Kashgar and the Silk Road

Kashgar, in the western Tarim Basin in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, was the western gateway to the Tarim and the principal meeting point of the northern and southern branches of the overland Silk Road. The city is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in Central Asia, with archaeological layers going back to the Bronze Age, and it was for two thousand years one of the principal markets of the central Silk Road. The wider geography of the routes that converged there is described in the article on the routes and map of the Silk Road, and the city is set in its wider urban context in the article on Silk Road cities. What strikes me about Kashgar, on a first visit, is how small the old oasis feels relative to the size of the trade it conducted — the Sunday bazaar is essentially walkable in an afternoon.

The geography of the convergence

The Tarim Basin, ringed by the Pamirs, the Tian Shan, the Kunlun, and the Karakoram, contains the Taklamakan Desert, one of the driest landscapes in the world. Caravan traffic from the east, emerging from the Hexi Corridor and the oasis of Dunhuang, had to skirt this desert. The northern branch of the road ran through Turfan, Kucha, and Aksu; the southern branch through Khotan and Yarkand, principal sources of the jade for which the southern Tarim had been famous since the Bronze Age. The two branches converged at Kashgar, at the western end of the basin, where the road crossed the Pamirs into Sogdiana and Ferghana. The modern drive from Kashgar to Tashkurgan is roughly twelve hours by road, and the Khunjerab Pass on the Pakistani side has been open to foreign travellers only since 1986 — the geography has shaped the politics for two thousand years.

Kashgar’s position made it a natural market of exceptional importance. Goods from the entire Tarim Basin passed through the city; goods from the western world — Sogdian silks, Bactrian horses, Persian metalwork — entered the basin at Kashgar. The city was also the principal gateway to Ferghana, the route by which Chinese demand for the “heavenly horses” of the western steppe was supplied. The conventional narrative treats Kashgar as a transit point; in my view it was a market first, a transit point second. The prices set in the Kashgar bazaar are what brought the caravans in.

Han, Tang, and the Chinese protectorate

The Han dynasty established a protectorate over the western Tarim in the second century BCE, and Kashgar was one of the principal oasis kingdoms of the Chinese system, as described in the article on the Han dynasty and the Silk Road. The Tang reasserted Chinese control in the seventh and eighth centuries, and Tang Kashgar was a substantial city with Buddhist monasteries, Nestorian communities, and Sogdian merchant houses. The Buddhist culture of the city was, in some respects, a westward extension of the Buddhist culture of the Tarim and belongs to the wider story told in the article on Buddhism and the Silk Road.

Kashgar is, in many ways, the farthest west of the great oasis cities of the Tarim.

The Tang protectorate collapsed in the eighth century, under the pressure of the Tibetan empire and the Karakhanid Turks. Kashgar became the centre of the Karakhanid khanate, which converted to Islam in the tenth century and ruled the western Tarim until the Mongol period. The Islamic conversion of Kashgar belongs to the wider transformation described in the article on the spread of Islam along the Silk Road. The more interesting point, often missed, is that the Karakhanid takeover was as much a steppe event as an Islamic one; the dynasty was already Turkic before it was Muslim, and the conversion didn’t change the cavalry.

A personal note

A note on the modern city. Kashgar in 2026 is a Chinese city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Republic, with a Han Chinese majority in the rebuilt old city and a Uyghur majority in the surrounding countryside. The Silk Road character that tourists associate with the city — the donkey carts, the Uyghur craftsmen, the Sunday market — survives, but partly as a heritage performance. A reader looking for an unmediated Silk Road city will not find it in modern Kashgar.

Further reading

This is one of those topics where the standard reading list is long and the good reading list is short. Three works that I (the author) keep returning to:

• The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter — these are uneven but the good ones are very good.
• A recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal (Brill) for what scholars are actually arguing about right now.
• One primary source in translation. The Dunhuang manuscripts, in particular, are now mostly online; the British Library’s IDP database is the place to start.

Avoid the popular histories. They are usually wrong in small ways and large ones.

Related pages

See also The routes and geography of the Silk Road, The great cities of the Silk Road, and Dunhuang and the Mogao Caves.