Place · high route · India
Nubra & the Karakoram Pass
The Nubra valley and the 5,540-metre Karakoram Pass beyond it carried the caravans from Leh to Yarkand — eight stages above five thousand metres, no fodder, and a route marked for its whole length by the bones of pack animals.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.500, 77.820
Worth knowing
It was the highest regularly used trade route in the world and one of the deadliest: Younghusband and others describe the track as findable by skeletons alone. The double-humped Bactrian camels still kept in Nubra are descendants of the caravan animals.
Connections (2)
- Trade routeKhotan
From Leh the caravans went up the Nubra valley, over the Saser La and the Karakoram Pass at 5,540 metres, and down the Yarkand river to Khotan and Yarkand — eight or nine stages above five thousand metres with no fodder and no fuel. It was the highest regularly used trade route on earth and the track was findable by the bones of dead animals. This is the branch that connects the Tarim oases directly to India without going through Afghanistan.
- Trade routeSrinagar
Pashmina from the western Tibetan plateau came down through Leh and over the Zoji La to Srinagar, where it was spun and woven into the shawls that made Kashmir's name in Europe and drove a European imitation industry at Paisley. Control of that one commodity chain is why the Dogras took Ladakh in 1834 and why the nineteenth-century trade treaties of the region are almost entirely about wool.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Karakoram Pass”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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