Place · oasis city & route junction · China
Kashgar
The western end of the Tarim basin, where the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan meet and where the passes over the Pamirs and the Karakoram come in. Everything moving between China, India and Central Asia by land passed within sight of it.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 39.470, 75.990
Worth knowing
Xuanzang came back through Kashgar in 644 with his manuscripts. A thousand years later it was the centre of the Great Game: the British and Russian consulates faced each other across the town, and Aurel Stein and the Russian and German expeditions all outfitted here before going into the desert.
Connections (4)
- Trade routeSamarkand
Sogdian merchants from Samarkand ran the relay east through Kashgar and around both sides of the Taklamakan, and Sogdian was the working language of the whole route for six centuries. Their letters abandoned in a watchtower west of Dunhuang about 313 CE are the oldest documents of the Silk Road and read like ordinary business correspondence, with one furious letter from a woman left behind by her husband.
- Trade routeHunza
From the Hunza gorge the route climbs to the Khunjerab and drops into the Tarim basin toward Kashgar — the shortest line between the subcontinent and Central Asia and one of the highest. The Sacred Rock at Haldeikish is covered in the names of the people who took it, in Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian and Tibetan. The Karakoram Highway now follows the same line and destroyed a great deal of the record building it.
- Traveller routeXuanzang
Xuanzang came back through Kashgar in 644 with the manuscripts, images and relics he had spent sixteen years collecting, having lost part of the load crossing the Indus. A thousand years later the same town was the centre of the Great Game, with the British and Russian consulates facing each other across it, and Aurel Stein and the German and Russian expeditions outfitting there before going into the desert to dig up what Xuanzang had described.
- Trade routeKhotan
Khotan and Kashgar are the two ends of the southern Taklamakan rim, and Faxian's account of them is the earliest description of the Tarim oases as Buddhist kingdoms rather than as way-stations. He gives Khotan ten thousand monks and a great image procession; within eight centuries both cities were Muslim and the monasteries were sand.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kashgar”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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