an increased opinion of you and a character modifier,
Exotic Silk Road Entertainers, for 10 years.
Owners of the county of
Kucha and their lieges have a special variation of this character interaction called
Present Skilled Kuchean Entertainers. It gives better bonuses than the normal version.
Historically, during the Tang period, Kucha had a reputation (true or not) as being something of a medieval Las Vegas party town. Its musicians and courtesans were famed as far away as China, and Chinese poets raved about courtesans from these regions, such as in this poem by
Li Bai, one of the greatest Chinese poets:
Interestingly, Li Bai was born a little north of the Tarim Basin, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan in the city of Suyab, a Sogdian trading settlement turned Tang Dynasty outpost.
Anyways, to additionally represent Kucha’s fame as a leisure town, the county of Kucha is now given a county modifier,
Kuchean Music, which gives a slight boost to tax income.
Anyhow, events revolving around the aftermath of these gifts are planned - for instance, an entertainer might rise to prominence in your court, or you might consider gifting a beautiful slave musician to a courtier infatuated with her. However, at the moment, I am not sure if I’ll be able to code it in time, so this may come in a future update down the line.
Gagaku
Before I end this, I’'ll take a little detour to talk about Silk Road music. This is the last section so feel free to skip it as it’s fluff, but I think the history is too fascinating to pass up.
A couple songs in the next RICE update are of Japanese origin. What does this have to do with the Silk Road and Tarim Basin? A lot more than one might initially think. Centuries ago, music from Iranian regions like Kucha spread across the Silk Road to China; from there, it spread to Korea, then Japan, where some of these songs became part of the repertoire of imperial court music known as
Gagaku, passed down from teacher to student for generations. Gagaku has changed over the centuries, as most notably, it became slower and slower as it was increasingly formalized; much of the original music could be danced to quite vigorously, by contrast.
Still, some Gagaku songs are one of our few remaining, unbroken links to the actual music of the Silk Road. Overall, Gagaku can be very much an acquired taste as it sounds a little harsh to the modern ear, but close one’s eyes, and one can perhaps get a haunting glimpse of a world long gone.
I’ll end this dev diary with an example of gagaku music and dance on Youtube, specifically Togaku, a Gagaku subgenre derived from Tang dynasty music:
Selected Sources for Further Reading
- Aksu, Encyclopedia Iranica
- Analysis of the Ancient River System in Loulan Period in Lop Nur Region, Jianfeng Zhu, Peng Jia, Yueping Nie
- Cultural Selection: The Kizil Cave Murals and the Silk Roads Transmission of Buddhism and Central Asian Art, UNESCO
- Fragments of Secular Documents in Tocharian A, Ogihara Hirotoshi
- Life Along the Silk Road, Susan Whitfield
- Life in Third-Fourth Century Cadota, Christopher P. Atwood
- Nomads and Oasis Cities: Central Asia from the 9th to the 13th Century, Xinru Liu
- The Impact of the Silk Road Trade on a Local Community: The Turfan Oasis, 500-800, Valerie Hansen
- The Kizil Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, Miki Morita
- The Lake-level Changes of Lop Nur Over the Past 2000 Years and Its Linkage to the Decline of the Ancient Loulan Kingdom, various authors
- The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective, J. P. Mallory
- The Slave Trade of European Women to the Middle East and Asia From Antiquity to the Ninth Century, Kathryn Ann Hain
- The Western Regions (Hsi-yü) Under the T’ang Empire and the Kingdom of Tibet. Mu Shun-ying and Wang Yao
- The World’s Earliest Aral-Sea Type Disaster: The Decline of the Loulan Kingdom in the Tarim Basin, various authors
- Tocharian Language, Encyclopedia Iranica
- Tokharian Buddhism in Kucha, Mariko Namba Walter
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