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.

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.

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.

Silk road

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