Jing Han

Jing Han

Oct. 31, 2026

Silk Road, Tomb murals, Ethnic images, Digital humanities, Spatiotemporal analysis, Cultural heritage

The Silk Road served as a crucial corridor for the interaction, exchange, and integration of multiple ancient ethnic groups. As underground visual historical records, tomb murals authentically document the profound interactions among these groups in production, daily life, trade, ritual practices, and spiritual beliefs, serving as a precious visual archive that empirically evidences the formation of the Chinese national community. Focusing on ethnic images in tomb murals from the Han to Qing dynasties (202 BCE–1911 CE), this study introduces a digital humanities perspective to systematically investigate more than 406 archaeological sites by integrating spatiotemporal analysis, quantitative statistics, and iconological methods. Spatially, the ethnic images exhibit an uneven distribution—dense in the west and sparse in the east, and more prominent in the north than in the south—forming three major clusters centered in Shaanxi (high-ranking mural tombs of the Sui and Tang dynasties), Shandong (Han dynasty stone reliefs), and Inner Mongolia (murals of the Liao and Yuan dynasties). This pattern was jointly shaped by geopolitics, Silk Road trade networks, and regional funerary traditions. Temporally, these images underwent a continuous evolutionary process spanning over a millennium, characterized by the stages of “the gaze of the Other, assertion of power, symbiosis in daily life, institutional segregation, and reinforcement of identity”. Furthermore, the study proposes that data-driven heritage exploration, coupled with intelligent digital exhibition and dissemination, can facilitate macro-level analysis of the images’ evolutionary trajectory and longitudinally present the multi-layered content of the murals. This research not only provides systematized visual historical evidence for understanding mutual learning among multi-ethnic civilizations and the formation of the community, but also offers a practical paradigm for the digital interpretation and international dissemination of Silk Road cultural heritage globally.

© 2026, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license