Niya, today known as Minfeng, was a capital of the Jingjue and Shanshan kingdoms of central Asia beginning in the first century BC, and an important city on the ancient Jade and Silk Roads. Niya is located in the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of central China, at an oasis near the banks and terraces of the Niya river. Occupations at the site date between the late western Han and eastern Jin periods of China, with Niya's heyday between the late 2nd century BC to the middle 4th century AD.
Archaeological remains discovered at Niya include a small walled settlement, and a Buddhist monastery and stupa (spiritual monument). Scattered among about 20 neighborhoods at Niya were residences, administrative offices, cemeteries, farm fields, orchards, irrigation facilities, and workshops for smelting iron, making and firing pottery, working wood and making glass.
Buildings at Niya
The monastery held a temple measuring 5.3x5.2 meters, built of a wooden frame with adobe walls. This temple contained four carved wooden Buddhist sculptures and fragments of carved murals. The stupa, once part of a second monastery, was located at the center of the Niya. It consisted of a square building with a square central earthen platform measuring 5.3 meters on the side and corridors on all four sides.
Houses at Niya ranged from one to several rooms, and were built of wooden frames with walls of adobe brick or woven willow branches with applied mud. Some of the larger houses had halls, walkways and storage rooms. A common larger room held earthen platforms on three sides and a hearth in the middle.
Niya's ruins also included a large number of Chinese and Kharoshthi documents, written on wooden strips and sheepskins; tapestries and clothing of silk and wool were recovered from the tombs at Niya. The tombs also contained human remains of ethnic Caucasian and Chinese people: the burial goods show both eastern and western influence, evidence of the importance of Niya as a place on the Silk Road.
Niya and Archaeology
First investigated by Aurel Stein in the 1940s, Niya was extensively excavated by an international team made up of scholars from the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Heritage and Tokyo University between 1988 and 1997.
Sources and Further Information
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com Guide to the Silk Road and part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Archaeology of Glass Making: The Levantine CoastFogelin, Lars. 2006. Archaeology of Early Buddhism. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, California
Yang, Xiaoneng. 2004. Niya Site at Minfeng, Xinjian Uygur Autonomous Region. Pp. 296-300 in Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives on China's Past. Yale University Press, New Haven.
