Gansu historical timeline

Gansu’s history is the history of the route, and of what came along it.

Han expansion

The Han emperor Wu pushed west in the second century BC to outflank the Xiongnu, sending the envoy Zhang Qian on a mission that opened knowledge of Central Asia and established the corridor. Garrison towns, beacon towers and a westward extension of the wall followed, reaching past Dunhuang.

Buddhism arrives

Monks and merchants brought Buddhism east along this road from the first century. Carving at Mogao began in 366 and continued for a thousand years under successive dynasties and occupations — Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Tangut — producing a continuous record of Buddhist art and of the cultures that passed through.

The library cave

In 1900 a Daoist caretaker at Mogao found a walled-up chamber containing some fifty thousand manuscripts, paintings and textiles, sealed around the eleventh century. They included the Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated printed book in the world, along with documents in seventeen languages and several extinct scripts. Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others removed the great majority to European and Japanese collections, which remains a serious grievance.

Contested corridor

Tibetan, Tangut, Mongol and Ming control alternated. Jiayuguan fort was built in 1372 as the Ming frontier, and beyond it was formally outside the empire.

The Great Wall you do not expect

The Han wall west of Dunhuang was built around 100 BC not from brick but from tamped earth layered with bundles of reed and tamarisk, and stretches of it survive two thousand years later in the dry air — low, crumbling ramparts running across gravel desert with beacon towers at intervals. It is far older than the Ming brickwork everyone photographs near Beijing, and far more affecting for being alone in the emptiness.

Modern

Muslim rebellions in the nineteenth century, a devastating earthquake in 1920, and industrialisation and nuclear testing in the desert north.