A different crowd at the western gate
The Tang capital had two walled markets, and they did different jobs. The Tang West Market Museum records the distinction plainly: the East Market served the imperial court and its officials, while the West Market, beside the city’s western gates, served ordinary citizens and foreign trade. Around it lived merchants from Sogdiana and elsewhere along the Silk Roads, and the market held Persian establishments and foreign-run wine shops.
The museum states the conclusion directly: the West Market was, without question, the actual starting point of the Sui–Tang Silk Road. Goods bought there were carried out of the city for export, and goods arriving from outside were unloaded and sold there. That single market is where Chang’an most visibly met the world.
The Sogdians and the trade they carried
The dominant foreign community was Sogdian, from the city-states around Samarkand and Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. The museum names the Sogdians among the merchants who settled around the market, and the epitaphs dug up in Xi’an’s suburbs carry the surnames of these households. Much of what we know about them comes from funerary inscriptions rather than from tax rolls.
Their work was the unglamorous heart of the Silk Road: warehousing, credit, translation, and knowing which caravan was due and what it would fetch. They ran the market’s foreign wine shops, and the state used them as interpreters and intermediaries beyond the frontier. The market’s foreign-run shops and Persian establishments are the physical trace of that everyday business.
Being “outside the order” was a legal status
In Tang law a foreigner was not simply a visitor. The Tang Code, in the Tanglü shuyi (volume six, article 48), set out a rule for huawai ren — “people outside the civilising order”. The Beijing High Court quotes the clause exactly: when two foreigners from the same place harmed each other, each was judged by his own customary law; when the parties came from different places, Tang law decided the case.
That clause is often called one of the most carefully written in Chinese legal history. It did not promise open borders. It recognised that different communities lived under different customs, and wrote that recognition into law rather than pretending a single rule covered everyone.
Foreigners in office and in the examination halls
Some foreigners stayed for a lifetime and rose inside the system. The Study Times records the best-documented example: Abe no Nakamaro (698–770), a Japanese student who arrived at nineteen with the ninth Japanese mission to the Tang court, passed the jinshi — the highest civil examination — and in 752 became the first foreigner to direct the imperial library as mishujian.
Japan sent nineteen large missions to the Tang court over more than two centuries, carrying students and monks as well as envoys. Nakamaro never returned home; the Study Times says he served the Tang for about fifty years and died in Chang’an. A foreigner who ran the imperial library is a sharper measure of the capital than any slogan about openness.
What survives to look for
Three places hold the physical evidence. The Shaanxi History Museum excavated the Hejiacun hoard in October 1970 — a Tang-era cache from Hejia village in Xi’an, rich in gold and silver objects, which the museum calls one of the most important Sui–Tang archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. The Beilin Museum holds the Nestorian Stele, cut in 781, which records how a Christian monk called Alopen was received in Chang’an in 635.
The West Market site itself has a museum beside it, and the Tang West Market Museum interprets the excavated market where this story happened. Keep the layers separate when you visit: the market is an excavated site and its museum a modern interpretation, not a surviving Tang street. Each place answers a different part of the question — who traded here, who worshipped here, and who stayed.
Read the record, not the myth
Much of this story reaches us sideways. The Sogdian merchants are known largely through their epitaphs, the Nestorian community through a single inscribed stone, and the foreign students through records of office and examination. That is why each claim above links to a named source rather than to a rounded figure for how many foreigners lived in Chang’an — no census survives that separates them out.
The most useful lesson is a distinction. A foreign resident of Tang Chang’an was an ordinary feature of the city — a merchant, a translator, a soldier, an official — not a curiosity. The West Market was where that ordinariness was most visible, and it is still the right place to begin looking for it.
