The Modern Silk Road and UNESCO

The Silk Road is not only a historical network but also a modern idea. The phrase itself, coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, was used only intermittently during the early twentieth century and referred most often to a romantic image of medieval caravan cities. It was the work of UNESCO in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that consolidated the modern usage: a series of integrated World Heritage campaigns that brought dozens of Silk Road sites into a single international framework, and a related effort to promote the network as a shared cultural inheritance. The result is the modern conception of the Silk Road as a transnational corridor of memory, scholarship, and tourism. I have come to think that this is, in many ways, the more important of the two — the modern idea has shaped more museum floors, more school curricula, and more tourist itineraries than the historical reality ever did. UNESCO’s role is described in the broader history of the Silk Road.

The UNESCO Silk Road programme

UNESCO’s engagement with the Silk Road began in the late 1980s, against the background of the end of the Cold War, the opening of Central Asia, and a new interest in transregional cultural heritage. The first major venture was the “Integral Study of the Silk Roads: Land Routes,” a research programme launched in 1988 that brought together scholars from more than twenty countries. A second programme, “The Silk Roads: Maritime Routes,” followed in the 1990s. A third initiative, the “Silk Roads Dialogue among Civilisations,” ran from 2008 to 2010 and emphasised the contemporary relevance of the historical exchanges described in the article on the decline of the Silk Road.

The flagship achievement was the inscription, in June 2014 at the 38th session of the World Heritage Committee in Doha, of “Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor” on the World Heritage List. The nomination, jointly prepared by China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and later joined by Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Iran, and Turkmenistan, brought 33 sites into a single serial inscription spanning more than 5,000 kilometres. The sites include capital cities, oasis towns, mountain passes, Buddhist cave complexes, and ancient road segments in eight countries. The serial listing remains the largest transnational World Heritage property in the world. The conventional view, in my view, slightly understates how much of a political achievement this was — the alignment between China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan was not, in 2014, the sort of thing one could take for granted.

The modern Silk Road is, in significant part, a UNESCO invention.

A second strand of the work has focused on the maritime routes. The serial inscription of the Maritime Silk Road, completed in 2018 under the title “Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China,” has extended the heritage framework to the sea routes. The maritime perspective is treated in the article on the maritime Silk Road, and the broader economic context in the article on Silk Road trade. Popular accounts often treat the 2014 and 2018 inscriptions as the same project; they are, in fact, the work of different committees and different scholarly teams, and the maritime narrative has a noticeably different centre of gravity.

Major heritage sites

The UNESCO framework has brought renewed attention to many of the great cities of the Silk Road. The site list includes the remains of the Tang capital at Xi’an, with the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (built 652 CE, restored under the Ming) built to house the Buddhist sutras brought from India by Xuanzang; the Buddhist cave complexes of Dunhuang (the Mogao Caves, 492 cells carved into the cliff above the Daquan River); the historic centres of Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan; the ancient city of Merv in Turkmenistan; the Silk Road sites of the Tian Shan corridor in Kazakhstan (the site of Suyab and the Ak-Beshim ruins near Tokmok) and Kyrgyzstan (the Suyab and Chuy valley sites, and the citadel at Burana Tower); the historic centre of Isfahan in Iran, with its Meidan-e Shah inscribed in 1979; and a long list of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain monuments in the Indian and Pakistani extensions. The maritime inscriptions include the historic ports of Quanzhou (where the Qingjing Mosque, built 1009, is the oldest surviving mosque in China), Guangzhou, and Yangzhou, the trading settlements of the Swahili coast (the ruins at Kilwa Kisiwani, inscribed 1981, are the famous example), and the medieval port cities of the Malay peninsula.

A personal note

UNESCO’s Silk Road programme has been enormously successful at putting the Silk Road on the global cultural map, but it has also been criticized for imposing a single, retrospective narrative on a much more varied past. The 2014 World Heritage inscription, in particular, treats the Silk Road as a single transnational corridor, which it never was. The reader should know that the modern UNESCO Silk Road is partly a construction, and a contested one.

Further reading

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012). The single best modern overview.
• The relevant chapter of The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, multiple dates).
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.
• Susan Whitfield, ed., The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (British Library, 2018) for the British Library’s own primary-source scholarship.

Related pages

The Silk Road: A Complete Historical and Cultural Guide · The history of the Silk Road · The great cities of the Silk Road · Silk Road trade: goods, routes, and economy · and the rest under the main guide.