Silk Road Decline
The Mongolian Empire was to be fairly short-lived. Splits between the different khans had erupted as early as 1262. Although the East was considerably more stable, especially under the rule of Kubilai, it also succumbed to resurgence of Chinese nationalism, and after several minor local rebellions in the first few decades of the fourteenth century, principally in the south of China, the Yuan dynasty was finally replaced by the Ming dynasty in 1368. With the disintegration of the Mongol empire, the revival of Islam and the isolationist policies of the Ming dynasty, the barriers rose again on the land route between East and West.
Despite the presence of the Mongols, trade along the Silk Road never reached the heights that it did in the Tang dynasty. The steady advance of Islam, temporarily halted by the Mongols, continued until it formed a major force across Central Asia, surrounding the Taklimakan like Buddhism had almost a millennium earlier. The artwork of the region suffered under the encroach of Islam. Whereas the Buddhist artists had concentrated on figures in painting and sculpture, the human form was scorned in Islamic artwork; this difference led to the destruction of much of the original artwork. Many of the grottos have been defaced in this way, particularly at the more accessible sites such as Bezeklik, near Turfan, where most of the human faces in the remaining frescoes have been scratched out.
The demise of the Silk Road also owes much to the development of the silk route by sea as it was becoming rather easier and safer to transport goods by water rather than overland. The encroaching of the deserts into the inhabited land also made life on the edges of the Taklimakan and Gobi Deserts particularly difficult. Any settlement abandoned for a while was swallowed by the desert, and so resettlement became increasingly difficult. These conditions were only suitable in times of peace, when effort could be spent countering this advance, and maintaining water sources.
The attitude of the later Chinese dynasties was the final blow to the trade route. The isolationist policies of the Ming dynasties did nothing to encourage trade between China and the rapidly developing West. This attitude was maintained throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, and only started to change after the Western powers began making inroads into China in the nineteenth century.
By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, the Qing dynasty subdued the Dzungar people, however, and annexed the whole Taklimakan region, forming the basis of present-day Xinjiang province. This restored China to the state it had been in in the Han dynasty, with full control of the western regions, also including the territories and Tibet and Mongolia.
However, as trade with the West subsided, so did the traffic along the Road, and all but the best watered oases survived. The grottos and other religious sites were long since neglected, now that the local peoples had espoused a new religion, and the old towns and sites were buried deeper beneath the sands.
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