Those of you interested in the Silk Road, Chinese history, and religion in East Asia, you may want to look at this: Sogdians and Buddhism , by Mariko Namba Walter.
An excerpt:
There were many Sogdian colonies in the northern part of China, and the Sogdians were successful merchants at that time, mediating and organizing the trade between Sogdiana and China along the Silk Road. According to a Chinese population survey, these Sogdians in China and Inner Mongolia were predominantly merchants, but others could have been farmers, local bureaucrats, herdsmen, or even Buddhist monks. Sogdians were not only the carriers of goods but also the cultural transmitters of many religions such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, and Buddhism, which we examine later in this chapter. Sogdians played a major role in world history and in the transmission of world religions, although the language and the people died out in medieval times. Who exactly were the Sogdians? Where did the Sogdians originally live? In order to answer these questions, we must turn our eyes to the land of Sogdiana and its kings, and then to their colonies to the east.
This is issue no. 174 of Sino-Platonic Papers .
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