Silk Road to Everywhere

Steeped in centuries of history and romance, the Silk Road, also known as the Silk Route, an ancient trade link between China and the west, carried goods and ideas between the two great civilizations of Rome and China. Silk and much else went westward, and wool, gold and silver came east. Due also to this great highway across vast regions, China also received Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism, the latter from India.

Originating in western China's Xian, home of the famed Terracotta Warriors, the 6,400-kilometer (4,000-mile) road, in essence a web of rugged caravan tracks, followed the Great Wall of China to the north-west, skirted the Takla Makan Desert, scaled the Pamir Mountains, crossed Afghanistan, and went on to the Levant. From there, merchandise was shipped to and fro across the Mediterranean.

Few traders actually traveled the whole route, goods being passed on to a chain of middlemen in a staggered progression of what seemed a commercial game of "pass the parcel".The difference was that if any of them mislaid a shipment, it would quickly be stolen by robbers notorious for their raids on caravans.

With the gradual loss of Roman territory in Asia and the rise of Arabian power in the Levant, the Silk Road became increasingly unsafe and thus devoid of travelers. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the route was revived under the Mongols -a time which saw Marco Polo using the Silk Road to travel to Cathay (China).

Fast-forward to today, and you will find the famous road only partially extant, notably as a paved highway connecting Pakistan and China's Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region. But all is not lost. One of the best-known roads in the world might reappear if there is response to a United Nations suggestion that there is need for a modern trans-Asian highway a New Silk Road.

When I was in college, we had a course related to cultural exchanges between east and west which I very much enjoyed, and at which time I became fascinated by the romance and mystery of the Silk Road. From that time, I greatly looked forward to visiting this unique ancient route between the two hemispheres. It finally happened last September when, as an adult, I became part of a group organized by Tihe Travel Agency which enabled me to fulfill my schooldays dream.

The Silk Road traders of ancient times could never have dreamed that their rugged, dangerous route would one day become a source of fascination and a hot modern-travel link between China and the west. Even less could they have envisaged tourism items such as Silk Road coffee-table books and CD-ROMs, Silk Road travel agencies, and Silk Route hotels dotted right across Asia.

They would have been equally bowled over to know that the virtual cart-tracks, long abandoned, that formed sections of the original Silk Road can now be found in Chinese road atlases - even though they are unsuitable for motor vehicles. About the only people who would traverse them would be modernmountain bikers.

Despite the fame of the Silk Road name, it is something of a misnomer. Silk was only one of almost countless goods and artifacts taken along the route on the backs of camels. And not just one neatly defined Silk Road. It actually comprised avast network of trails, few if any of which could be easily traveled from end to end. Some people have tried to map a consistent, main route without diversions, but they failed. Modern travelers should bear this in mind if they attempt to indulge in a private route march.

Unraveling the Silk Routes
The first recorded Silk Route traveler, General Zhang Qian, had politics rather than silk in mind, and even during the route's busiest period in the 7-9th-centuries Tang Dynasty, silk represented only a small part of a trade which included everything from precious stones to rhubarb. More importantly, the multitude of camel tracks that made up the Silk Road were a collective "information superhighway" of their day. Religious ideas such as Buddhism entered China by this means, while technological ideas ranging from paper-making to printing with movable type traveled out-exchanges which helped transform the cultures that received them.

There was never just one neatly defined Silk Road. Even General Zhang took one track out and a different one back. The diverse sections of the route varied according to changes in politics and concerns such as the availability of water supplies. Legends tell of sandstorms so violent that they buried cities in a matter of hours. And far from being permanent, many stretches of the route were across trackless steppes or deserts. Only a handful of sections offered the semblance of a visible path.

The peak of Silk Road trade was during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), whose capital was at Chang'an, today known as Xian. From there, the route ran west alongside the Wei River, then north-west along a narrow green strip between the Nan Shan (Southern Mountains) and the fringes of the Gobi Desert. At the end of this corridor stood the outpost of Dunhuang, on the edge of the fearsome Taklamakan Desert, where the route diverged into two.
The northern route skirted the edge of the desert along the Tian Shan (Heavenly Mountains), and the southern counterpart along the edge of the Kunlun range separating the region from Tibet. Each route had its variations, but they eventually rejoined at Kashgar, where travelers' fear of death from heat and sandstorms was exchanged for their demise from bitter cold.

Routes onward required the crossing of substantial mountain ranges, with passes of up to 4,600 meters, before they connected with India, what is now Pakistan, countries of the CIS, then beyond to Baghdad, Damascus and Mediterranean ports.

The history of what, to be correct, should be called the China Silk Routes is in large measure that of the wax and wane of Chinese dynasties from 138BC to the present day.

Dun Huang (Mogao Caves)
These caves were mentioned by early Silk Route eastbound travelers as being

the first place they came across Chinese people in any numbers, and all the
influences they had brought with them. The area was the meeting point of routes
around the northern and southern edges of the Taklamakan, the place to acquire provisions before entering the cruel desert and to rest after emerging from its challenges.

But it is the caves themselves that have made Dunhuang particularly famous. They were originated in 366 by a monk, fleeing from famine elsewhere, who claimed to have had a vision of multiple Buddhas in full haloed glory - a claim more prosaically explained by light from the setting sun sparkling on a mineral-rich mountain.

Luckily for archaeological history, this explanation did not occur to the monk. Convinced he had had a revelation, he cut the first cave - an act duplicated by many other travelers in ensuing centuries, the result being the largest collection of caves on the Silk Route

Other Places of Interest Gaochang (Karakhoja) and Jiaohe (Yarkhoto)
Having been built from mud adobe bricks, many of Xinjiang's ancient Silk Route cities have been reduced to ugly mounds of windswept rubble with only the remains of original city walls to suggest that hundreds, if not thousands, of people once lived there. Few of these sites are near such stretches of modern roads as exist today.

But there is ease of access to the substantial and interesting ruins of Gaochang and Jiaohe, in ancient times vibrant cities. Stand among them, and you can quite easily conjure up visions of what once they must have been like, with all the hustle and bustle of trade among diverse peoples.

Kashgar (Kashi)
Despite its remoteness, Kashgar has long thrived as a junction of routes around both sides of the Taklamakan, from Tibet, India, Afghanistan and Russia. In ethnicity, Kashgar Prefecture is now 93 percent Uighur, six percent Han, and with pockets of Tajik, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kazak, Tartar, Xibo, Manchu, Mongol, Daur, and Hui nationalities.

Few places in the world can offer such a colorful mix of people and cultures, the wonder being that they tend to live in great harmony despite their cultural differences.