Khiva and the Silk Road: A Walled Oasis City on the Amu Darya

Khiva was never one of the great Silk Road capitals. It stood on a side branch of the network, in an oasis on the lower Amu Darya, hemmed in by the Kyzylkum and Karakum deserts. Yet its walled inner town, Ichan Kala, is what UNESCO describes as a coherent and well-preserved example of Central Asian Muslim architecture, and that is no accident. The Khiva Silk Road story is about water before it is about trade: canals that made fields out of desert, a river that changed course and moved a capital, and a line of khans who built the town we see on the profits of farming, caravans and, for a long time, the slave trade. Read in that order, the mosques, minarets and palaces of Khiva explain how a town on a minor branch of the Silk Road outlasted its own former capital, Urgench.

The Khiva Silk Road connection: a branch line through Khorezm

Khiva lies in Khorezm, the ancient Chorasmia, an oasis spread across the delta of the Amu Darya, the river the Greeks called the Oxus. The Kyzylkum Desert lies to the east, the Karakum to the south and the Ustyurt Plateau to the west, and to the north the river once ran out into the Aral Sea. On our history-led Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, Khiva and nearby Nukus are the westernmost point of the route, reached after the long crossing of China and the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

The main east–west caravan roads ran further south, through Merv, Bukhara and Samarkand. Khorezm’s value lay in the routes that branched off them. UNESCO describes Ichan Kala as the inner town of the old Khiva oasis, the last resting place for caravans before they crossed the desert to Iran, and from Khorezm other roads ran north-west across the steppe towards the Volga. In 921–22 the Abbasid envoy Ibn Fadlan, on his way from Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulghars, spent the winter of 921–22 in al-Jurjaniya, the Khorezmian capital later known as Urgench, before heading north. Caravan trade made Khorezm’s rulers wealthy in the tenth century, but Khiva itself was a minor stop on these roads, which is what the tour page means when it places the town on a minor branch of the Silk Road.

An oasis built on canals

Nothing in Khorezm grows without irrigation. For more than two thousand years its farmers have drawn water from the Amu Darya through networks of canals, and the region’s history follows the state of those canals as closely as the fortunes of its rulers. Khiva’s own founding legend is a story about water: Shem, the son of Noah, is said to have dug a well called Kheivak here after the Flood. Local tradition and some archaeological estimates put the first settlement here about 2,500 years ago, and the town appears in written sources from the tenth century.

Khorezm itself was far older and far more important than its later market town. Under Darius I it came under the Achaemenid Persian empire, and Chorasmian soldiers marched with Xerxes against Greece in 480 BC. The ruined mud-brick forts that still stand in the desert to the north-east of Khiva belong to this ancient Khorezm, a subject large enough for its own article. In the Islamic period the oasis produced celebrated scholars. The ninth-century mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us the word “algorithm”, takes his name from the region, and the polymath al-Biruni (973–1048) was born here.

From Urgench to Khiva: how a small town became a capital

For most of the medieval period Khiva was a provincial town. The capitals of Khorezm were Kath and then Gurganj, the city Ibn Fadlan knew as al-Jurjaniya and later called Urgench, now Konye-Urgench in Turkmenistan. Gurganj was the seat of the Khwarazm-shahs, whose empire briefly stretched across Iran and Central Asia before it collapsed in the Mongol conquest of the early 1220s. Urgench recovered as a trading city, only for Timur to destroy it in 1388.

The river finished what the armies began. In 1511 an Uzbek ruler, Ilbars, founded the Arabshahid dynasty that would rule Khorezm as a khanate. Over the following decades the western branch of the Amu Darya that watered Urgench dried up, and by the early seventeenth century (sources differ on the date) the khans moved their capital south to Khiva. The state that Russian writers later called the Khanate of Khiva lasted, with one break under Persian occupation in the 1740s, until 1920. One of its rulers, Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur (khan 1643–1663), was also its historian: he wrote two genealogies of the Turkic peoples in Chagatai Turkic, the Shajara-i Tarakima and the Shajara-i Turk.

In 1804 power passed formally to the Qungrat dynasty, Uzbek tribal leaders who had dominated the khanate for decades. Most of the inner town’s monuments date from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the khanate grew rich and confident. It was one of three Uzbek principalities in the region, alongside Bukhara and Kokand, a story set out in our wider guide to Uzbekistan’s history and must-see sites.

Reading Ichan Kala: walls, gates and a citadel

Ichan Kala is the inner town of Khiva, a rectangle of about 26 hectares, roughly 650 by 400 metres, enclosed by mud-brick walls up to about 10 metres high. UNESCO counts 51 monumental buildings and 250 old houses within it. Four gates open on the four sides, and the walls themselves, with their rounded bastions and crenellations, have been rebuilt many times, and much of what stands is of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Outside them lies Dishan Kala, the outer town, which was once enclosed by a second wall with eleven gates.

The citadel, the Kunya Ark, stands against the western wall. Its fortifications were strengthened and a reception hall built in the 1680s, and the khans added to it through the nineteenth century: a throne room, a mosque, a mint, a harem and the offices of government. Above it rises the Ak-Sheikh Bobo bastion, an old lookout post with a wide view across the roofs, domes and minarets of the inner town. The density of what you see from there is the point. In 1967 the Uzbek authorities declared Ichan Kala a reserve, in 1969 it became a museum-reserve, and in 1990 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List.

Faith and learning in the inner town

Ichan Kala was a religious centre as well as a seat of government, and its buildings show how the two were bound together. The Juma Mosque, the Friday mosque, is first recorded in the tenth century and was rebuilt in the late 1780s. It has no domes, open courtyard or grand portal. Instead its flat roof rests on 212 wooden columns, according to UNESCO, in a single hall measuring about 55 by 46 metres. Many of the carved columns are older than the present building, reused from earlier structures, and their styles record centuries of Khorezmian woodcarving.

Khiva’s most revered shrine, by local tradition, is a tomb. Pahlavan Mahmud, who died in 1326, was a local poet, a wrestler of legendary strength and a healer, and he is revered as Khiva’s patron saint. A dome was first raised over his grave in the seventeenth century, and the tiled complex around it was rebuilt and enlarged in the nineteenth. The khans chose to be buried near him, among them Abu al-Ghazi and Muhammad Rahim Khan I, so the shrine of a craftsman-poet became a dynastic burial ground.

Learning was organised in madrasas, the residential colleges where students studied law, theology and Arabic. UNESCO lists the madrasas of Allakuli Khan, Muhammad Amin Khan and Muhammad Rahim Khan among the inner town’s principal monuments. The last of the great building projects came only in 1908–1910, when Islam Khoja, chief minister and father-in-law of the khan Isfandiyar, built a madrasa and a minaret, the tallest structure in Khiva, according to Britannica. For a sense of how this scholarly tradition looked in the larger city to the east, our article on Bukhara’s Islamic scholarship and architecture takes up the story.

Unfinished ambitions: Kalta Minor and Tash Hauli

Two monuments sum up the confidence of the nineteenth-century khanate. The first is the Kalta Minor, the “short minaret”. Muhammad Amin Khan began it in 1852 beside his new madrasa, apparently intending a tower of 70 to 80 metres. When he was killed in battle near Sarakhs in 1855, work stopped. What stands today is a stump about 29 metres high and 14.2 metres across at the base, wrapped in bands of turquoise, green and white glazed tile: a monument to ambition halted mid-course.

The second is Tash Hauli, the “stone courtyard” palace that Allakuli Khan, who ruled until 1842, built in the 1830s on the eastern side of the inner town. It has more than 150 rooms around three courtyards, among them a harem with lodgings for the khan and his four wives and an audience hall where ambassadors were received. Its walls are faced with blue and white majolica tiles attributed to the master Abdullah Jin, and its tall verandas stand on single carved wooden columns. Archnet reports that it was reputedly built over eight years by more than a thousand slaves, which leads to the darker side of Khiva’s prosperity.

Slaves, envoys and the Russian conquest

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century Khiva was home to what Britannica calls a notorious slave market. Raids across the desert and the steppe brought in captives, and the khanate taxed their sale and put them to work in its fields, army and households. Many of the captives were Persians, with smaller numbers of Russians. Their labour helped pay for the palaces and madrasas of Ichan Kala.

The captives gave Russia both a grievance and a pretext. A first expedition under Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky in 1717 ended with the Russian force killed or enslaved, and General Perovsky’s winter campaign of 1839 turned back after heavy losses in unusually severe cold. Western travellers who reached the city came with their own agendas. The Hungarian orientalist Ármin Vámbéry travelled through Khiva in disguise in 1863 and published his Travels in Central Asia the following year.

In 1873 a Russian army under General Konstantin von Kaufman took the city. A treaty signed in August that year made the khanate a Russian protectorate, imposed a war indemnity and abolished the slave trade, and Kaufman ordered the captives freed. The American correspondent Januarius MacGahan described the campaign in Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva (1874), and the British officer Fred Burnaby’s A Ride to Khiva (1876) made the city a byword for remote adventure. The khans kept their throne until 1920, when the last of them abdicated and the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic took the khanate’s place. In 1924 its lands were divided between the new Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet republics.

What do the tours include in Khiva?

Khiva fills Days 20 and 21 of our 29-day Silk Road tour from Xi’an to Tashkent. On Day 20 the group flies from Tashkent to Nukus for a sightseeing tour that includes the Savitsky Museum and its collection of Russian avant-garde art, an embroidery centre and a local yurt-making family, then travels about four hours to Khiva for two nights. Day 21 is a full day in the city, taking in the Kalta Minor minaret, the Kunya Ark with its administrative buildings, gunpowder works, law courts and mosque, the Pahlavan Mahmud complex, the Ak-Sheikh Bobo observation platform and, after lunch, the Islam Khoja minaret, the Juma Mosque and the Tash Hauli palace. The Stans tour also reaches Khiva by road from Nukus, on Day 5, and explores the city on Day 6.

How long does the Silk Road tour spend in Khiva?

Two nights, with one full day of sightseeing. The group arrives on Day 20 after the visit to Nukus and stays at the Asia Khiva Hotel or similar. On Day 22 the tour continues by coach across the Kyzylkum Desert to Bukhara, stopping in the desert for lunch.

How much walking is involved in Khiva?

The Silk Road tour is rated Level 2, Moderate. The tour page asks that travellers can carry their 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. Ichan Kala is compact, about 650 by 400 metres, but a full day there means time on your feet on paved lanes and in courtyards.

Are entrance fees in Khiva included?

Yes. The Silk Road tour includes comprehensive sightseeing tours with English-speaking guides, with all entrance fees included throughout. For broader planning questions about the country, our answers to common questions about travelling in Uzbekistan are a useful starting point.

What Khiva reveals about the Silk Road

Khiva shows that the Silk Road was not only a highway between great cities but a web of branches, and that a branch town could outlast its own former capital, Urgench. Its prosperity rested on water from the Amu Darya, its rise on the river’s change of course, and its nineteenth-century splendour on a regional trade that included human beings. What survives in Ichan Kala is mostly of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is why the town reads so clearly as a whole.

On our Silk Road journey, Khiva comes near the end of the route, after the oases of western China, the Tian Shan and the Savitsky collection in Nukus, and just before Bukhara and Samarkand. Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you have two nights inside the story of a walled oasis city before the road turns east across the Kyzylkum.