1 · POSITION
The Silk Road was not one road but a network across Asia, and the register holds it as the oldest hospitality infrastructure it records: a traveller could only cross it if a bed, water, fodder and a market waited at the end of each day. In June 2014 UNESCO inscribed a five-thousand-kilometre stretch of it — the routes network of the Chang’an–Tianshan corridor, from central China to the Zhetysu region — across China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. [1]
2 · WHAT THE CORRIDOR KEEPS
The inscription gathers thirty-three sites of every kind the road needed: capital cities and palaces, trading settlements, Buddhist cave temples, ancient paths, mountain passes, beacon towers, sections of the Great Wall, fortifications, tombs — and posthouses. Among them is the Xuanquan posthouse at Dunhuang, and the tomb of the Han envoy Zhang Qian. [1, 2]
3 · THE POSTHOUSE AS EVIDENCE
Xuanquan shows what hospitality on the road cost. Its wooden and bamboo slips record the reception of the king of Yutian travelling to Chang’an with a delegation of up to 1,074 people, and an itemised bill for the envoy Chang Hui in 65 BC. The station was found in 1987, excavated from 1990 to 1992, and yielded more than seventy thousand objects. [2]
4 · THE STATIONS IN THE REGISTER
The register files the road’s nodes under their own codes — the Hexi Corridor, Dunhuang, Kashgar, Turpan, the Tang capital at Chang’an and its West Market, the Persian caravanserai — and keeps the Silk Road as the line that joins them. [1]
5 · ⚑ CANDOUR
⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. The register’s six thousand kilometres was short: the network ran more than 6,400 kilometres overland, and the note now says so. The inscribed corridor is about 5,000. Zhang Qian is recorded by his tomb, not credited here with opening the road. [1–3]
Sources & Further Reading
Sources checked 22 October 2026.