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Entry 98 of 240War

The Battle of Talas

751 CE/Central Asia/Tang China / Abbasid Caliphate
Today The Kyrgyzstan–Kazakhstan borderSpan Tang–Abbasid frontier · 8th c. CE

Tang China and the Abbasid Caliphate — the two greatest powers on earth — met exactly once, at a river in Central Asia, and the Tang lost. The battle changed no borders and is barely mentioned in Chinese sources. Its consequence was accidental: among the prisoners the Abbasids marched back to Samarkand were papermakers. Within decades paper mills were running in Baghdad; within centuries the technique reached Europe. A minor frontier defeat handed the Islamic world the cheap writing surface that its golden age of translation and scholarship would be built on.

◆ Worth knowingNeither empire seems to have thought the battle mattered much. Its real cargo was a manufacturing secret China had kept for six centuries, walking west in a prisoner column.
◆ The mechanismInformation-medium revolution

A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Also: Trade-route shift · Military-technological disruption

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