Panto City
2 min readPantuo City is located on the bank of tuman river in the southeastern suburb of the current Kashgar, with an alternate name”Aisikesa”(in Uygur language, meaning shabby city), which is the imperial city of Shule Kingdom, one of the thirty six states in the Western regions. In 73 AD, it became the supreme headquarter of Ban Chao to manage the Western Regions. Ban Chao took the Shule as the base to resist the Huns, placate the Western Regionsrestore the rule of the central government over the Western Regions and re open the silk road and complete the grand cause of unifying the Western Reqions.
Pantuo City enjoys a long history. In the Han Dynasty, the powerful regime co-existing with the han is the normadic nation in the north -Huns whose nvasion and plunders on the Central plains make itself an old enemy of thecentral dynasty. As the palace city of Shule Kingdom, Pantuo City was also under the rule of shule King duti who was Hunophile In 73 AD, Ban Chao raided Panto City and re-opened the silk road, and from then on, the prestige of Ban Chao rose day by day. In 92 AD, Ban Chao was promoted Protectorate of the Western regions Until 102 Ad, ban chao relieved from the court and returned to Changan when he was 70 years old. Ban Chao had stayed in Pantuo City to manage the Western Regions for as long as 17 years, amd the history of Panto was closely connected with Ban Chao. Therefore, inmany historical records, Pantuo City was also called”Ban Chao City”. Pantuo City was destroyed in warfare during the Qianglong reign of the Qing dynasty(1759).
At the beginning of the 20th century, a French named Paul Pelliot once came here for excavation and survey. According to the drawings by him, the city at that time was with two sections of earth-built wall along the north and est and the northern wall is 287m long the western wall 205m long and wall footing thickness about 7m. The plane of the city was similar to a trapezoid, covering an area about 58,835m. At present, only a section of old wall ruins about 8m long and about 3m high is left .
In order to commemorate the famous statesman, militarist and diplomatist Ban Chao in the Eastern Han Dynasty, to commend his historic feat of unifying the mother country the government of Kashgar established ban chao Memorial Park on the ruins of Panto City in 1994, and named it Panto City The current Pantuo City covers an area of lhm, which is centered on Ban Chao statue and 36 warriors standing on the road in symmetry. It is built with a large semi-circle embossed screen wall, 36m long and 9m high, as well as gate, ancient pavilion, dolmen, wall and beacon tower and others Pantuo City is a key national relic’s protection unit in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
