Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, want-to-go and the year you stood here are recorded in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
The Chang'an-Tianshan corridor is a 5,000 km stretch of the Silk Roads running from Chang'an and Luoyang in China to the Zhetysu region of Central Asia, part of a network of routes about 8,700 km long. The routes took shape between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD, flourished from the 6th to the 14th century and stayed in use as a major trade route until the 16th.
The corridor is tied directly to Zhang Qian's mission to the Western Regions. Its 33 components include capitals and palaces such as Chang'an, trading towns, Buddhist cave temples, posthouses, passes, beacon towers, stretches of the Great Wall and tombs. Qocho in the Turpan basin drew water from underground karez channels, and about 90 km of canals survive around Suoyang city. Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam spread along these roads.
UNESCO began studying the Silk Roads in 1988. In 2011 China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan agreed to nominate this corridor jointly, with 22 components in China, 8 in Kazakhstan and 3 in Kyrgyzstan. It was inscribed on 22 June 2014.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).