International Dunhuang Programme (IDP)
British Library / International Dunhuang Programme
British Library-hosted international database of digitized manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and other eastern Silk Road sites, with an IIIF image viewer, contextual essays, a Dunhuang learning resource and a virtual exhibition.
More resources on The Silk Road
The Silk Road (journal), Volumes 1-18
Open-access annual journal, long edited by Daniel Waugh, with articles by archaeologists and historians on Silk Road sites, artefacts, textiles, coins and texts, plus extended review essays. Volumes from 2003 to 2020 are available free online. Bridge from popular books into current specialist research, with well-illustrated site reports and reviews.
Silk Road Seattle
University of Washington teaching site directed by historian Daniel Waugh, linking translated primary sources such as the Hou Han shu, Sogdian Ancient Letters, Faxian and Xuanzang, alongside maps, city and architecture surveys, and museum-collection guides. Best free gateway to the actual primary texts of Silk Road history, curated and annotated by a specialist.
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present that centers steppe peoples rather than the empires around them and argues commerce drove their states. Kept for advanced readers as the major Central Eurasia-centered counter-narrative to China/Rome-centered accounts, with deep notes. Reviewers fault its pro-nomad slant and anti-modernist digressions.
Life along the Silk Road (Second Edition)
Composite biographies of people who lived along the Eurasian routes, mainly in the eighth to tenth centuries: a merchant, soldier, monk, princess, courtesan, widow and others, reconstructed from manuscripts and archaeology. The second edition adds an African shipmaster and a Persian traveler. Distinct angle the other picks lack: ordinary lives rather than empires or trade volumes, grounded in the Dunhuang manuscripts Whitfield curated.
The Silk Road: A New History
The specialist-respected core text: evidence-driven, built on excavated documents rather than grand narrative, and it advances a clear, debatable thesis. Reconstructs Silk Road society from excavated documents at sites including Niya, Kucha, Turfan, Samarkand, Chang'an and Dunhuang. Hansen argues overland trade was mostly local and small-scale, while the routes moved people, religions, languages and artistic techniques.
The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction
Compact thematic overview by a Georgetown historian of Inner Asia, treating the Silk Road as a long-running Afro-Eurasian exchange system: its geography and steppe peoples, and the spread of technologies, religions, art, disease, and the modern term itself. Best short entry point: scholarly, thematic rather than a chronicle, and frames the Silk Road as exchange of goods, ideas, technologies and disease.