Chang'an

Assembled from 29 blocks · 3 evidence · 29 related

1. Story
2. Imperial capital of the Han (as Western Han capital, 202 BCE-9 CE) and of the Tang (618-907), and the eastern anchor of the overland routes. Tang Chang'an was laid out on a rectangular grid of walled wards covering roughly 84 square kilometres, with the Western Market serving as the quarter where Sogdian, Persian and Central Asian merchants lived and traded. Population estimates of up to a million including suburbs are commonly cited but debated. Han Chang'an stood several kilometres north-west of the Tang city; both lie under and beside modern Xi'an. Destroyed as a capital after 904; never again the seat of a Chinese dynasty.
3. Knowledge
4. Chang'an
5. Xi'an
6. Church of the East (Nestorian Christianity)
7. Connections
8. Xi'an
9. Church of the East (Nestorian Christianity)
10. Tang Empire
11. Zhang Qian returns to Chang'an
12. Alopen reaches Chang'an
13. Xuanzang travels to India and back
14. The Nestorian Stele is erected at Chang'an
15. Chang'an
16. Chang'an-Tianshan corridor inscribed by UNESCO
17. Chang'an
18. Christianity
19. Limits of religious diffusion
20. Silk Road religious corridor
21. Alopen reaches Chang'an
22. The Nestorian Stele is erected at Chang'an
23. Xi'an Stele (Jingjiao / 'Nestorian' Stele)
24. Alopen received at the Tang court
25. The Xi'an stele is erected
26. Evidence
27. A transnational serial property of 33 component sites across China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, covering roughly 5,000 km of corridor: capitals, palace complexes, trading settlements, Buddhist cave temples, beacon towers, passes and sections of the Great Wall. The property is defined as a network of routes, not a road.
28. Records in Chinese, with a Syriac colophon listing clergy, that the missionary Alopen reached Chang'an in 635 and received Tang imperial permission to preach, and summarises a century and a half of the Church of the East in China. The primary documentary object for Christianity on the overland routes.
29. Eyewitness description of the Tarim oasis kingdoms, the Pamir crossing, Central Asia and seventh-century India, compiled the year after Xuanzang's return. It records the state of Buddhist communities city by city and has been used by archaeologists to identify and locate sites.