On foot in the path of the Silk Road

The fabled Silk Road that spanned Central Asia wasn’t really a road. It was a complex web of trading routes, both terrestrial and marine, that linked far-flung civilizations—and tens of millions of lives—across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa beginning at least 2,000 years ago.

My name is Paul Salopek and I am a longtime foreign correspondent and a National Geographic Society Fellow. 

Over the past two years I have walked nearly 1,800 miles across the heart of Asia, from the desert shores of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan to the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. Using the latest GPS technology, this map plots my walking route along the faded Silk Roads that still crisscross a Central Asian hinterland many today consider a geopolitical backwater but which a thousand years ago flowered as the cultural hub of the world.

Enriched by a trade in luxury goods, the Silk Road empires that once straddled this region collected, translated, and built upon knowledge from every corner of the Old World. Many Central Asian scholars worked in government-funded libraries and academies, refining algebra and tempered steel. While Europe slumbered through its Dark Age, everything from Greek philosophy to Buddhism and the Arabic language to the mathematical concept of zero spread along the Silk Road’s camel trails. In this way Central Asia became an early laboratory of globalization.

Walking the Silk Road today, I often felt like a passing ghost.

Most of the trade network’s water wells and caravan stops are long gone—vanished under drifting sands or sealed beneath modern highways. And when I walked sunburned and grimy into villages or truck stops, usually in the company of pack animals, the reactions of the region’s modern inhabitants veered from astonishment to wariness to hilarity. At least this much hasn’t changed on the Silk Road: the hospitality of its people.

My walk across Central Asia is just one stretch of a much longer foot traverse of the planet.

The Out of Eden Walk, as my project is called, is a storytelling journey through the world that follows the pathways of the first human migrations out of Africa during the Stone Age. The idea is to retrace the original discovery of the Earth by our ancestors while writing stories and taking photographs and video and audio recordings along the way. The project uses deep history to examine the current events that are shaping our lives in the early 21st century. By slowing down to the pace of my own footsteps, I hope to immerse myself in the lives of the ordinary people I meet along the way, and extract more meaningful stories from the usual headlines of our day:

I began my walk in Africa—the cradle of humankind—in early 2013. And in 10 years of continuous walking, I plan on reaching my journey’s finish line: the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, which scientists believe is the last corner of the continents to be colonized by our forebears.

The Silk Road leg of this global trek began in May 2015 and has unspooled eastward through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to the headwaters of the Amu Darya, a storied Central Asian river known to ancient Greeks as the Oxus, in the icy mountains of northern Afghanistan.

The walk’s storytelling can be found  here . 

Walking across Central Asia isn’t easy. 

The region encompasses immense deserts and steppes, as well as 25,000-foot mountains. In some places, such as western Kazakhstan, the landscapes were so desolate that I had to bury geotagged caches of water to retrieve later. I camped wherever nightfall found me. To make this long foot journey possible, and more enjoyable, I always tried to walk with local people. In Kazakhstan I walked with a former judge and an unemployed oil worker. In Uzbekistan I was joined by a melon seller and a professional tour guide. Two local young women, both expert alpine hikers, joined me in the remote Pamirs of Tajikistan. This Silk Road journey is as much theirs as mine.

The Silk Road was a geographical conduit linking the commercial appetites of the Roman Empire and the Xian Empire of China. (And everyone in between.) 

Silk was the network's premium commodity for good reason: huge demand made it immensely profitable. It was a luxury fabric coveted by the Romans and monopolized by Chinese dealers. In the first century A.D., the chronicler Pliny estimated that Rome spent a hundred million gold coins a year to pay for the shimmering Asian cloth adored by fashionable Mediterranean elites. "Such is the cost," he grumped, "of our exquisites and our women."

The manufacture of silk was a secret tightly guarded by the Chinese. The Romans guessed that the exotic material was made of leaves or even rare soils. Centuries would pass before its true source became known: a filament secreted by the caterpillar of the moth Bombyx mori to make its cocoon. 

Today the art of silkmaking has mostly faded from Central Asia. But in Margilan, Uzbekistan, a few dozen families continue the tradition. The process, when still done by hand, is laborious. It can take a month of work to make the raw silk required for an evening gown. Rosuljon Mirzaakhmedov, a ninth-generation silk weaver in Margilan, has expanded the new Silk Road all the way to the New World: He exhibits his work in places as far afield as New Mexico.

Silk gets the bulk of historical attention. Yet hundreds of other commodities bumped by camelback across the belly of Asia, including Roman glass, Levantine gold, Russian furs, Central Asian carpets, and Chinese porcelain. Medicines made of plants and animal parts also were traded along the Silk Road. In Kazakhstan I used an unusual local nomad remedy—burned hedgehog skin mixed with cooking oil—to treat a saddle sore on my packhorse.

Silk textiles are still sold on the Silk Road, in this case in a tourist market (left, above) in the old Khanate of Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Hard sell: A dapper young Wakhi boy offers gems for sale near Vrang, in the Pamirs of Tajikistan. His "rubies" were actually a softer mineral called spinel.

A central corridor of the Silk Road hugged the banks of the Amu Darya, or fabled Oxus River, through modern-day Uzbekistan, enriching the most prosperous empires of their day. By the seventh century A.D. the Zoroastrian kingdom of Sogdiana, based in a sprawling city called Afrosiab, near Samarkand, became the ultimate middleman for most commerce on the transcontinental route. Both women and men conducted business. And Sogdian mothers were said to spoon sugar into their babies' mouths to sweeten the infants' tongues for future success at haggling.

Nomadic Arab armies invaded Central Asia in the seventh century.

Under Muslim rule Samarkand, one of the oasis cities along the Amu Darya in modern Uzbekistan, became one of the greatest papermaking centers of the Islamic world. "Paper was … essential for the bureaucracy that was administering their empire, for the many new things they were learning, and for their increasingly rich culture of arts and science," writes Mark Kurlansky in his book, Paper: Paging Through History. Light and durable, paper was a transformational commodity on the Silk Roads. The Chinese are generally credited with inventing it around 250 B.C. Legend says Arabs acquired the technology from two captured Chinese soldiers. Europeans didn’t adopt the innovation until a millennium later.

The highest mountains in the world, oceanic grasslands and fiery deserts tested hardy traders in Central Asia. The region's rulers, including the invading Mongols, helped keep the Silk Road's commerce flowing—and taxable—by building chains of sophisticated caravanserais, each offering piped water and a warehouse. These pit stops were spaced a day's walk apart through the most inhospitable terrain. 

The Silk Road thrived for roughly two millennia, changing the course of world history through rich cultural and commercial exchange.

The trade route's vast profits—and Central Asia's openness to outside ideas—ignited a Muslim Golden Era that saw the creation of universities, astronomical observatories, and libraries. "In many centers across Central Asia there emerged leaders who embraced the creation of knowledge as one of the goals of their rule," writes Frederick Starr in The Lost Enlightenment. Silk Road scholars translated Greek and Indian philosophers into Arabic and added to the global fund of science through original research.

A few examples: The ninth-century Central Asian genius Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi—the word "algorithm" is a Latin garbling of his name—helped invent algebra and accurately calculated the length of the Mediterranean (correcting Ptolemy). Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, or Avicenna, born in 980 in the khanate of Bukhara, in Uzbekistan, was Islam's first philosopher and wrote a medical textbook followed by European doctors for centuries. And Abu al-Rayan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, also from Uzbekistan, devised a method of estimating the Earth's radius by observing the heights of mountains. The commercial empires of the Silk Road were multiethnic and tolerant, espousing a creed of humanism 500 years before the West.

Then their bright flame flickered out.

Dynastic struggles, drying climates, and the calamity of Mongol invasions all eroded the brilliance of the Silk Road empires. European maritime trade would soon bypass the region’s trade routes. But the greatest cause of decay was the rise of religious fundamentalism and political polarization between Islam's Sunni and Shiite sects. "By the late eleventh century a full-blown cultural war was under way," writes historian Starr. "Free inquiry was caught in the crossfire."

The camel trains vanished. Central Asia slipped into a long silence. 

It’s been centuries since the old Silk Road landscapes dominated global culture. Many of the region’s newly independent states—the so-called Stans—are still shaking off the legacy of 200 years of Russian colonization, including 70 or more years of stifling Soviet rule. But there are stirrings of renewed outside interest in the region.  

Hydrocarbons, the new silk

Central Asia holds major reserves of gas and oil—the new silk. Foreign powers, including Russia, China, the United States, Turkey, and the European Union, are jockeying for access to these resources. Pipelines now crisscross the nomad steppes. Kazakhstan alone is moving toward becoming one of the world’s top 10 oil producers.

China's new "belt and road"

The world’s new economic juggernaut—China—is hoping to surpass the glories of the original Silk Road by investing a trillion dollars in infrastructure across Eurasia that will enhance cross-border trade. Highways, train lines, power plants, dams, port facilities, communications networks, and more are all part of Beijing’s One Belt One Road initiative. Proponents see the ambitious plan as a pathway to boosting the prosperity of billions of people; skeptics fear an economic takeover.

Walking the sepia horizons of the Silk Road was a journey through memory.

But I also realized, as I passed under the blue shadows thrown by the ruined walls of once great Central Asian trading cities, that the Silk Road offers a possible map into the future.

Today a populist backlash against globalization is roiling parts of the Western world. People who feel left behind by a worldwide marketplace in both commodities and ideas, a model that dates back to the end of World War II, are rebelling against political and corporate elites who have benefited disproportionately from that system. Some are advocating a return to protectionism, nationalism, and even the building of new walls. The vanished caravan empires of Central Asia still offer a timely lesson for the 21st century: The questions of survival that echo along the fading Silk Road trails remain largely unchanged.

Turn inward? Or remain open?

And what to hold onto?

And what to trade away?