Silk Road Cities
From Xi'an to Istanbul the caravan cities still keep their blue domes, bazaars and the habit of hospitality to strangers. Travel this collection in either direction; the light is best at the caravanserai hour.
There was never a Silk Road. The name was coined in 1877 by a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, for something that had ended centuries earlier and had never been a road — it was a shifting braid of routes along which goods moved in short relays, each merchant covering a segment and selling on. Almost nobody travelled its whole length, and silk was only the most valuable of the things that did.
What did travel the full distance were ideas. Buddhism reached China along these routes and left cave temples at Dunhuang and Kizil; paper went the other way and reached Europe through Samarkand; Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam all moved as freight moved. The cities in this collection are the points where the relays changed hands, which is why they are oases, passes and river crossings rather than capitals.
Their fortunes ended together. When Portuguese ships rounded Africa in the 1490s, sea freight undercut the caravans within a generation, and the cities that had lived on transit either found another reason to exist or shrank. Bukhara kept its madrasas; Khiva kept its walls and a slave market; Kashgar kept the bazaar. Isfahan, at the western end, became an imperial capital instead.
Read west to east or east to west — the collection is arranged as a route, and the direction changes what the cities appear to be doing.