Silk Road religious corridor

node · earth · Central Asia, from Iran and north India to northern China

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.