In 2019, researches on the Silk Road has yielded fruitful results, with more than 200 monographs, papers, reports, and catalogs published at home and abroad. Here comes the Top 10 Silk Road Academic Researches Released during the 2020 Silk Road Week:

1. Yutaka Yoshida, Three Manichaean Sogdian Letters Unearthed in Bazaklik, Turfan Unearthed (English)

Professor Yoshida, a famous Japanese expert in Sogdian language, has transcribed, translated, and annotated three Manichaean Sogdian letters from 1980 to 1981 at the Bazaklik Grottoes in Turpan. The publication of this book provides important new materials for Turpan studies, Manichaeism studies, and Sogdian activities on the Silk Road.

2. Christoph Baumer & Mirko Novak, Urban Cultures of Central Asia from the Bronze Age to the Karakhanids: Learnings and Conclusions from New Archaeological Investigations and Discoveries (English)

This collection of 28 articles comprehensively describes the development of urban culture in Central Asia from the early Bronze Age to the eve of the Western Expedition in Mongolia. It focuses on the application and interpretation of the new archaeological materials in Central Asia and puts forward a new opinion on the history of Central Asia and the cultural exchange between East and West.

3. Xu Di, The Dunhuang Grottoes and Global Education: Philosophical, Spiritual, Scientific, and Aesthetic Insights (English)

This book adopts an alternative perspective to the massive literature of Dunhuang at present. It is a good attempt in the historical study to explore the contemporary cultural value of Dunhuang Grottoes from the perspective of mass education. This book not only opens up a new field of vision for Dunhuang studies but also provides a reliable sample of how the Silk Road cultural heritage can play a practical and educational role.

4. Ball Warwick, Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan: Revised Edition (English)

Since its publication in 1982, the book of Archaeological Sites in Afghanistan has become the principal reference book for Afghan archaeology. This nearly 1500-page reference book contains more than 2,000 entries of the archaeological site in Afghanistan and is an indispensable reference book for studying Afghan cultural relics and monuments.

5. Li Ling, Reading Persia (Chinese)

Reading Persia is the author's all-encompassing record on a field trip to Iran. In this book, Professor Li Ling looks at the history of ancient Central Asia and the world from a perspective of uniting both sides. This book is a systematic and detailed history of the Persian Empire, a comprehensive comparison of ancient China and the Persian Empire in all aspects.

6. Wei Zhijiang, History of Eurasia and the Silk Road (Chinese)

This collection of 22 articles includes not only the theoretical exploration of the Silk Road and regional history, but also the in-depth study of a large number of specific cases. It has made important contributions in many aspects of the history of the Eurasian region, the Maritime Silk Road and the Land Silk Road.

7. Takao Moriyasu, Corpus of the Old Uighur Letters from the Eastern Silk Road (English)

The book publishes more than 200 Uighur letters written in Turpan, Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, and Heishui City from the Xizhou Uyghur period to the Mongolian period, providing a large number of new materials for the study of Uighur history and the Silk Road cultural exchange in the Tang and Yuan dynasties.

8. Susan Whitfield (Wei Hong), Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes (English)

This book, written by more than 80 famous scholars including Ge Le Nai (F. Grenet), Xin Weilian (N. Sims-Williams), Rong Xinjiang and Zhao Feng, and supplemented by a large number of exquisite pictures and maps, gives us a detailed introduction to the complex network of trade routes across the African-Eurasian continent, mountains, plains, deserts, and oceans, showing the diverse landscapes, nationalities, history, art along the Silk Road, and cultural exchanges between the East and the West, as well as the integration and development of culture and civilization.

9. Rong Xinjiang, Zhu Yuqi, New Exploration of the Silk Road: Archaeology, Literature and Academic History (Chinese)

This book is a collection of papers from the 2018 "Peking University Silk Road Civilization Summit Forum", which has made outstanding contributions in the aspects of Silk Road language and religion, history and classics, archaeology, and cultural exchange, and the history of exploration.

10. Diego Tamburini; Caroline R. Cartwright; Monique Pullan, An Investigation of the Dye Palette in Chinese Silk Embroidery from Dunhuang (English)

This article describes the process of studying fibers and repairing using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It provides an important reference for the Silk Road textile archaeology and the identification and protection of ancient textiles, and its test results are also of great help to the study of the Tang Dynasty Dunhuang material and cultural exchange.

(Executive Editor: Ye Ke)