Silk Road

China had received with more or less good grace the flood of Buddhist missionaries but had long since sent out her own missionaries— priests, not of a transcendental religion of salvation, but of a secular way of life, of a worldly and refined civilization. Expansion in Turkestan and Central Asia took place simultaneously with expansion in Southeast Asia. As fast as the famed Silk Road started winding itself through thousands of miles of Eurasian deserts, swamps, jungles and mountains toward Persia and the Mediterranean world, increasingly numerous fleets of junks began to ply the warm waters of the tropical south.

1958, Amaury de Riencourt, “The Moonlight Civilizations”, in The Soul of China, Revised edition, Harper & Row, published 1965, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 109-110

But halfway back, he learned that there had been a change in dynasties and decided he would be better off staying where he was. And so Lu Kuang set up his own Silk Road kingdom at Wuwei in the middle of the Kansu Corridor.

2016, Bill Porter, The Silk Road: Taking the Bus to Pakistan, Counterpoint, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 172

In this old Silk Road city in western China, a state security campaign involving the detention of vast numbers of people has moved to its next stage: demolishing their neighborhoods and purging their culture.

2019 March 21, “After mass detentions, China razes Muslim communities to build a loyal city”, in EFE, archived from the original on 21 Aug 2022

Six hours are enough to devour the over 900 miles from Shanghai to Xi’an, the landlocked capital of Shaanxi Province in China’s central northwest, standing on the bones of the imperial city of Chang’an. In the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., this was the center of not only China but the globe — the eastern origin of the trade routes we call the Silk Road and the nexus of a cross-cultural traffic in ideas, technology, art and food that altered the course of history as decisively as the Columbian Exchange eight centuries later. A million people lived within Chang’an’s pounded-earth walls, including travelers and traders from Central, Southeast, South and Northeast Asia and followers of Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism.

2020 May 11, Ligaya Mishan, “Eating in Xi’an, Where Wheat and Lamb Speak to China’s Varied Palette”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 11 May 2020