Silk Road religious corridor

Assembled from 45 blocks · 3 evidence · 52 related

1. Story
2. Not a single road but the overland belt of oasis-to-oasis routes linking north India and Iran to the Tarim Basin, the Hexi Corridor and the Chinese capitals. The same caravan infrastructure that moved silk, glass, horses and paper moved monks, scriptures, translators, relics and painters. Buddhist monastic communities clustered at the staging points — Gandhara, Bamiyan, Kucha, Turfan, Dunhuang — because that is where the caravans stopped, were provisioned and were taxed. Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and the Church of the East used the same corridor. The term 'Silk Road' is a nineteenth-century coinage (Ferdinand von Richthofen) and is a modern analytic label, not a name used by the people who travelled it.
3. Knowledge
4. Dunhuang
5. Silk Road religious corridor
6. Indian Ocean maritime trade network
7. Connections
8. Buddhism
9. Church of the East (Nestorian Christianity)
10. Xuanzang
11. Dunhuang
12. Indian Ocean maritime trade network
13. Ashoka's bilingual Greek-Aramaic inscription at Kandahar
14. Buddhism attested in Han China
15. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
16. Xuanzang's overland journey to India and return
17. Alopen received at the Tang court
18. The Xi'an stele is erected
19. Northern Tarim route
20. Southern Tarim route
21. Mogao Caves
22. Mogao Caves
23. First cave cut at Mogao (traditional date)
24. The Sogdian Ancient Letters are abandoned west of Dunhuang
25. Mogao Cave 17 is sealed
26. Wang Yuanlu opens Mogao Cave 17
27. Silk Road religious corridor
28. Buddhism attested in Han China
29. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
30. Islam
31. Silk Road religious corridor
32. Aksum
33. Kilwa Kisiwani
34. Hinduism
35. Zoroastrianism
36. Aksum adopts Christianity under King Ezana
37. Zoroastrian migrants reach Gujarat — the Parsi settlement
38. Construction of Borobudur under Shailendra patronage
39. Construction phases of the Great Mosque at Kilwa Kisiwani
40. The ruling house of Malacca adopts Islam
41. Measured global religious composition, 2010-2020
42. Evidence
43. 492 cells and cave sanctuaries at Mogao, situated at a strategic point on the Silk Route at a crossroads of trade and religious exchange, contain statues and wall paintings spanning about a thousand years of Buddhist art (4th-14th centuries); inscribed on the World Heritage List in December 1987.
44. The sealed library cave — Mogao Cave 17 — yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, textiles and printed texts dating from the late fourth to the early eleventh century, written in at least seventeen languages and twenty-four scripts, Chinese and Tibetan most prominent among them, alongside Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese and Old Uyghur. The corpus is Buddhist, Manichaean, Christian and secular-commercial together — direct evidence that religious and commercial texts moved through the same oasis. V55 verification basis: the IDP catalogue was retrieved in summary; individual manuscript records were not consulted, this session having no direct network access to idp.bl.uk.
45. A first-hand account of Xuanzang's nineteen-year journey from Tang China through the Western Regions to India and back, compiled in 646 CE, describing monasteries, kingdoms, road conditions and religious practice along the corridor. V55 verification basis: the text's authorship, compilation date and character are corroborated; the year of the standard English edition is NOT — a 1996 BDK English Tripitaka date was previously asserted here and could not be confirmed, so it has been removed rather than restated. A curator with library access should settle the edition.