A trip to the Silk Road

The ancient route connecting East and West still remains an attraction worth visiting

By SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF
tourists.camels 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
tourists.camels 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Silk Road is one of numerous exotic travel destinations offered by several Israeli foreign travel providers.
The term “Silk Road” (Seidenstrasse) was first coined by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 to refer to a network of trade routes that existed in ancient times, which connected China in the east to the Middle East, and from there on to Europe in the west.
Though it is an established fact that silk reached the Roman Empire from the east, today there are scholars who doubt whether this silk actually originated in China, or instead came from somewhere in Central Asia, after the secrets of silk production were smuggled out of China.
Be that as it may, no one doubts that East-West trade actually took place along the said land routes for well over a millennium, before the development of alternatives sea routes, and before China went into isolation during the course of the Ming Dynasty in the 15th century. However, silk was only one of numerous products traded, and the routes were possibly even more important for enabling the movement of people, ideas, religions and cultures than for trade.
Silk Road guidebooks cover recommended routes and sites all the way from the Chinese city of Xi’an in the east to the Turkish city of Istanbul in the west. The air distance between the two cities is 7,038 kilometers – around half within the sovereign territory of China.
Most of my three-week trip to the Silk Road, which began in Kyrgyzstan, took place in China.
Anyone traveling the Silk Road – and especially its Chinese section – might easily be disappointed by the very small number of historical sites that are directly connected to the historical route, and the many long hours spent traveling between them. The reason stems from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when the European travelers and scholars who uncovered most of these sites removed – or rather plundered – much of what is of historical interest from these sites, especially documents, artifacts and artwork, shipping their findings back to museums in Europe. This has resulted in there being relatively little to see beyond breathtaking scenery that relates directly to the Silk Road.
One of the European travelers responsible for the plunder was Aurel Stein – a Jewish-British archeologist, born in Budapest. Stein’s greatest discov-ery was made in 1907 at the Mogao Buddhist Caves near Dunhuang, where he discovered the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest printed text, dating back to the equivalent of 868 CE, along with 40,000 other manuscripts. Stein sent over to Britain 24 cases of manuscripts and four cases of paintings and relics, for which he was knighted. Though the Chinese refuse to forgive him for his plundering and for the physical damage his activities caused in some of the caves he explored, his image does appear on a monument recently put up near the town of Tashkurgan along the Karakoram highway, which depicts the Chinese version of the history of the Silk Road, one of whose routes used to run in this region.
One of the 40,000 documents found in Dunguang was in Hebrew – the text of an 18-line prayer made up of individual lines from Psalms, which was found in a pouch and apparently served as a protective talisman, believed to have originated in Mesopotamia and to have belonged to a Jewish trader. The eighth-century document is housed in the French National Library.
Another document written in the Hebrew alphabet, found in the same location, is a letter written in Persian by a Jewish trader, in which he describes a dispute with his landlord, who failed to pay him for some sheep. This document is held in the National Library of China in Beijing.
However, as pointed out by Prof. Valerie Hansen of Yale University, who recently wrote a history of the Silk Road, though Jewish merchants are known to have been present along its Chinese section, few physical traces of them remain, and present-day travelers to China are unlikely to see any.
RETURNING TO my own recent trip (organized by Eco Field Trips, and led by the very versatile and knowledgeable Tsur Shezaf), the highlights included breathtaking scenery; several unique historical sites directly or indirectly connected to the Silk Road; Buddhist and Muslim places of worship; and opportunities to observe – whether it was the daily lives of quite a few minorities who inhabit the western provinces of China, the flow of Han Chinese into these provinces, the incredible development of infrastructure or the rapid expansion of towns and cities taking place throughout these regions.
Large sections of the Silk Road cross very high mountain ranges, or run through vast stretches of desert. The scenery of the mountain ranges varies from totally arid desert mountains resembling the Sahara Desert, to mountains with lush pastures reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. We saw snow-capped mountains, rock formations that looked as if they were designed by some heavenly architect, gushing rivers running down creeks, and several natural and artificial lakes – the latter created by dams, of which there are around 5,000 that are over 30 meters high in China.
It is hard to imagine how the traveling merchants in the days of the Silk Road crossed all these mountain ranges.
Today they are crisscrossed by a network of highways and roads. Many of these roads are engineering marvels, such as the Karakoram Highway leading to Pakistan, mentioned above, which was opened in 1986 and remains to the present day the highest paved road in the world (with an alti-tude of 4,700 meters at its highest point).
In order to cross the deserts, the traveling merchants of the past had to find oases along the way, where they could rest and replenish their water and food supplies.
The main oasis along the route that we journeyed along was the impressive Turpan oasis, which is the lowest site in the world after the Dead Sea, and is famous for its vineyards and raisins. On the outskirts of Turpan, there are the ghost-like remains of two ancient cities that existed in the days when the Silk Road was active: Yarkhoto and Karakhoja – the latter visited by Venetian adventurer Marco Polo around 1271. Also to be seen in this location is a sophisticated system of underground canals, first developed during the period of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 24 CE), which convey water from the surrounding mountains to the irrigated fields below.
IN TERMS of places of worship – past and present – we are speaking primarily of Buddhist monasteries and Muslim mosques. Besides active Tibetan monasteries (we visited the Rongwo Yellow Hat Order Monastery in the small Tibetan town of Tongren, where we surprisingly found several pictures of the Dalai Lama – something that would have been unheard of several years ago), the main Buddhist sites along the Silk Road are grottoes excavated into the mountains, where Buddhist monks and artists created Buddha statues and magnificent wall paintings of Buddhist narratives.
These grottoes – most of them close to desert oases – survived thanks to the climatic conditions, but some were damaged, inter alia, by Muslim marauders, who defaced images; European scholars; and most recently, the Red Guards. The one site that remains in its full glory is that of the 500 Mogao Caves near the town of Dunhuang, which was an important stop along the Silk Road. Some of the caves date as far back as the fourth century and contain exquisite works of art, in which one can perceive the influences of different cultures.
The eighth-century, 16-meter-long statue of the reclining Buddha and his disciples (cave No. 148), is one of the main attractions.
For those of us who are accustomed to Middle Eastern mosques, the mosques along the Silk Road seem unusual. Several of China’s 55 recognized minorities are Muslim, and their mosques vary greatly, from colorful wooden structures to fortress-like brick ones, and in the case of the Hui Muslims, mosques that resemble pagodas, frequently boasting several minarets.
All along the Silk Road in China one finds different non-Han Chinese populations. Our first stop in China, after crossing the border from Kyrgyzstan, was Kashgar, which until not that long ago was a small market town, with a predominantly Uyghur population.
The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group that originally came from the Mongolian steppe, and today live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
They are Muslims who use the Arabic alphabet.
In recent years Kashgar has developed into a modern city of 1.5 million, with a growing population of Han Chinese, who are changing the demographic makeup of this city – as well as that of other minority towns and cities in western China. While the old Kashgar is rapidly disappearing and old neighborhoods are being demolished, the traditional Uyghur way of life may still be observed in numerous marketplaces in villages all around the city, and the famous livestock market on its outskirts. Though Kashgar is undergoing rapid modernization, the main means of transportation in the city appears to be tens of thousands of scooters (that run on rechargeable batteries), carrying the most incredible selection of colorful characters and loads.
TWO OTHER rapidly growing cities which we visited, each with a population of around 3.5 million, were Ürümqi, which houses one of China’s best museums, with some magnificent Silk Road exhibits (including the famous Taklamakan Desert mummies); and Lanzhou, a mountainous city on the banks of the Yellow River, which used to be an important intersection and garrison town along the Silk Road. Today it is considered one of the most polluted cities in the world, some of the causes being natural and others man-made.
One of the ways the Chinese are dealing with the natural causes is by cutting terraces into the mountainsides, to enable the planting of vegetation.
In addition to the Uyghurs, the minorities scattered along the Silk Road include Kazakhs, Tajikis, Mongolians, Hui Muslims, Tibetans and others. It is very difficult for a Western traveler to discern exactly how well these peoples have integrated into Chinese society, and how they feel about the dominant Han Chinese and the current regime – though the general atmosphere is certainly not nearly as oppressive as that which prevailed in pre-1990 Eastern Europe.
This impression might be misleading, because whenever there is unrest among any of the minorities in China, the disturbed areas are closed to foreign visitors. The government’s policy for dealing with potential political unrest among the minorities – and such unrest apparently exists under the surface – is to pour a lot of money into development, though the benefactors are not only the minorities themselves, but Han Chinese who, as already mentioned, are moving into developing areas in the millions.
Of course, the massive development is not only meant as a palliative for the minorities, but to contend with China’s monumental economic and strategic challenges. Expanding railways and highways connect the most remote regions, and cross the borders into China’s neighboring countries, serving as a sort of present-day Silk Road, servicing China’s internal and foreign trade.
Large-scale house construction is also visible everywhere, especially of apartment buildings – frequently 30-story or more high-rises, many with solar systems on the roof. At the moment these buildings look bright and shiny, but a closer look reveals that the construction work is frequently shabby, and to go by the hotels we stayed at, maintenance is not one of the local strong points. The danger is that many of these new buildings will rapidly turn into slums.
Along some of the highways we crossed we saw vast wind turbine farms. Since 2010, China is the largest producer of wind energy – much of it in Xinjiang. We also observed active oil fields; incidentally, the earliest known oil wells in the world were drilled in China as early as 347 CE.
Surprisingly, the number of foreign tourists along the Silk Road is relatively small, but there are thousands of Chinese tourists flocking to the tourist sites, such as the Singing Sand Dunes not far from the Mogao Caves, where hundreds of Bactrian (double-humped) camels carry visitors for a ride up the dunes. The more adventurous brave the dunes on foot.
The hotels we stayed at were all reasonable, but except for hard-boiled eggs and some fresh vegetables for breakfast in some of the hotels, there was no Western-style food available, not to mention kosher food. Outside the hotel rooms, only squatting toilets are available – but it is surprising how quickly one gets used to them.
While most of our travel was by coach, we took one nine hour train ride and four internal flights, discovering that some of the smaller airports are not very clear regarding what one may or may not take on board – so having a local tour guide, who understands how the system works, is vital.
In general, one cannot do without a local guide – both because of the language and the unexpected bureaucratic hazards.
Our local guide – an Uyghur from Kashgar called Alip – was an absolute gem. Besides accompanying tour groups from abroad, Alip is also involved in organizing tours to Turkey, a much sought-after destination for Uyghurs, who, as mentioned above, are of Turkic origin.
For those who need an English-speaking tour guide but cannot afford to hire a private one, there are Australian tour providers, who offer trips to the Silk Road (and other Asian destinations) at prices comparable to those offered by the Israeli tour providers, but usually with fewer participants in each group.