Though Sassanian political control did not reach beyond the Pamir Mountains, their cultural influence spread far into East Asia. Chinese silk weavers reproduced Sassanian patterns, while Sassanian silver ewers, brocades and glassware make up a significant part of the Shosoin, the eight-century repository for treasures donated to Todaiji temple in Japan.

This wall painting was found in the largest of the caves located in Kizil, a Buddhist site along the north branch of the caravan route skirting the Takla Makan Desert. The two medallions preserved here, once part of a larger composition, show two ducks facing each other. The way their plumage is decorated in geometrical patterns of colored bands and circles is distinctly Sassanian. They carry strings of beads and jeweled pendants in their beaks, a device that came to be known as zeniao, or the "gnawing bird" pattern in China. A section of the Tang huiyao (Important Documents of the Tang) describes how only high-ranking court officials were allowed to wear fabrics decorated with variations of the zeniao motif, including geese carrying sashes and falcons bearing branch sprigs in their beaks.¹

By the sixth century, the Sassanian Empire was Zoroastrian by official decree, and there was little tolerance for the practice of competing religions. For this reason, the fact that this mural was found in a Buddhist locale is significant. Rather than Sassanian converts providing designs and painters to decorate a Buddhist cave temple, it is more probable that local Kizil artists and artisans took inspiration from patterns woven into Sassanian textiles and brocades. In this way, what was originally a secular Sassanian motif was converted in this cave to serve as decoration in a religious, non-Zoroastrian setting.

(1) Ryochi Hayashi, The Silk Road and the Shosoin (New York: John Weatherhill, Inc. / Heibonsha, 1975), p. 128-9.