The Southwestern Silk Road in the Jin Dynasties

Combining historical documents with archaeological materials, the paper expounds systematically alot of issues about the Southwestern Silk Road in the Han and Jin Dynasties as well as the economy and culturein Chengdu area in the Han Dynasty. Concerning the Southwestern Silk Road, the author discusses its Opening, route, formtion and peculiarities of the route, building and trade activities. The ancient road had exited before the midddle of the Western Han Dynasty, but the whole road was not opened until Yongping era(69AD) in the Eastern Han Dynasty. The main route was from Chengdu through Yongchang Prefecture (nowwestern Yunnan) to Juandu (now India). To ersure the road unblocked and keep its effective communicationand transmission, the Empire took all kinds of measures such as building roads extensively, setting up the prefecture and county seats and a variety of insallations of communication, large-scale immigrations and troop-stationing. At that time, there were two sorts of trade activities on the ancient road, which were called domestictrade and foreign trade. Mainly, domestic trade was done between Shu area and Southwestern minority tribes while foreign trade was done between Shu area and foreign countries.