The Silk Road in China

Vaster, sparser, and more awe inspiring than any other section of the famous silk routes.

The Taklamakan Desert is the second-largest shifting-sand desert in the world. This enormous yellow eye stares blankly of out western China’s Xinjiang region – a part of the country where less than 10 percent of the land is fit for human habitation. The highway that crosses the desert is lined with trees – not for beauty, but out of necessity – their roots help fix the sand in place and stop the road from being submerged by the so-called ‘Sea of Death’.

The desert, one of the most feared places on the continent, was once an infamous roadblock on China’s trade routes west. The Silk Roads, which carried caravans of goods between China and Europe, split at the desert’s threshold near the city of Dunhuang, going south and north around it.

Today, you can drive along the edge of the desert, and experiencing the size of this astonishing landscape is a major highlight of our Silk Road in China holiday.

The vastness of deserts pretty much captures the experience of China’s Silk Road. The 6,400km route starts in China and ends in Rome, Italy. Yet from Luoyang, the route’s most easterly point, to the city of Kashgar, a Chinese city further west than Almaty in Kazakhstan, it’s around 3,200km as the crow flies. That’s over 3,000km of travelling without crossing a single international border. In most people’s minds, country-hopping seems like an integral part of the Silk Road experience, yet if you do our full tour of the entire Silk Road, for the first two weeks, you are just in China.

Despite this, most international travellers look to Central Asia first when it comes to Silk Road experiences – and to the increasingly busy Uzbekistan. Why not China?

“Though China marks the eastern origin of the Silk Road, Uzbekistan often takes centre stage as the 'heart' of Silk Road travel,” says our partner for overland adventures on the Silk Road, Wild Frontiers. “This is typically due to the architectural treasures of Samarkand’s Registan and Bukhara’s historic mosques, which are both more concentrated and visually striking than China’s dispersed sites. China’s Silk Road, while historically vital, is viewed as less accessible and often overshadowed by its modern cities and attractions.”

China is dominated by big, modern cities – and development has changed places like Kashgar beyond recognition in just a few short decades. But there’s a whole lot of country in between.

China’s Silk Road weaves together an incredible diversity of natural landscapes. There’s Yadan National Geologic Park near Dunhuang, with its uniquely shaped rocks, and Zhangye National Geopark near the city of Zhangye, where the hills, striped in different colours by sandstone and other minerals, arch like rainbows. Further west, en route to Kazakhstan, there’s Shipton’s Arch, a record-breaking natural arch the height of the Empire State Building, and the high-altitude Lake Karakul, surrounded by permanently snow-covered peaks. Then there’s Turpan, one of the lowest cities in the world, its lake at 155m below sea level.

“A journey through China's Silk Road provides a broader, deeper and more varied experience, from imperial cities and sacred monasteries to desert adventures and ancient cave art”, says Wild Frontiers. “The vast and awe-inspiring landscapes… cannot be beat by Uzbekistan.”

For some of its route, the Silk Road follows the so-called Hexi Corridor in Gansu, a miraculous strip of flat, fertile land between the twin hostilities of the freezing Tibetan Plateau to the south and the forbidding Gobi Desert to the north.

Some landscapes retain their intimidating nature despite China’s rapid infrastructure developments, and it's telling that many Silk Road tours fly over the Taklamakan Desert rather than crossing it. At Dunhuang, you’ll find caves filled with precious statues and mural paintings – paid for as thanks by those who made it past 337,000sq km of deserted hostility. The Thousand Buddha Caves, also known as the Mogao Grottoes, comprise 492 caves, including a cave library with 40,000 scrolls, and holds one of the most important collections of Buddhist art in the world.

The end of the road on most Silk Road tours in China is Kashgar’s massive Sunday market, a convergence of 100,000 people peddling everything from pigeons to pottery. Uyghur, Kyrgyz and Kazakh traders meet and mingle – a fitting multicultural end to a route that tells one of the great stories of world trade.