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History & Empires

The Tang Dynasty and the Silk Road

The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) is often treated as the high point of Silk Road history. Its capital Chang’an, modern Xi’an, was, by the most common…

The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) is often treated as the high point of Silk Road history. Its capital Chang’an, modern Xi’an, was, by the most common estimates, the largest city in the world in the eighth century, with close to a million inhabitants within its walls, including foreign merchant communities from Sogdiana, Persia, India, Korea, and the Arab world. The Tang reasserted Chinese control of the Tarim Basin, reopened the western routes, presided over a flourishing of Buddhist monastic life, and produced some of the most famous travellers in the history of the network. The Tang collapse in the mid-eighth century did not end the Silk Road, but it ended the long period in which China was the dominant political power along its eastern half.

The political restoration of the overland routes

The Sui dynasty (581–618) and the early Tang waged a generation of war to restore Chinese control of the Tarim Basin, lost to the Tibetans and the Türk nomads during the long fragmentation of the post-Han period. The early Tang campaigns brought the four garrisons of the Tarim — at Kucha, Khotan, Kashgar, and Karashahr — back under Chinese authority. The Dunhuang manuscripts, sealed in a cave of the Mogao complex in the early eleventh century and rediscovered in 1900, preserve the bureaucratic paperwork of this restored protectorate in extraordinary detail.

Tang control of the Tarim was more thorough than Han control had been. The Tang stationed substantial garrisons along the routes, appointed military governors, and integrated the Western Regions into a single administrative and fiscal system. The route network that resulted is the one most commonly depicted on later maps of the Silk Road: a trunk line from Chang’an through the Hexi Corridor to Dunhuang, where it split into a northern branch through Turfan and Kucha and a southern branch through Khotan, with the two branches reconverging near Kashgar before crossing the Pamirs into Sogdiana.

The Tang is, for the popular imagination, the Silk Road dynasty.

A cosmopolitan capital

Chang’an, the Tang capital, was the eastern anchor of this system and a city of remarkable cultural variety. The Tang capital was planned on a rectangular grid of about eight by ten kilometres, with a great imperial palace complex at its northern end, a vast state market across the eastern part of the city, and two large foreign quarters where foreign merchants were registered and lodged. The Sogdian community was large and well-organised; Sogdians ran trading houses, served in the Tang military, and even occupied senior positions at court. The An Lushan rebellion of 755 CE — the most serious internal crisis of the Tang — was led, in part, by a Sogdian general; the Sogdian mercantile community is treated in the article on Sogdian merchants.

Nestorian Christian priests, Zoroastrian fire-keepers, Manichaean teachers, and Muslim merchants from the Abbasid caliphate were all present in Tang Chang’an. Buddhist monasteries were the most visible of the foreign religious institutions, with hundreds of registered monasteries inside the city and the great Buddhist complex of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda on its southern edge, built to house the scriptures brought back from India by the monk Xuanzang.

A personal note

On dating: The Tang is usually dated 618–907, but the actual political control of the Tarim Basin by Tang armies was much shorter, ending with the An Lushan rebellion of 755 and the subsequent Tibetan expansion. The “Tang Silk Road” of the popular imagination is really the Silk Road of the first half of the eighth century, a period of about eighty years. The rest of the Tang saw the slow decline of imperial control over the western routes.

Further reading

This is one of those topics where the standard reading list is long and the good reading list is short. Three works that I (the author) keep returning to:

  • The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter — these are uneven but the good ones are very good.
  • A recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal (Brill) for what scholars are actually arguing about right now.
  • One primary source in translation. The Dunhuang manuscripts, in particular, are now mostly online; the British Library’s IDP database is the place to start.

Avoid the popular histories. They are usually wrong in small ways and large ones.

If you came to this article first, start with the main Silk Road guide (Xi’an and Chang’an, the eastern starting point). For the rest of the network, see: