1.Chang’an became an international metropolis at that time; many foreign envoys, merchants and missionaries lived in Chang’an.
2.The emperors paid special attention to the management of the vast Western Regions.
3.The mighty countries to the west of the Tang Empire, such as Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), Persia and Arabian Empire kept relatively stable. These countries were willing to build good relations with China.
The Four Classics(士农工商）
1.Scholar-Poetry
“胡姬貌如花，当垆笑春风。”—–李白《前有樽酒行》
“街东街西讲佛经，撞钟吹螺闹宫廷”—–韩愈《华山女》
“羌笛何须怨杨柳，春风不度玉门关。”—–王之涣 《凉州词》
Scholar-Xuanzang
The most famous was the Chinese monk Xuanzang (602–664), who, in defiance of the emperor Taizong’s prohibition against travel beyond China, departed Chang’an in 629 and walked to India. Xuanzang spent 16 years in India collecting texts and returned with 700 Buddhist texts. He returned triumphantly more than sixteen years later, accompanied by a caravan laden with sutras, statues, and relics, which he bestowed to the emperor. He chronicled his journey, describing the climates, peoples, and customs he encountered, in his book Record of the Western Regions. There was great contact and interest in India as a hub for Buddhist knowledge. Xuanzang managed to bring back valuable Sanskrit texts to be translated into Chinese. There was also a Turkic–Chinese dictionary available for serious scholars and students, while Turkic folksongs gave inspiration to some Chinese poetry.
What kept Xuanzang going, he wrote in his famous account of the journey, was another precious item carried along the Silk Road: Buddhism itself. Other religions surged along this same route—Manichaeism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and later, Islam—but none influenced China so deeply as Buddhism, whose migration from India began sometime in the first three centuries A.D. The Buddhist texts Xuanzang carted back from India and spent the next two decades studying and translating would serve as the foundation of Chinese Buddhism and fuel the religion’s expansion.
Near the end of his 16-year journey, the monk stopped in Dunhuang, a thriving Silk Road oasis where crosscurrents of people and cultures were giving rise to one of the great marvels of the Buddhist world, the Mogao caves.
2. Peasants
In China, there was a great demand for sugar; during the reign of Harsha over North India (r. 606–647), Indian envoys to the Tang brought two makers of sugar who successfully taught the Chinese how to cultivate sugarcane.
According to Silk Road Foundation:”Barbaric food” became widely admired. In everyday things, the Chinese had learned from India ways of making sugar from cane, wince from grapes.Spinach, garlic, mustard and peas introduced from the Silk Road, were now grown in China. Of these the most popular were little “foreign” cakes of various kinds, especially a steamed variety sprinkled with sesame seeds, and cakes fried in oil. The art of making these had been introduced from the West but they were ordinarily prepared and sold by Westerners. Of course some of the foreign recipes required expensive imported ingredients was costly. Especially popular were aromatic and spicy dishes.
The Tang people had different methodand orange peel just as in preparing the tea beverage. One of them was to boil tea leaves in a pot together with ginger, leek, mint, date, garlic，dogwood.
3.Artisans
4. Merchant
The Chinese products exported were silk fabrics, lacquerworks, ironware, bullion and medicinal materials.The Gobi Desert is the largest desert in Asia, and stretches across modern day China and Mongolia. Whilst this desert can be divided into several different eco-regions, it may be said to consist, generally speaking, mainly of rocky, compact terrain. It is this feature of the Gobi Desert that made it easier for trade caravans to travel across the desert, as opposed, for example, to the sandy terrain of the neighboring Taklamakan Desert. Like other deserts, the Gobi Desert is arid, and therefore the biggest challenge facing those who choose to traverse it is to obtain enough water for themselves as well as for their camels.One of the consequences of the need for water in the Gobi Desert is the foundation of rest stops / caravanserais along the route taken by the travelers. These stops allowed travelers to rest, to have food and drink, and to prepare themselves for the next portion of their journey. These places also facilitated the exchange of goods, and even ideas, amongst the travelers who stopped there. Ideally, these caravanserais were placed within a day’s journey of each other. In this way, travelers could avoid spending too much time in the desert, which would make them targets for bandits, another danger of the Silk Road.