In July 751 CE, an Abbasid Arab army under general Ziyad ibn Salih defeated a Tang Chinese force under Gao Xianzhi near the Talas River (modern Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan border). The battle itself was modest in military terms — perhaps 30,000 on each side — but its cultural consequences were enormous.
Among the Chinese prisoners taken to Samarkand were papermakers. Until that point, paper production was a Chinese state monopoly, known nowhere else. Within a generation: - Samarkand became the first paper-production centre outside China. - Paper mills spread to Baghdad (793), Cairo, and eventually Spain (12th c.). - Papyrus and parchment were gradually replaced across the Islamic world. - The availability of cheap paper enabled the explosion of Islamic scholarship in the 9th–12th centuries.
The surviving paper workshop at Konigil village near Samarkand still uses the same mulberry-fibre technique those Chinese craftsmen brought in 751.
Geopolitically, the battle ended Tang expansion westward and confirmed Islamic control over Transoxiana (the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya — i.e. modern Uzbekistan).
Uzbekistan in photos
A short visual companion to this entry — photographs from our Uzbekistan travel archive.
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