Religions of the Silk Road

Since antiquity, material goods and ideas have traveled back and forth along the Silk Road linking East Asia and the Mediterranean, through such cities as Samarkand, Turfan, Marw, and Duanhuang. Among the religions that flourished in the cities along these routes were Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism, and later Islam. The Uighir of the Xinjiang region of western China, today mostly Muslim, were one of the dominant ethnic groups along the Silk Road in the medieval period.