Loulan and Shanshan
Loulan was an oasis kingdom at the eastern end of the Tarim basin, near the lake of Lop Nur, on the route between China and the west. In the second century BCE it was caught between the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu nomads. In 77 BCE, after the Han envoy Fu Jiezi killed its king, the Han installed a new ruler and renamed the kingdom Shanshan, moving its centre further south. Shanshan remained a client of China for long periods and came to control several oasis states along the southern route, including Niya and Endere.
The Kharoshthi documents
The great discovery about Shanshan was made by Aurel Stein in the ruins of Niya, a settlement the documents call Cadh'ota, abandoned in the fourth century to the advancing sand. He found hundreds of documents written in ink on wooden tablets, often in ingenious double tablets sealed with clay, and on leather. They were written in the Kharoshthi script and in a form of Gandhari Prakrit, the language of the Gandhara region, mixed with local words. Smaller numbers were found at Loulan and other sites.
The documents date from about the mid-third to the mid-fourth century, and they are administrative: royal orders, letters, contracts, lists and lawsuits, concerning land, camels, slaves, wine and taxes. They are dated by the regnal years of kings who used Indian titles such as maharaja and devaputra, "son of the gods", the latter also a Kushan title. They show a society with a written legal system and a Buddhist community whose monks could own property and marry.
How Gandhari came to the Tarim
The use of Gandhari in Shanshan has been explained either by migration of people from the Kushan territories into the Tarim basin, perhaps refugees or traders, or by the prestige of the Kushan administrative tradition and of Buddhism, which carried the language as a learned medium. The documents are among the largest bodies of Gandhari text outside the subcontinent, and they connect the region closely with the Buddhist world of the north-west.
The end
The Chinese pilgrim Faxian passed through Shanshan in 400 and found its king a Buddhist and its monks numerous, studying Indian texts. In the mid-fifth century the kingdom was conquered by the Northern Wei, around 445, and later fell under the Tuyuhun. The drying of the rivers led to the abandonment of the oases, which preserved the documents under the sand.
Further reading
- Neelis, Jason. Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks. Brill, 2011
- Salomon, Richard. Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara. University of Washington Press, 1999
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
See also
- 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.
- Kushan Empire — The Kushan Empire (c. 1st-3rd century CE) was a Central Asian dynasty of Yuezhi origin that ruled a domain stretching from Bactria and the Tarim Basin to the Gangetic plain, linking the Silk Road's trade and Buddhist networks between China, India, Persia, and Rome.
- 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.
- 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.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.