Issyk-Kul Lake: The Northern Silk Road, Petroglyphs and Mountain Landscapes

Seen from its northern shore, Issyk-Kul Lake looks like an inland sea that has strayed into the mountains: a sheet of deep blue water about 180 kilometres long, held between two ranges of the Tian Shan at about 1,600 metres above sea level. For travellers on the northern branch of the Silk Road it was a landmark, a water source and a corridor between the oases of the Tarim Basin and the cities of the Chüy Valley. Its shores carry the traces of everyone who used that corridor, from the nomads who carved ibex into the boulders above Cholpon-Ata to the Russian officers and Dungan refugees who built Karakol. On Days 16 and 17 of our small group Silk Road tour from Xi’an to Tashkent, the group spends two nights on the lake, reading that history in its rock art, museums and mountain landscapes.

Issyk-Kul Lake in the Tian Shan

Issyk-Kul Lake fills the floor of a long basin in the north-east of Kyrgyzstan. The Kungey Ala-Too runs along its northern side and the higher Terskey Ala-Too along its southern side, and the lake between them is about 180 kilometres long and up to 60 kilometres wide, with a surface area of some 6,200 square kilometres. It is deep as well as broad, reaching around 668 metres at its deepest point. Dozens of rivers and streams, fed by snow and glaciers, run down into it from both ranges, yet the lake has no outlet: the water leaves only by evaporation and, some hydrologists think, by seepage underground. The result is a slightly saline lake, about 0.6 per cent salt against roughly 3.5 per cent for seawater.

For a traveller in the past, the lake’s practical qualities mattered as much as the scenery: a basin with open water, grazing on the shore and settlements along the fringe of the mountains was a place where caravans could rest. Our history-led Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent follows that logic too, arriving at the lake from the mountains to the south and leaving it for the Chüy Valley and Bishkek to the west.

A corridor on the northern Silk Road

The Silk Road was never a single road, and the branch that passed Issyk-Kul is a good example of how geography chose the routes. Travellers leaving the Tarim Basin could cross the Tian Shan by several passes. One route climbed from the oases on the northern edge of the Taklamakan over the mountains to the lake, followed its shore westward and came down into the Chüy Valley, where towns such as Suyab and later Balasagun grew up around trade, agriculture and the camps of steppe rulers. From there the roads continued west towards Talas, the Syr Darya and Transoxiana.

One traveller who left a written account of this route was the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who crossed the mountains to the lake on his way to India around 630. In the translation by Samuel Beal of his Record of the Western Regions, the lake is “about 1000 li in circuit, extended from east to west, and narrow from north to south”, its water “bitter and salt”, and “dragons and fishes inhabit it together.” About 500 li further on he reached the town on the Suyab river, where, in Beal’s words, “the merchants from surrounding countries congregate and dwell.” Suyab became a Tang military outpost in the mid-seventh century, and its ruins, together with those of Balasagun and Nevaket in the Chüy Valley, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2014 as part of the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor.

On the tour, the medieval side of this corridor comes into focus on Day 18, when the group pauses at Burana on the road from the lake to Bishkek. Our article on Burana Tower and the medieval towns of the Chüy Valley tells that story. The tour reaches the lake from a different direction to Xuanzang: after crossing from Kashgar over the Torugart Pass, it stops at the stone caravanserai described in our guide to Tash Rabat and mountain travel in Kyrgyzstan, spends a night in Naryn, and then drives over the Dolan Pass to Issyk-Kul.

Nomads, the Wusun and the lake shore

Long before the caravans, the Issyk-Kul basin belonged to pastoral nomads. Mountain pastures in summer and the milder lake shore in winter made it valuable grazing country, and the burial mounds, standing stones and rock art around the lake are the record they left. Chinese historians of the Han dynasty knew the region as the land of the Wusun, a nomadic people whose ruler kept his court at a walled town called Chigu, the “Red Valley City”. Its exact site has never been established, but it is usually placed in a valley near Issyk-Kul. Han China sought the Wusun as allies against the Xiongnu and sent princesses to marry their rulers, which is one reason the region appears in Chinese records at all.

Later centuries brought Turkic rulers to the same pastures. In the eleventh century the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari, whose compendium of the Turkic languages is discussed in our article on Kashgar and the Silk Road, came from a family connected with Barsgan, a town on the southern shore of the lake usually identified with the village of Barskoon.

The Cholpon-Ata petroglyphs

The most direct link to the lake’s early inhabitants is on the northern shore at Cholpon-Ata. Above the town, a slope strewn with glacial boulders carries carvings on hundreds of boulders, pecked into the dark rock surfaces, most often mountain goats with long, curving horns, along with deer, hunters and hunting scenes. Dating rock art is difficult, and the estimates vary: the tour page dates the rock drawings seen on the Day 16 visit from the first century BC to the seventh century AD, and the petroglyphs and prehistoric monumental structures of the Petroglyphs Museum from the second millennium BC to the sixth century. On Day 16 the group visits the Cholpon-Ata Bazaar and makes an excursion to the Petroglyphs Museum. For a comparison at the other end of the Silk Road world, our guide to the Gobustan petroglyphs in Azerbaijan looks at a rock-art landscape on the shore of the Caspian.

How much walking is involved at Issyk-Kul?

Expect a moderate amount on uneven ground. The Silk Road tour is rated Level 2, Moderate, which its tour page defines as being able to carry your own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground (the Stans tour is rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging). The petroglyphs are spread across an open, boulder-strewn hillside rather than a paved museum, so sturdy shoes help, while the Karakol visits on Day 17 are town sightseeing between museum, church and mosque.

Submerged towns, monks and the Black Death

The lake has not always stood at its present level. Its level is thought to be several metres higher than in medieval times, and divers and archaeologists have recorded the remains of settlements in the shallows around the shore, a reminder that the towns of the northern route could be lost to water as well as to war. Medieval Europe knew of the lake too. The Catalan Atlas, usually dated to 1375, marks the lake and notes a monastery of Armenian brothers where the body of the apostle Matthew was said to rest, an echo of the Christian communities that lived along the trade routes of Central Asia.

Those communities left their own record. Gravestones inscribed in Syriac survive from Christian cemeteries in the Chüy Valley west of the lake, and some dated to 1338 and 1339 give “pestilence” as the cause of death. In 2022 a team led by Maria Spyrou, with Philip Slavin and Johannes Krause, published in Nature an analysis of ancient DNA from individuals buried in two of these cemeteries, and identified the plague bacterium in them. The strain they recovered sits at the branching point from which the Black Death strains descend, which suggests these trading communities, on the routes that passed Issyk-Kul, lay close to the source of the pandemic.

Why does Issyk-Kul not freeze?

The explanation usually given is its slight salinity and its depth. The water is about 0.6 per cent saline, and a lake this deep stores a great deal of summer warmth that is released slowly through the winter, so the open water rarely freezes despite the altitude. The Kyrgyz name, Ysyk-Köl, the “warm lake”, is usually linked to this.

Karakol: a Russian frontier town, Dungan craftsmen and Przhevalsky

At the eastern end of the lake, Karakol shows how the region changed in the nineteenth century. As the Russian Empire advanced into Central Asia, a military outpost was founded here in 1869, and the town grew on a grid of streets lined with wooden houses. In the late 1870s and 1880s it also took in Dungans, Hui Muslims of Chinese origin, who crossed into Russian territory after the failure of the Muslim uprisings in north-western China. They brought with them their language, their cooking and their building traditions.

The clearest sign of that migration is the Dungan Mosque, a wooden building in the style of a Chinese temple, raised in the early twentieth century and, as the tour page puts it, built in wood “without a single nail”. Its tiered roofs and brightly painted carved brackets would look at home in northern China, yet it served a Muslim congregation on the edge of the Kyrgyz steppe. Not far away, the wooden Russian Orthodox church represents the other community that arrived with the Empire.

Karakol is also linked with the Russian explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, who led four expeditions through Mongolia, China and Tibet. He died in Karakol in 1888 on the eve of his fifth, and was buried on the shore of the lake. The town was renamed Przhevalsk in his honour the following year and kept the name for much of the Soviet period. On Day 17 the group drives from the lake to Karakol and visits the Przhevalsky Museum, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Dungan Mosque, with lunch at a local café, before returning to the hotel on the lake.

Mountain ecology: water, wetlands and spruce forest

The lake’s landscapes are also part of its history, because the same features that drew caravans also support an unusual ecology. Issyk-Kul and its surroundings form part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and the lake and the state nature reserve on its shore were designated a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 2002. The shallow bays, river mouths and reedbeds, particularly at the eastern and western ends, hold large numbers of wintering waterbirds, and the lake has its own endemic fish, several of which are threatened by overfishing and introduced species.

Above the water the ranges change character quickly. The southern slopes of the Kungey Ala-Too are short and send only small streams to the lake, while the northern face of the Terskey Ala-Too is cut by long valleys whose rivers feed the lake, with dark stands of Tian Shan spruce on the shaded slopes and summer pastures above them. The pattern of use is old: herders still move livestock up to the high pastures in summer, as the nomads whose carvings cover the boulders at Cholpon-Ata did before them.

How long does the Silk Road tour spend at Issyk-Kul?

Two nights. The group drives from Naryn over the Dolan Pass to Issyk-Kul on Day 16, visiting the Cholpon-Ata Bazaar and the Petroglyphs Museum, and spends Day 17 on the excursion to Karakol, staying both nights at the Royal Beach Resort or similar with breakfast, lunch and dinner included. Day 18 begins with an early departure for Bishkek, about 400 kilometres to the west, with a stop at Burana on the way.

What Issyk-Kul reveals about the Silk Road

Issyk-Kul Lake is a reminder that the Silk Road was shaped by mountains and water as much as by cities. The lake gave travellers a level corridor through the Tian Shan, grazing and fresh streams along its shores, and a link between the Tarim oases and the Chüy Valley. Nomads carved its boulders, Han historians recorded its nomads, a Buddhist pilgrim described it, Christian merchants were buried near it, and Russian soldiers, Dungan refugees and a Russian explorer settled at its eastern end. The Stans tour reaches the lake from Bishkek by way of Burana and continues to Son-Kul, while the Silk Road tour arrives over the mountains from Naryn.

On our Silk Road journey, travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, the lake is the pause between the high passes of the Kashgar crossing and the Uzbek cities ahead. For country-level questions, from currency to climate, our answers to common questions about travelling in Kyrgyzstan are a useful companion to the itinerary.