The Silk Road: More Than Lines on a Map
Heritage is a term that covers many things tangible and intangible. It can be related to economics, ecology, religion, history, and more. Heritage can also span thousands of miles and national borders. The Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor of the Silk Road is a prime example of a cross-cutting World Heritage site. This particular section of the Silk Road was inscribed onto the World Heritage list in 2014. UNESCO’s description for the Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor acknowledges the Silk Road as “one of the world’s preeminent long-distance communication networks” and discusses the “political, social, and cultural impacts” it had in addition to the network’s role trading goods between Asia and Europe.
The Silk Road can seem rather boundless — representing the movement of items or ideas over the vast Asian continent. It is difficult to visualize in terms of heritage. The Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor, however, helps to ground the concepts of heritage, diffusion, and movement in physical locations, reminding students of history and heritage that trade networks are more than just lines on a map. Trade networks are an important aspect of intangible and tangible dynamics of heritage that interconnect societies over vast distances.
The corridor begins in Chang’an (located near modern-day Xi’an in the Shaanxi province of China) and crosses over the Tian Shan Mountains into Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It starts on a plateau, crosses over mountains, passes through valleys, skirts around deserts, and stretches across grasslands. Within the boundaries of the corridor, there are 33 sites including posthouses, temples, agricultural sites, water channels, and even a portion of the Great Wall among other things. The inclusion of these sites as aspects of the corridor maintains a connection between the network as a whole and the effects the network had on local communities through the movement of people and ideas.
An intriguing example of this is the Karez style water system found in the Tarim Basin of Northwest China. The Karez water system was developed under the Achaemenid (Iranian) empire and consists of underground wells and channels used for irrigation. Alessandro Rippa (2014) states that the karez system was brought into the Tarim Basin by Iranian peoples moving through the corridor from the Indo-Afghan region. Rippa also points out that in addition to these irrigation systems, the Iranian immigrants to the basin introduced the production of wheat, barley, and sheep to the area.
The transfer of ideas along the Silk Road was not limited to agricultural technologies. It also included the movement of religion across Asia. For example, Xinru Liu (2011) found that the movement of Buddhism into China can be seen as early as the 2nd century C.E. with Buddhist traders from the Iranian civilization of Sogdiana. Eric Greene (2018) documented that the religious use of Buddhist images in China began around the late 2nd century C.E. or early 3rd century C.E. The impact of Buddhism in China along the Silk Road can be seen at Buddhist Cave-Temple complexes such as those found at Maijishan and Bingling and pagodas like the Great Wild Goose Pagoda. The Maijishan Buddhist Cave-Temple complex, an important stopping point along the Silk Road, consisted of hundreds of caves and thousands of terracotta structures.
At the most Eastern portion of the Chang’an-Tianshan corridor is the city of Xian, which houses The Great Wild Goose Pagoda established by Xuanzang in 652 C.E. This location an example of Buddhism in China along the Silk Road and its creator Xuanzang is an example of a person who utilized the Silk Road to travel to India and begin his translation of Buddhist texts. The pagoda was made “to house the numerous Sanskrit manuscripts and Buddhist images he had brought back with him from his sojourn in India.” If this location had not been included within the Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor, it would have been a detriment to the exploration of heritage along the Silk Road.
The inclusion of cave-temple complexes, irrigation systems, and pagodas, among other sites, within the World Heritage Property of the Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor of the Silk Road provides tangible examples of the Silk Road’s influence on the history of China. It illustrates the intermingling of cultures in ways a map of the trade network would struggle to do. As a single site, the heritage property of the Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor of the Silk Road is an important piece of heritage. With the addition of the 33 sites included in the property, the Chang’an-Tianshan corridor becomes a more accessible tool for heritage education. The inclusion of the additional 33 sites as makes the corridor an exemplar of UNESCO’s second criteria for World Heritage site status, which is “to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design.” The Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor’s trade routes and 33 sites illustrate the exchange between cultures and provides examples of those exchanges in the tangible forms of planning, monuments, and architecture.
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Greene, Eric M. “The “Religion of Images”? Buddhist Image Worship in the Early Medieval Chinese Imagination.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 138.3 (2018): 455–84.
Liu, Xinru. “A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam.” Journal of World History, vol. 22 no. 1, 2011, p. 55–81. Project MUSE.
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