Romance Of The Steppe

I am trying to write a romance that is going to get rid of all the prevailing romance elements that I dislike, like the inevitable rescue scenes, rivalry, jealousy, frog to prince, love bombing etc. I want to write about two normal people who fall in love and talk their experiences and emotions in a normal way. There will not be a scene of one lover carrying the other to the point of endangering the spine or causing hernia; there will not be the deliberate steering away from topics for the purpose of making the relationship look more functioning than it actually is.

And this romance is based on two people in the 7th century in Dunhuang, a steppe town located on the edge as well as at the crossroad of three big empires who fought each other frequently. The three empires were the Turkic Khaganate, the Tibetan Empire, and the Tang Chinese Empire. Since the town was an important oasis along the Silk Road, everybody wanted it, even though it was difficult to hold on to it for a long period of time. There’s a map of the three empires here from Wikipedia.

And it is impossible to talk about this map and the 7th century without mention Sogdiana, which is a group of city states of Iranian origin located midway between the East and the West on the Silk Road. There is a map of it here from Wikipedia. For 600 years, Sogdiana people made the trade on the Silk Road possible. They were the traders, bankers, travelers, translators, advisors. The sogdian language was the de facto trade language of the steppe and the official written language of the ancient Turkic Khaganates. Sogdiana was so rich that they funded everything around them–trades, wars, projects. Sogdian traders learned four to six languages from a young age. Often they served as advisors to the three big empires around them and made the communication between empires possible.

As a person of Mongolian descent, I am always interested in stories of ancient Turkic states, the steppe, the Silk Road. And Sogdiana has fascinated me for a long time. They were so clever and enterprising, so courageous and adaptive. They were very religious and believed in Zoroastrianism and Manichean faith. When the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana (Central Asia) started in the 7th century, Sogdiana funded their military operations, and in turn received interests and profits on their loans. Sogdiana was so good as financiers of wars that they eventually became the victims of their own success, meaning the Muslim conquerors grew stronger and stronger and eventually laid siege to Sogdiana, overpowered the city states, forced the nobles to flee, and gave the residents tax breaks if they would convert to Islam.

Now come back to my story of two lovers. The girl was a native to Dunhuang. Her mother was half Tibetan and half Turkic, and her father was the son of the exiled ex-prime minister of Tang Dynasty and his Sogdian wife. The boy was a military strategist of the army that was newly stationed at Dunhuang. They were both shy and quiet, not those outgoing extrovert we usually see in a romance. There should be more shy and quiet people in romantic fictions, and here they are.

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Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay