Silk Road to apply for World Heritage

China and central Asian countries are to submit an application to add the ancient Silk Road to the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List. "The final application will be submitted to UNESCO in two years," Guo Hongchang, mayor of Luoyang city in Henan, said on Thursday. The 2,000-year-old Silk Road was a trade route linking Asia and Europe through Persia. The 7,000-kilometer-long road extended from the Chinese cities of Luoyang and Xi'an, to Europe via south and central Asian countries. "A multinational application will be the better choice if we want to aptly present the historical culture of the ancient Silk Road," said Jing Feng, an official with the UNESCO World Heritage Center's Asia-Pacific Region Program. Dozens of experts and heritage officials from UNESCO and China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan agreed on a multinational application for the Silk Road to join the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List back in 2006. "The application will help us to exchange the experience of cultural heritage protection with other historical sites," said Guo Yinqiang, head of Luoyang's Cultural Heritage Bureau. Luoyang has spent about $11.7 million on the project plan since 2005 to protect its relics at the sites of the Sui and Tang Dynasties (581-907) where the Silk Road started at that time. The Luoyang administration moved six enterprises, including a cement factory and a bearing factory, out of the area in 2008 in an attempt to improve the environment.