Place · buffer corridor & pass route · Afghanistan
The Wakhan Corridor
A finger of Afghanistan some three hundred and fifty kilometres long and in places under twenty wide, which exists for a single reason: the Anglo-Russian boundary commission of 1895 drew it so that British India and the Russian empire would not share a border anywhere. Before it was a buffer it was a road — the passes at its head are the ones Faxian and Xuanzang used between Badakhshan and the Tarim, and the ones the Gilgit manuscripts and the Upper Indus carvings sit at the far end of. Wakhi farmers and Kyrgyz herders live in it.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 37.000, 73.000
Worth knowing
The corridor was invented to keep two empires from touching, and it succeeded so thoroughly that Afghanistan now has a seventy-six kilometre border with China reachable only on foot over a pass that is shut most of the year.
Connections (4)
- Route adjacencyXuanzang
Before it was a buffer it was the road. Xuanzang crossed the Pamirs through these valleys in the seventh century on his way between the Tarim basin and Gandhara, and describes the cold, the altitude and the dragon lake; the passes at the head of the Wakhan are the ones the pilgrim traffic used between Badakhshan and Kashgar. The corridor was only drawn as a political shape in 1895, by an Anglo-Russian commission that wanted the two empires not to touch, and it has been a dead end ever since.
- Route adjacencyGilgit
The Wakhan is the western approach to the route the Upper Indus carvings record. Traffic crossing from Badakhshan over the Pamir passes came down toward Gilgit and Chilas and then along the Indus to Gandhara, which is why the rocks at Shatial carry inscriptions in Sogdian and Bactrian as well as Brahmi and Kharoshthi, and why the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent were found in a stupa at Gilgit. The 1895 boundary closed the corridor as a thoroughfare and left the carvings at the far end of a route to nowhere.
- Route adjacencyLeh
Leh and the Wakhan are two ends of the same high traffic. Caravans out of Yarkand and Khotan came over the Karakoram passes to Leh, where pashm, brick tea, borax and charas changed hands for Indian cloth and dyes; the Wakhan carried the western branch of the same Central Asian trade toward Badakhshan and Chitral. Both were closed by twentieth-century borders — Leh's route by the Chinese frontier after 1950, the Wakhan by the 1895 buffer and everything since — and both bazaars now trade with nobody over the passes.
- Route adjacencyChitral
Chitral's northern passes — the Dorah and the Broghol — lead over into Badakhshan and the Wakhan, which is what made a small mountain principality strategically interesting to two empires at once. The 1895 boundary settlement that created the Wakhan corridor also fixed Chitral's status as a British-protected state, precisely so that the approaches from the Pamirs into India would be in known hands. The 1895 siege of the fort happened in the middle of that settlement being negotiated.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Wakhan Corridor”. Anglo-Russian Pamir Boundary Commission agreement, 1895; Xuanzang, Da Tang Xiyu Ji, on the Pamir crossings.
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