What would people have been smoking in 700 AD Central / Eastern Asia?
score:26
Historically:
They wouldn't have been smoking anything.
This is some evidence that Arabian traders brough opium to Tang dynasty China, and one might reason it could've been accessible to steppe nomads. However, this would've been extremely costly and reserved for "medicinal" uses, not smoked by random soldiers on a hunt.
Folklore:
There is a legend of tobacco of some kind from the Tang dynasty, which fits this context. As the story goes, when Emperor Suzong - who took the throne in modern Ninxia - was moving back to the Imperial Capital (modern Xi'an), he took a rest stop on a hill. An old man passed by smoking from a pipe bag, and the Emperor found it enticingly refreshing. So the locality was ordered to send tobacco as tribute to the court ever since. And that's the story of how Zhengning County, in Ganshu, got started on its famous tobacco industry
The story is almost certainly absolutely apocryphal.
In the Movie:
I looked up the movie and the actual sentence was:
風颳過來的土煙味，我聞到了
The wind blows over the smell of [tǔyān, lit. soil/ground/earth smoke], I smell it.
A thousand years later, [tǔyān] would come to mean domestically produced opium, or alternatively, nightshade. For the context of the movie however, a historically accurate interpretation is the literal meaning: he's smelling the cloud of dust kicked up by the pursuant.
Whether the writers intended this is, of course, another question altogether.
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