Cang Ci, governor of Dunhuang, protects the western merchants

After the fall of the Han in 220 the new Wei dynasty soon renewed ties with the oasis states of the Tarim Basin. In the second month of the third Huangchu year (March 222) the kings of Shanshan, Kucha and Khotan each sent envoys with tribute to Cao Pi; afterwards, the Records of the Three Kingdoms says, the road to the Western Regions was open again, and the office of the Wuji Colonel, in charge of the military colonies, was restored — according to the Weilüe, with its seat at Gaochang near Turpan. The same history adds that although not all the west came, the great states — Kucha, Khotan, Kangju, the Wusun, Kashgar, the Yuezhi, Shanshan and Jushi — sent tribute every year, much as under the Han; in January 230 (the twelfth month of the third Taihe year) the king of the Great Yuezhi, Bodiao, usually identified with the Kushan emperor Vasudeva I, received the title “King of the Great Yuezhi, friend of Wei”.

Dunhuang, at the western end of the Hexi Corridor, was where the roads to the Western Regions began, but in the turmoil at the end of the Han it had been cut off and had had no governor for twenty years, and its great families had grown overbearing; the governors sent there under Wei before Cang Ci, such as Yin Feng, had merely followed old ways. Cang Ci, a native of Huainan who had organised military farms there for Cao Cao and had been magistrate of Chang’an, was made governor in the Taihe era. He restrained the powerful and had the surplus land of the great clans allotted to the landless according to the number of mouths, the price to be paid off gradually; he reviewed the backlog of lawsuits himself, and fewer than ten people a year were sentenced. The “various Hu of the Western Regions” who came with tribute and goods had often been turned back by the magnates, or cheated and insulted in trade. Cang Ci issued sealed travel permits to those who wished to go on to Luoyang; for those returning from Dunhuang, officials bought their goods at fair prices, paying from the government stores, and had them escorted on the road.

When he died in office a few years later, the people of Dunhuang mourned him as a kinsman and painted his portrait, and the westerners gathered at the offices of the Wuji Colonel and the local officials to lament him; some cut their faces with knives to show their grief, and they set up a shrine where they worshipped him from afar. His successors, the Weilüe notes, fell short of him; only Huangfu Long, governor in the Jiaping era (249–254), who taught the people of Dunhuang to use the seed drill and a better way of irrigating, was judged second to him.