The Lingering Recollection of Historical Events: 

Memories of Charms Along the Silk Road 

Author: Dan Qing 

Paperback, 209 pages 

Published by Foreign Languages Press 

Drawing on artifacts and ruins unearthed through archaeological excavations, this book brings the history of the ancient Silk Road to life. These relics, embedded with the memories of a vanished world, wordlessly tell stories that are both intimate and epic. 

The author, Dan Qing, is a Life Fellow and vice president of the Turfan Studies Institute in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and an expert advisor to the UNESCO World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and the Pacific Region. 

Across the book’s 18 chapters, the author, imbued with deep affection, recounts the stories of the ancient cities of Gaochang and Jiaohe, the Astana ancient tombs, Sulaiman Pagoda, Bezeklik Thousand-Buddha Grottoes, Qiuci Grottoes, and the Grape Valley, and many other sites. 

Wherever the author takes the readers along this sun-scorched, wind-torn ancient Silk Road, history itself comes alive in their minds: snorting warhorses, clashing steel, cries and shouts echoing across the centuries. 

Turpan, the Silk Road’s once vital crossroads, is a city the author has made several research trips to over the years. There, the Tang dynasty manuscripts, inscribed steles, and other relics unearthed at the ruined cities of Jiaohe and Gaochang trace the ups and downs of a civilization. Seen through these lens, the Silk Road appears less as a mere caravan trail, than as a living artery of human friendship. 

Gaochang, rising on the open, sunbaked plain southeast of Turpan, was more than a crossroads of East and West. Its founders named it for what they saw – “Gao” for the high ground it sat upon and “Chang” for the thriving trade that crowded its markets. 

A capable storyteller, the author then points out that from the Western Han through the Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties, Turpan stood at the crossroads of East and West – the dry desert air thick with the voices of passing caravans and shifting empires. Today, the weathered ruins of Gaochang and other scattered sites still carry that echo, guarding one of the richest cultural legacies on the ancient Silk Road. 

Around two millennia ago, kingdoms of the Western Regions pledged tribute to the emperor of the Han. To seal their loyalty, rulers dispatched princes and brothers to Chang’an, the Western Han capital, as royal hostages. At the Yumen Pass, or Jade Gate Pass in Dunhuang, the Han soldiers raised watchtowers and forts, safeguarding the gateway to the west. Garrisons turned the desert at Luntai, Gaochang, and Quli into ripening fields, their harvests feeding envoys and caravans. Patrols rode up and down the road itself, protecting every traveler under the long shadow of their Han spears. Step by step, grain by grain, the Silk Road widened; goods, ideas, and people flowed in both directions, binding the Han heartland ever closer to the tribes of the northwest. 

Central China, meanwhile, shared its iron furnaces and ox-drawn plows, its silk looms and water-driven irrigation techniques, sending them westward across the desert. In return, the Western Regions sent back sleek horses, orchards of grapes and melons, the lilt of new dances, and the pulse of unfamiliar drums. Even Gaochang’s administrative system, its spoken tongues and written signs, soon bore the unmistakable imprint of the Han heartland. 

At its Tang-era zenith, Gaochang rang day and night with the silver jangle of camel bells. Caravans arrived from distant lands like Persia, Arabia, and the steppes of Central and Western Asia, their guides facing off against howling winds and scorching sands. Meanwhile, Tang merchants rolled out porcelain from the central plains, fragrant tea from Guangzhou, and silk from Suzhou and Hangzhou. 

Gaochang may have been small, but to the Tang court it was indispensable. The taxes levied on its markets paid the salaries of soldiers and officials across the Western Regions. Beyond silk, caravans carried grain, rice and flour, sun-dried and fresh fruit, cotton and linen cloth, pottery, vegetable seeds, leather shoes, fur and feathers, bolts of clothing – every item taxed, tallied, and turned into revenue that kept the empire’s distant outposts alive. 

The city was host to far more than commerce. The Gaochang Grottoes, are counted among the world’s four premier Buddhist rock-cut complexes. Freshly unearthed manuscripts in at least twenty-four languages, together with exotic objects carried from distant lands, testify to a city where peoples and cultures converged in dazzling variety. 

These centuries-old cities, tombs, and grottoes now stand as a living monument to human history. Preserved not merely to commemorate the past or caution against the future, the ruins invite every visitor to step inside their epic history and feel echoes of past civilizations through the undulating stream of time. 

The author asks rhetorically: What is history? He then shares with the reader that it is the unyielding pass, lone beacon towers, and weathered stones of the Great Wall. Today, as the Eurasia Continental Bridge rises anew under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this same wind-scoured land, carries the deeper pulse of Chinese civilization into the future.