Chang’an: The Eastern Apex of the Silk Road Urban Network

The dust of the Hexi Corridor still clung to the wool of Bo Shiyi’s Bactrian camels as the caravan crested the final rise overlooking Chang’an in the seventh month of 733 CE. A Sogdian merchant from the oasis city of Samarkand, Bo had spent eighteen months traversing the Silk Road’s most treacherous stretches: fording the freezing, snowmelt-swollen waters of the Syr Darya, navigating the shifting sand dunes of the Taklamakan, and bribing Tang border guards at the Anxi Protectorate to avoid the month-long delays that could spoil his cargo of frankincense and perishable Central Asian textiles. Now, as the glint of Chang’an’s outer wall came into view—its crenellated ramparts stretching for nearly 25 kilometers, enclosing an area of 84 square kilometers—he inhaled the familiar mix of scents that marked the eastern apex of the Eurasian trade network: roasted mutton from the city’s bustling street food stalls, the sharp tang of southern camphor unloaded from Yangtze River junks, and the faint, sweet smell of frankincense still sealed in the clay amphorae strapped to his camels’ flanks. Bo’s journey was not unique: thousands of merchants, pilgrims, envoys, and laborers passed through Chang’an’s gates each year, but his experience encapsulates the city’s dual identity as both a passive terminus of overland trade routes and an active, transformative hub that reshaped goods, ideas, and identities before they moved westward across Eurasia.

Chang’an’s role as the Silk Road’s eastern anchor was not an accident of geography, but the product of deliberate imperial planning that began under the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) and reached its mature form under the Tang. Designed by the Sui architect Yuwen Kai and expanded by Tang rulers, the city’s grid layout reflected a cosmological vision of imperial order: the palace complex (Daming Gong) sat at the northernmost point, aligned with the North Star, while the administrative core (Huang Cheng, or Imperial City) sat directly south of it, and the residential and commercial wards (Fang) radiated outward in a precise checkerboard pattern of 108 rectangular blocks, separated by 14-meter-wide avenues. Two official markets—the Eastern Market (Dong Shi) serving local consumers and the Western Market (Xi Shi) dedicated to international trade—sat in the southeastern and southwestern corners of the Imperial City, respectively, their locations chosen to minimize disruption to elite residential neighborhoods while providing easy access to the city’s main western gate, Kai Yuan Men, the official starting point of the Silk Road. This planned separation of commercial and residential space, rare among pre-modern Eurasian cities, allowed the state to tightly regulate trade while concentrating foreign merchants in a single, easily monitored zone. The Western Market alone covered an area of 0.9 square kilometers, larger than the entire old city of Constantinople at the time, and housed permanent storefronts for Persian, Sogdian, Korean, and Japanese traders, as well as temporary caravanserais for visiting merchants from as far as the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire.

The material evidence for Chang’an’s role as a trade hub has been dramatically expanded by recent archaeological finds, most notably the 1970 discovery of the Hejiacun hoard, a cache of more than 200 gold, silver, and ceramic objects buried in the home of a mid-level Tang official shortly after the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763 CE). For decades, the hoard was interpreted as a stash of imperial tribute, but the 2021 publication of the full archaeological report by the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology revealed dozens of objects with clear Central Asian and West Asian origins, including three Sogdian-inscribed silver plates depicting the Zoroastrian supreme deity Ahura Mazda, a Sasanian Persian gilded silver box decorated with hunting scenes, and a hoard of 30 Abbasid silver dirhams and 12 Sasanian drachms, all dated to the first half of the 8th century.1 The hoard also included 17 pieces of Chinese porcelain, including Yue ware celadons from the southern Yangtze region and Xing ware white porcelains from Hebei, as well as 42 pieces of silk textile fragments, some woven with Central Asian “pearl-roundel” (lian zhu wen) patterns imported from Sogdiana, others woven with Chinese motifs of phoenixes and peonies that would later become popular across Central Asia. The coexistence of these objects in a single cache, buried just 3 kilometers from the Western Market, demonstrates that Chang’an was not a one-way destination for foreign goods, but a site of exchange, transformation, and re-export: Sogdian merchants brought silverware and coins to Chang’an to trade for Chinese silk and porcelain, which they then carried back to Samarkand and Merv, while Chinese artisans copied Sogdian textile patterns and Persian glassmaking techniques to produce hybrid goods for both domestic and export markets.

This active, transformative role of Chang’an in the Silk Road network challenges the dominant narrative of the city as a passive “terminus” where foreign goods arrived and were consumed by the Tang elite. New research on Tang administrative documents, including 12 newly deciphered manuscripts from the Dunhuang caves dated to the Kaiyuan era (713–741 CE), reveals that the Tang state actively facilitated the re-export of foreign goods from Chang’an to markets across Eurasia. The documents, which include tax ledgers, merchant registration records, and imperial edicts, show that the state established a specialized agency, the Hushi Jian (Bureau of Barbarian Trade), to manage trade with foreign merchants, with a rank higher than the local market bureau (Shi Shu) to reflect the strategic importance of long-distance exchange.2 Foreign merchants were required to register for a “market license” (shi ji) to trade in the Western Market, and were subject to a 10% customs duty (bo jiao) on most goods, though horses, tribute items, and religious goods were exempt from taxation to encourage trade. The documents also reveal that the state operated a system of “official purchase” (guan gou) for high-value goods, including Central Asian horses, frankincense, and gemstones, which were bought at fixed prices by the Bureau of Imperial Stables and the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, then either used for state purposes or re-exported to other regions. In 733, the year of Bo Shiyi’s arrival, the Hushi Jian recorded the import of 1,200 Central Asian horses, 20,000 jin (12 tons) of frankincense, and 5,000 bolts of Sogdian silk, 60% of which was re-exported to the Anxi Protectorate in the Western Regions to supply Tang troops and trade with local oasis kingdoms.

The Western Market itself was a microcosm of the broader Silk Road network, a densely packed maze of storefronts, warehouses, and religious sites where goods, ideas, and identities were negotiated and transformed. Persian merchants operated permanent “Persian houses” (Bo shi di) in the market, where they stored and sold goods including Sasanian silverware, Indian gemstones, and Arabian frankincense, while Sogdian merchants operated their own guild-like associations, led by community elders known as “sabao” (萨保), a title granted by the Tang state to recognize their role in managing Sogdian merchant communities and facilitating trade.3 The market also housed three Zoroastrian fire temples, a Nestorian Christian church (the “Luminous Religion Temple,” or Da Qin Si), a Manichaean monastery, and a Persian Buddhist temple, serving the religious needs of a foreign population that made up nearly 20% of Chang’an’s total population of 1 million in the early 8th century. The diversity of the market’s population is attested by the large number of terracotta figurines of foreign merchants and laborers unearthed in the area, including Sogdians with their distinctive tall hats and beards, Korean merchants with their topknots, and black “Kunlun” slaves from Southeast Asi