The site
Miran lies at the edge of the desert where a river from the Kunlun mountains once watered an oasis, on the southern route round the Tarim basin between Dunhuang and Khotan. In the early centuries CE it belonged to the kingdom of Shanshan, also known from its documents as Kroraina, a Buddhist state whose officials wrote in Kharoshthi script and a form of Gandhari Prakrit brought from the north-west of the Indian subcontinent. The site has the remains of stupas, shrines and a later fort, scattered over a wide area of eroded ground.
The paintings
In 1907 the explorer Aurel Stein excavated two shrines, which he numbered M.III and M.V. Each was a circular passage around a small stupa, and their walls were painted. The lower walls carried a frieze of winged figures, busts with large eyes and wings, which Stein compared with the cupids and angels of Roman art. Above was a long painted frieze of the Vessantara Jataka, the story of the prince who gave away everything, including his children, with garlands carried by youths.
A short inscription in Kharoshthi on one of the paintings names the painter as Tita and records his payment. Stein suggested that the name might be a form of Titus, pointing to a painter from the Roman east or trained in that tradition. The suggestion is often repeated; it cannot be proved, but the style of the paintings clearly derives from the Gandharan art of the north-west, itself deeply influenced by Roman provincial art. The paintings are usually dated to the third century CE, which makes them among the earliest surviving Buddhist wall paintings in Central Asia.
Stein cut out several panels and took them to Delhi, where they are now in the National Museum. Some panels removed by a later Japanese expedition are in other collections, and others were destroyed when attempts to remove them failed.
The Tibetan fort
In the late eighth century, during the expansion of the Tibetan empire, the Tibetans built a fort at Miran. Stein found large numbers of documents there, on wood and paper, in Tibetan: military reports, letters, contracts and lists of soldiers. They are a major source for Tibetan rule in Central Asia and for the early Tibetan language. The fort was abandoned in the ninth century as Tibetan power collapsed.
The site today
Wind erosion and later digging have damaged the site severely. The Chinese authorities have protected it, and some conservation and excavation have taken place, but much of what Stein saw has gone. Miran remains one of the key places for understanding how Buddhist art travelled from Gandhara to China.
Further reading
- Neelis, Jason. Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks. Brill, 2011
- Behrendt, Kurt A. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
See also
- Shanshan — Shanshan, called Kroraina in its own documents, was a kingdom of the Lop Nur region on the southern Silk Road from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE, whose officials kept records in the Gandhari language and the Kharoshthi script of north-western India.
- Dunhuang — Dunhuang is an oasis city at the western end of the Gansu corridor in China, a meeting point of the Silk Road routes, whose Mogao caves preserve a thousand years of Buddhist painting and whose sealed library cave yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts.
- Gandhara — Gandhara was an ancient region centred on the Peshawar Valley, Swat Valley, and Taxila in present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan that served for over a millennium as a crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and the Persian and Hellenistic worlds, and as a major centre of Buddhist art and learning.
- Buddhism — Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition founded in northern India in the 5th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, centred on the Four Noble Truths and a path to liberation from suffering.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.