Dunhuang

Assembled from 20 blocks · 3 evidence · 24 related

1. Story
2. Oasis town in the Hexi Corridor at the western edge of Han China, established as a commandery in the late second century BCE under Emperor Wu. Beyond it lay the Jade Gate (Yumen Pass) and the Yang Pass, the frontier gates where travellers chose between the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan. Its position as the last garrison before the desert made it a customs point, a garrison town and a religious centre. The Mogao Caves lie about 25 km to the south-east; the Sogdian Ancient Letters were found in a ruined watchtower west of the town.
3. Knowledge
4. Dunhuang
5. Connections
6. Northern Tarim route
7. Southern Tarim route
8. Mogao Caves
9. Mogao Caves
10. First cave cut at Mogao (traditional date)
11. The Sogdian Ancient Letters are abandoned west of Dunhuang
12. Mogao Cave 17 is sealed
13. Wang Yuanlu opens Mogao Cave 17
14. Silk Road religious corridor
15. Buddhism attested in Han China
16. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
17. Evidence
18. Five substantially surviving letters of Sogdian merchants, undelivered, showing how the eastern routes actually operated: resident family colonies in a chain of cities from Sogdiana to the Hexi Corridor, goods moved between them in relays, business conducted by correspondence and credit rather than by single long journeys. Letter 2 reports the sack of Luoyang, which anchors the conventional dating to around 313 CE. The letters are written on paper, establishing that the material had reached the far western Chinese frontier by that date.
19. 492 decorated cave temples with roughly 45,000 square metres of murals and over 2,000 painted sculptures, cut between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, together with the manuscript hoard of Cave 17.
20. Catalogues and digitally reunites the material removed from Mogao Cave 17 and other eastern Silk Road sites between 1900 and the 1920s, now held in London, Paris, Beijing, St Petersburg and Tokyo. The dispersal is physical and permanent; the reassembly is digital.