Xi'an Museum

This guide centers on a carved stone house-tomb at Xi'an Museum, built for Wirkak, a Sogdian merchant who rose to oversee foreign traders in the Chinese city of Liangzhou, and his wife Wiyusi, who died a month after him in the sixth century. It follows the panels their sons carved across the sarcophagus walls, telling his life in the visual language of his own faith: his birth, his years riding with caravans, his eighty-six years, and a banquet scene of men and women raising cups on woven carpets. Bird-headed priests guard the doorway above, their mouths covered against impurity. The couple's epitaph runs twice along the lintel, in Chinese and in a Sogdian script almost no one in the city could still read.