Kashgar and the Silk Road: A Crossroads of Markets, Empires and Cultures

Kashgar has changed hands many times. Over two thousand years it has been a Buddhist kingdom paying tribute to the Han, a Tang garrison contested by Tibetan armies, a capital of one of the first Turkic dynasties to adopt Islam, a Mongol possession, the seat of Sufi saints, a Qing frontier city and, in the nineteenth century, a listening post for the British and Russian empires. The Kashgar Silk Road story is the story of all of them at once, because each power came for the same reason: this was the oasis where the routes around the Taklamakan Desert met before climbing into the mountains to the west. On Day 14 of our small group Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, the group flies in from Urumqi to read those layers in the city’s mosques, tombs, workshops and old consulates.

The Kashgar Silk Road crossroads: where the desert routes met

Kashgar sits at roughly 1,300 metres above sea level in the far west of the Tarim Basin, the great bowl of desert enclosed by the Tian Shan to the north, the Kunlun to the south and the Pamirs to the west. Rivers running down from those mountains water a broad oasis of fields, orchards and poplar-lined channels, and the city grew where that water met the roads. On our history-led Silk Road tour from Xi’an to Tashkent, Kashgar is the hinge between the Chinese and Central Asian halves of the journey.

The geography explains why. Caravans did not attempt the open sands of the Taklamakan, so traffic from China divided at Dunhuang and skirted the desert on either side. The northern route ran along the foot of the Tian Shan through oases such as Turpan, with its ruined cities of Gaochang and Jiaohe, then Kucha and Aksu; the southern route followed the Kunlun through Khotan and Yarkand. Both arrived at Kashgar. From here the roads divided again: west over the passes to the Ferghana Valley and Samarkand, and south-west over the Pamirs towards Bactria and India. Our guide to the Chinese section of the Silk Road follows the whole route from Xi’an to this point, and the wider history and legacy of the Silk Road sets it within the network as a whole.

That position made Kashgar valuable to anyone who wanted to control the trade, and vulnerable to every one of them. Its history is less a single story than a succession of overlords, each leaving something behind in the city’s religion, language and buildings.

Shule: a Buddhist kingdom between Han China and the Kushans

Chinese sources first know Kashgar as Shule. The Hanshu, the history of the Former Han dynasty, lists it among the principalities of the Western Regions, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica dates formal Han authority there from 59 BC to AD 23. When the Han lost their grip, the general Ban Chao campaigned back into the Tarim Basin and brought Kashgar under Chinese rule again in the 70s AD, and Han control of the region was re-established by 91.

China was not the only empire with an interest. In the early second century, according to Iranica, a Kashgar prince sent as a hostage to the Yuezhi was later put on the throne under the protection of the Kushan empire, whose lands stretched from Bactria into northern India. The connection matters because the Kushan world was one of the channels through which Buddhism reached the Tarim oases. For the better part of a millennium, until the tenth century, Kashgar belonged to the Buddhist world. When the pilgrim monk Xuanzang passed through in the 640s on his way home from India, he recorded a kingdom with around ten thousand Buddhist monks.

Tang garrison and Tibetan rival

Under the Tang, Kashgar became one of the Four Garrisons of Anxi, the military posts that anchored Chinese power in the Tarim Basin alongside Kucha, Khotan and Karashahr. The system was fully in place by 658, and it immediately drew a rival. The Tibetan empire, expanding north from its plateau, pressed into the Tarim repeatedly in the later seventh century, and Iranica dates a Tibetan invasion of Kashgar to 676–78. The Tang restored a measure of stability only after 692, and by the end of the eighth century their protectorate in the west had collapsed. For a city on the frontier of two empires, the Silk Road brought revenue and armies in equal measure.

The Karakhanids: a Turkic and Islamic capital

The change with the longest reach came in the tenth century. The Karakhanids, a Turkic dynasty that ruled across Central Asia, made Kashgar one of their centres, and their ruler Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam before his death in 955. The eastern branch of the dynasty, centred on Kashgar, followed him, and the oasis moved from the Buddhist world into the Islamic one. Satuq Bughra Khan came to be venerated as a saint.

Karakhanid Kashgar was also a literary capital. Here, in 1069–70, Yusuf Khass Hajib composed the Kutadgu Bilig, or “Wisdom That Brings Good Fortune”, which Iranica describes as the first Turkic Muslim poem, a long mirror for princes written for a Karakhanid ruler. At almost the same time, another son of the city, Mahmud al-Kashgari, compiled his great compendium of the Turkic languages in Baghdad, in the last quarter of the eleventh century, complete with a round map that placed the Turkic lands at the centre of the world. Between them, the two works show a Turkic culture confident enough to write about itself in its own language, using the scripts and learning of the Islamic world.

Mongol Kashgar and the merchants Marco Polo described

Between 1211 and 1214 Küchlüg, a Naiman prince who had usurped the throne of the Qara Khitai, took Kashgar from the weakened Karakhanids and, according to Iranica, banned Islam. His rule was brief. By 1220 the city had submitted to the Mongols, and after Chinggis Khan’s empire was divided it passed to the line of his son Chagatai, whose descendants held at least nominal authority here into the seventeenth century. Kashgar’s fortunes under the Mongols fit the broader pattern traced in our article on how Asia’s great empires rose and held together: a conqueror with a powerful army, ruling a patchwork of peoples through local elites and trade.

The account of Marco Polo, written at the end of the thirteenth century, gives a merchant’s view of the city in this period. His book describes Kashgar as a former kingdom now subject to the Great Khan, with a Muslim population alongside a community of Nestorian Christians, and people who lived by trade and handicrafts and grew cotton in their gardens and fields. Whether Polo passed through himself is still debated, but the picture of a mixed, commercial oasis is consistent with everything else known about the city.

The Id Kah Mosque and the Old Quarter

The Id Kah Mosque grew out of this later medieval city. It was founded in 1442 by Saqsiz Mirza, a son of the local ruler Amir Sayyid Ali, to commemorate his ancestors. The name comes from the Persian eidgah, a place for the great festival prayers. The present yellow-brick building dates from 1798, when it replaced an older structure, and it was enlarged to roughly its current size in 1838. Its gate tower and two minarets face a square at the edge of the Old Quarter, and the mosque’s courtyard and prayer halls cover about 16,800 square metres.

The mosque marks a period when Kashgar was rebuilt as well as ruled. Between about 1480 and 1514 Mirza Abu Bakr, of the Dughlat family that governed Kashgar under the Chagatai khans, levelled the old city and built a new one, and in 1514 the regional capital moved to Yarkand. On Day 14 the tour’s sightseeing includes the mosque and Arts and Crafts Street, and the tour page describes the backstreet markets of the Old Quarter, the trading heart of an oasis that has lived by commerce and handicrafts since Marco Polo’s day.

How much walking is involved in Kashgar?

Enough to need comfortable shoes and a steady pace. The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate, which the 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 tour page gives no distance for Kashgar itself: Day 14 begins with a morning transfer to the airport in Urumqi and the flight to Kashgar, the sightseeing tour follows on arrival, and the lanes of the Old Quarter and the courtyards of the mosque and mausoleum are easier taken at an unhurried pace.

The Afaq Khoja Mausoleum: saints, khojas and the Qing conquest

On the edge of the city stands the other landmark of the Kashgar visit, and it tells the story of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mausoleum known locally as Apaq Khoja was first built around 1640 for Muhammad Yusuf, a Naqshbandi Sufi master, and his son Afaq Khoja was buried there in 1694. Afaq Khoja was a religious leader whose family, the khojas, became rulers in their own right: in 1678 the old dynasty gave way to a khoja theocracy in Kashgar, which held power largely under the overlordship of the Dzungars, the Buddhist Mongol confederation to the north.

The building is a family shrine on a large scale. A dome of about 17 metres rises over the tomb hall between four corner minarets, and the building and its tombs are faced with glazed tiles in green and blue. Inside lie members of five generations of the Afaqi family, 72 people in all, and the complex includes prayer halls, a teaching hall, a cemetery and a pool for ablutions. Local tradition also connects the shrine with Iparhan, a woman of legend said to have been taken to the imperial court in Beijing, and a palanquin in the tomb hall is pointed out as the one that carried her back from the capital.

The khojas’ dependence on the Dzungars proved fatal. When the Qing destroyed the Dzungar state in the 1750s, their armies moved on into the Tarim Basin, and Qing China took Kashgar in 1759. The oasis that had once marked the western edge of Tang ambitions became part of the Qing territories later named Xinjiang, the “New Frontier”.

Consuls and the Great Game

In the nineteenth century Kashgar sat on the fault line between two expanding empires, Russia advancing south through Central Asia and Britain looking north from India. The fault line opened in 1865, when Yaqub Beg, a commander from the khanate of Kokand, seized Kashgar and ruled much of the Tarim Basin from it until 1877; both Britain and Russia sent missions to deal with him. After his death the Qing reconquered the region, and Xinjiang was made a full province in 1884.

Both empires then kept representatives in the city. Nikolai Petrovsky served as the first Russian consul in Kashgar from 1882 to 1903. George Macartney arrived in 1890 as an interpreter with Francis Younghusband’s mission and stayed until 1918, eventually as British consul-general, living for some 28 years at Chini Bagh, the “Chinese Garden” residence that his wife Catherine described in her memoir An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan (1931). Chini Bagh also became a base for the scholar-explorers. Aurel Stein spent the summer of 1900 there assembling the caravan for his first expedition, and the collecting that followed is told in our article on the explorers and archaeologists of the Silk Road.

On Day 14 the group visits what the tour page calls the old Russian and British embassies, the two powers’ former consular buildings in Kashgar, whose rivalry belongs to the same story as the khans and garrisons before them: outsiders drawn to the oasis because of where it stood.

How long does the tour spend in Kashgar?

One day and one night. The group flies from Urumqi to Kashgar on Day 14 and is taken on a sightseeing tour on arrival, taking in the Afaq Khoja tomb, the Id Kah Mosque, Arts and Crafts Street and the old Russian and British missions, with breakfast, lunch and dinner included and an overnight stay at the Tianyuan International Hotel or similar. The road west into Kyrgyzstan begins on Day 15.

What is the road from Kashgar into Kyrgyzstan like?

It is a long mountain day. The tour page says the group travels by coach to the Torugart Pass, 3,752 metres above sea level in the Tian Shan, and then switches to smaller vehicles for the road onward to Naryn because of its condition, pausing on the way at the stone caravanserai of Tash Rabat. There are no restrooms along the route, so the vehicles pull over for toilet stops, and a pre-packed lunch is provided.

What Kashgar reveals about the Silk Road

Read in sequence, Kashgar’s monuments make a simple point about the Silk Road: trade routes did not just carry goods, they carried rulers. The Han and Tang came for the same oasis that the Kushans and Tibetans contested; the Karakhanids made it a Turkic and Islamic capital; the Mongols, the Dughlats and the khojas ruled it in turn; the Qing absorbed it; and Russian and British consuls watched each other from it. Each left a layer, from the faith of the Karakhanids to the Id Kah’s yellow-brick gate and the tiled dome of the Afaq Khoja tomb.

That is why Kashgar sits where it does on our Silk Road journey, at the point where the China leg ends and the mountain crossing begins. Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you arrive after two weeks of oases and desert from Xi’an, read the city in a day, and then follow the old caravan road over the Tian Shan towards Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent.