The long sections of the Silk Road running across Xinjiang make up a treasure house of relics known to the whole world with their frontier passes, ancient cities and castles, strongholds and fortifications, Buddhist caves and temples, courier stations, ancient tombs, war-signaling stations, etc. like strings of pearls that sparkle brilliantly and colorfully along the ancient Road.

Xinjiang boasts 14 Buddhist cave temples and over 990 caves. The major ones are the Kizil, Kumtura, Kizilgaha, Senmusaimu and Bizaklik Grottoes, five in all. There are 239 biggest numbered caves and 46 smallest ones. The sculptures and murals in the caves, welding Chinese culture with those from India and Persia, gave birth go a unique style of art of their own. In addition to the Buddhist pictures, there are ones which depict the productive activities and everyday lives, in great vividness, of the local residents of various nationalities.

The most fascinating of all the historic sites on the Silk Road is the ancient city of Loulan. Located in the northwest part of what is now known as Lop Nur, it used to be a key hub of traffic of the Silk Road, with a past of commercial prosperity. Now, however, there are only the ruins of the city buried in the desert. Mummies of men and women have been unearthed from the ancient tombs here. Countless cultural relics have been discovered about the ancient cities and castles. The best preserved historic sites are the ancient cities of Gaochang and Jiaohe, situated in the Turpan Basin. In the ruins of the two ancient cities, the tourists can still see distinctly the keeps of the once significant royal palaces and Buddhist temples. Over a hundred dried-up bodies of men and women have been excavated out of the ancient tombs in Astana near the city ruins. The funerary objects unearthed from the tombs here include, all from the Sui and Tang Dynasties and the Dynasties previous to them, large quantities of documentary papers, silk, cotton and hemp fabrics of excellent workmanship, ancient money of all sorts and descriptions, colorful pottery human figures of all characters in various poses, and many varieties of food that have survived the wear and tear of nature. The mummy of an officer of high rank from the Tang Dynasty still keeps the man's tall and big stature, dignified appearance, and all the air expected of an ancient warrior. The dried corpse of a young girl, with her well-proportioned figure and dark hair, still suggests, more or less, the youth and beauty of her lifetime. The colorful pottery figurines and statuettes of great versatility in type and posture include stalwart warriors, shapely maids of honor, pestling or grinding women, and so on and so forth, all represented with verisimilitude and liveliness. How many footprints have been left behind for our tracing of the ancient ages!

Caravan bells have reverberated for two thousand years of human history on the different sections of the Tianshan mountains.

Now, however, parallel to the ancient Silk Road is a three-dimensional network of communication composed of highways, railways, and air routes. Highways wind up the Pamirs, "the roof of the world," and the sky-scraping Kunlun Mountains, and run across the Tarim and Junggar Basins. The Dushanzi-Kuqar Highway starts from Dushanzi in the north and ends in Kuqar, the ancient state of Qiuci, in the south. Flying over the Tianshan Mountains like a rainbow, it connects Northern Xinjiang and Southern Xinjiang closely. The opening of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railway in 1963 changed the railwayless history of Xinjiang.

The connection of a second Eurasian bridge by the completion and opening of the western section of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railway (the section between Urumqi and Alashankou Pass) on September 1,1990, was followed on the twelfth day of the same month by the joining of its tracks with those of a railway of Kazakhstan, thus opening the railway for the China-Kazakhstan passenger trains and extending the terminus of the "Silk road " to Europe and even to places beyond it.

The Silk Road is becoming, with every passing day, a passageway of the Chinese people in their economic and cultural interchange and friendly contact with all the peoples of the world. The ancient Silk Road is rejuvenated.