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Yumenguan. Yumenguan (the jade pass) was a crucial pass of the Han Great Wall. It is located in the desert 80 kilometers to the northwest of Dunhuang, Gansu Province. The famous ‘Hetian Jade’ collected from Hetian and other places and paid to the Court had to be carried from the Tarim Basin via Yumenguan, hence the name. There are two well-known lines written by Wang Zhihuan，the great poet in the Tang Dynasty. They read, ‘The Qiang flute needn’t sing the Weeping Willow; for Yumenguan shut out the vernal wind blow.’ Yumenguan was one of the arteries leading to the Western Regions and a must pass of the south and north roads of the Silk Road. It had played a very important role in promoting communications, cultural and economic exchanges between China and foreign countries. Silks, ironware, goldware and silverware of the Central Plains were continuously transported to the western countries via the pass. Specialties such as grapes, walnuts, carrots, peppers, spinage and religions and cultures of the Western Regions, on the other hand, were introduced into the Central Plains one after another.
Yumenguan was set up since Emperor Wu’s reign in the Han Dynasty. After the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties, constant warfare made the Silk Road go from bad to worse. With desertification of the Silk Road, Yumenguan was gradually rejected accordingly. In the Tang Dynasty, the Country Road was from Anxi via Hami to the Western Regions. From then on, Yumenguan of the Han Dynasty has become a mystery. After many first-hand investigations, contemporary Chinese and foreign archaeologists have made a tentative judgment that the Small Square Plate City is the ancient Yumenguan, because some bamboo slips of the Han Dynasty with characters such as ‘Yumen Duwei’ were excavated from there. The Small Square Plate City has a square shape. Its earth ramparts of the four sides are well kept. The city is 24.5 meters long from east to west, 26.4 meters wide from south to north, with the remaining height of over 9 meters. There is a horse road less than a meter wide in the southeast corner inside the city that goes southward to the end of the city along the eastern rampart.
