Routes & Cities
The Great Cities of the Silk Road
The Silk Road was a network of cities. The caravan trails that crossed the deserts and the mountains were punctuated by oasis cities that provided water,…
The Silk Road was a network of cities. The caravan trails that crossed the deserts and the mountains were punctuated by oasis cities that provided water, food, lodging, and protection; the sea lanes were punctuated by port cities that provided warehousing, brokerage, and customs facilities. The cities were not merely stopping places: most of them were major centers of consumption in their own right, with populations of tens or hundreds of thousands, monumental architecture, sophisticated craft industries, and merchant communities organized by language and religion. The history of the Silk Road is, in large part, the history of these cities. That is not a metaphor; it is, I think, the single most useful framing the modern reader can bring to the subject.
This article surveys the major urban nodes of the network. For a focused treatment of any single city, see the individual city articles linked throughout. For the broader geography of the routes, see the routes and map of the Silk Road. For the chronological history, see the history of the Silk Road.
The eastern terminus: Chang’an and Xi’an
Every overland Silk Road began at Chang’an, the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. Chang’an served as the capital of the Western Han, the Sui, and the Tang dynasties, and at its Tang-era peak was, by some estimates, the largest city in the world, with nearly a million inhabitants within its walls. The Tang capital was planned on a grid roughly eight kilometres by ten kilometres, with a vast imperial palace complex at its northern end, a great market stretching across the eastern part of the city, and foreign quarters that housed Sogdian, Persian, Indian, Arab, Korean, and Japanese merchants. Buddhist monasteries, Nestorian churches, Zoroastrian fire temples, and Manichaean meeting houses stood within a few streets of one another — and the modern visitor to the Tang-dynasty site museum at the north end of Xi’an can still pick out the rough quarters where each community clustered.
The city fell on hard times after the Tang collapse. The Sui-Tang capital site was largely abandoned, and a smaller provincial city grew up on the same location. The arrival of the Mongol Yuan dynasty revived Chang’an, briefly, as the western terminus of the Mongol postal system; the modern city of Xi’an preserves the Tang city walls (rebuilt in 1370 under the Ming, and again in the 1980s, so do not mistake them for Tang-era fabric), the remains of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda built in 652 to house the Buddhist sutras brought back by Xuanzang, and a number of Tang tombs and Buddhist cave temples. It is one of the most important historical cities in China and a major Silk Road heritage site, though the surrounding modern city of eight million or so is a different sort of place altogether.
Cities, of course, are where the action was.
The Hexi oasis: Dunhuang
Dunhuang was the most important oasis on the Chinese side of the network. It lay at the western end of the Hexi Corridor, where the road divided to skirt the Taklamakan, and was the last Chinese city that a caravan would see for months. Its position made it both a military outpost of the first importance and a major Buddhist pilgrimage site. The Mogao Caves, a sequence of almost five hundred Buddhist cave temples carved into a cliff a few miles southeast of the city, were begun in the fourth century and decorated continuously until the fourteenth, and contain some of the most important Buddhist art in the world.
In 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, restoring one of the Mogao caves, broke through a wall and discovered a sealed chamber — the Library Cave, number 17 in the modern numbering — containing tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and printed materials in Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Khotanese, Sanskrit, Uyghur, and other languages. The contents of the cave, much of which was dispersed to museums in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Beijing in the early twentieth century, are the single richest documentary record of the medieval Silk Road. Dunhuang is now a major heritage site and the subject of an ongoing international scholarly project based at the Dunhuang Academy in Gansu. The standard view, in my view slightly too tidy, treats the cave’s sealing as a deliberate act of conservation around the year 1000; the more interesting point is that we still do not know for certain who sealed it, or why.
The archaeological museum in Samarkand, the State Museum of the History of Uzbekistan (on Rashidov Street in Tashkent, not actually in Samarkand — an easy mistake), has a small but well-displayed Sogdian and Timurid collection; the visitor looking for a single museum to understand the city should start there. The Hermitage in St Petersburg, in rooms 193–195 of the eastern wing if the visitor wants to be precise, has the largest single collection of Dunhuang textiles and manuscripts outside China, and is worth a visit for that reason alone.
A personal note
An honest warning. The phrase “Silk Road cities” suggests a class of cities with something in common — markets, caravanserais, multi-faith populations. They had all of these, but they had very different sizes, very different political histories, and very different degrees of “Silk Road” character. Samarkand in the eighth century and Samarkand in the twentieth century were the same place in name only. Treat the unity of the class as a heuristic, not a fact.
Further reading
If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
- One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.