Silk Road China: The Historic Route from Xi’an through Gansu and Xinjiang

Leave Xi’an heading west and China narrows. The farmland of the Wei valley gives way to the loess hills around Lanzhou, then to a long strip of oases pinned between snow mountains and desert, and finally to the great basin of the Taklamakan, ringed by mountain walls. The Silk Road in China follows exactly this sequence, and reading it in order explains why the old route ran where it did: an imperial capital at one end, a defended frontier corridor in the middle, and oasis towns and markets beyond. This guide follows that corridor stop by stop, from Xi’an through Gansu and Xinjiang to Kashgar, as a way of understanding Silk Road China as a connected system rather than a list of sights. It is also the route of the first fifteen days of our Silk Road history tour from Xi’an to Tashkent, which begins with three days in the old capital.

Silk Road China in outline: capital, frontier, oasis, market

The phrase “Silk Road” is modern. It was popularised in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen as Seidenstraße, a tidy label for a tangle of routes that carried silk, horses, paper, glass, religions and ideas across Asia for well over a thousand years. Our general guide to the history and legacy of the Silk Road covers that whole network. This article stays with the Chinese section, where the geography is unusually clear.

China’s western route had to solve one problem: how to get from the agricultural heartland of the Yellow River basin to the oasis states of Central Asia without crossing the high Tibetan plateau to the south or the steppe of the nomadic powers to the north. The answer was a single natural passage through Gansu, the Hexi Corridor, followed by a choice of paths around the Taklamakan Desert in what is now Xinjiang. Two of those paths, one along the foot of the Tian Shan to the north of the desert and one along the Kunlun range to the south, rejoined at Kashgar before the routes divided again towards the west.

The opening of the route is usually traced to the Han dynasty. Around 138 BC Emperor Wu sent the envoy Zhang Qian west to find allies against the Xiongnu, the nomadic confederation that dominated the northern frontier. Zhang Qian was captured, held for years, escaped, and came home more than a decade later with reports of Ferghana’s powerful horses and of the cities of Bactria. Han armies followed. In 121 BC the general Huo Qubing drove the Xiongnu out of the Hexi Corridor, and over the following decades the Han court set up the four commanderies of Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan and Dunhuang to hold it. From then on, the history of the Silk Road in China is the history of a frontier: whoever controlled the corridor and the oases controlled the road.

In 2014 UNESCO inscribed a 5,000-kilometre section of this network, the Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor, on the World Heritage List as a joint property of China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. UNESCO describes it as taking shape between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD and remaining in use until the 16th century. Of its thirty-three components, twenty-two are in China, and several of them sit directly on the route described below.

Xi’an: the capital at the eastern end

Xi’an was Chang’an, the capital of the Western Han and, centuries later, of the Sui and Tang. Its vast grid plan dates from the Sui, who began building their new capital, Daxing, beside the old Han city in 582; the Tang inherited and enlarged it as Chang’an, with official markets where foreign merchants traded. That plan was copied in Japan’s early capitals at Nara and Kyoto. Because the caravans set out from here, Xi’an is usually described as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road; our guide to Xi’an as the Silk Road terminus looks at the city in more depth.

What survives in Xi’an tells the Silk Road story in layers. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built in 652, under the Tang, to house the Sanskrit scriptures the monk Xuanzang carried back from India after a journey of some sixteen years, and it is one of the Xi’an components of the UNESCO Silk Roads listing, along with the Small Wild Goose Pagoda and the sites of the Han Weiyang Palace and the Tang Daming Palace. The Great Mosque and the Muslim Quarter around it reflect a community that, as the tour itinerary notes, traces its roots to Muslim merchants who settled in Tang Chang’an. The Forest of Stone Steles Museum, the Ming city wall and the provincial museum fill in the political and written record.

The tour spends its first three days here. Day 2 is given to the Terracotta Warriors guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, and to the Neolithic village site at Banpo. Day 3 is a full day in the city: the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, a walk on the city wall, the Forest of Stone Steles, the Muslim Quarter and Great Mosque, the Drum Tower and the provincial museum. It is a deliberate start. Before the desert, you see what the caravans were connecting to.

Lanzhou and the Yellow River: where Gansu begins

On Day 4 the group takes a high-speed train west to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu, where the route met the Yellow River. Any traveller heading for the Hexi Corridor had to cross the river somewhere near here, and the city grew as a crossing point and garrison. Today the visit centres on the riverbank: the White Pagoda on its hill above the north bank, a stroll along the Yellow River, and a reconstructed water wheel of a type the tour page dates to the Ming dynasty.

One object that helps explain why the Han pushed west is in the Gansu Provincial Museum, visited on Day 6. The bronze Flying Horse of Gansu, found in 1969 in a Han tomb at Leitai near Wuwei and dated to around the 2nd century AD, shows a horse in full gallop balanced on one hoof. Horses were the strategic commodity of the frontier: Zhang Qian’s reports of Ferghana’s horses fed the Han court’s appetite for cavalry that could match the Xiongnu, and the museum’s Han collections make the link between trade and defence plain.

Between those two days the itinerary turns south, by coach, to Xiahe and the Labrang Monastery, a monastery of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism founded in 1709 on the Daxia River. It is a reminder that the Silk Road corridor always had neighbours: here the Tibetan Buddhist world comes within a day’s drive of the old trade route.

The Hexi Corridor and Jiayuguan: where the Ming drew the line

North-west of Lanzhou the Hexi Corridor runs for roughly 1,000 kilometres, with the Qilian Mountains to the south and a chain of low ranges and deserts to the north. Snowmelt from the Qilian feeds a string of oases, and it was those oases, not the desert, that the Han commanderies were built to hold. The Han extended their frontier walls of tamped earth and reeds out along the corridor towards Dunhuang. Some fourteen centuries later, the Ming chose to stop much further east.

That choice is visible at Jiayuguan, reached by high-speed train on Day 7. The Jiayu Pass was built around 1372, early in the Ming dynasty, as the frontier fortress at the western end of the Ming Great Wall. Its walls, gate towers and enclosed courtyards survive, and, as the tour page notes, inns for merchants grew up around it until the pass became a town. The group also visits the Overhanging Great Wall, a steep section of wall climbing a ridge near the pass, and the Great Wall Museum. If you want the wider story of the wall, our guide to the Great Wall of China covers its long history from the early frontier walls to the Ming.

Standing at Jiayuguan, the logic of the corridor is easy to see. The fortress sits across the narrow gap between mountain ranges; beyond it, for travellers heading east, lay the empire, and beyond it to the west lay what Chinese sources called the Western Regions.

How much walking is involved on the China leg?

The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate, which on the tour page means 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. In China, the most demanding stretches are the steep steps of the Overhanging Great Wall at Jiayuguan, the stairs and walkways between cave levels at the Mogao Grottoes, and walking across the open, unshaded archaeological sites around Turpan. City days in Xi’an involve a walk along the top of the city wall and on through the old streets to the Forest of Stone Steles.

Dunhuang and the Mogao Caves: the oasis at the gate

From Jiayuguan the group travels by coach to Dunhuang on Day 8. Dunhuang was the last Chinese-administered town before the open desert, and for westbound travellers the point of departure into the Western Regions through the Yumen and Yang passes. The ruins of the Yumen Pass and the Han posthouse at Xuanquan, both near Dunhuang, are components of the UNESCO Silk Roads listing. Eastbound merchants and pilgrims reached Dunhuang first, which is why the town became both a market and a centre of Buddhist devotion.

The Mogao Caves, visited on Day 9, are the result. UNESCO, which inscribed them on the World Heritage List in 1987, records that the first caves were cut in 366 AD and that 492 caves survive, with about 45,000 square metres of murals and more than 2,000 painted sculptures spanning a thousand years of Buddhist art. In 1900 the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu found a sealed chamber off one of the caves, now known as the Library Cave, which held tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and textiles. Aurel Stein reached Dunhuang in 1907, during his second Central Asian expedition, and took away thousands of items now in British collections, and other expeditions followed. That story, and the debate it still provokes, is told in our article on the explorers and archaeologists of the Silk Road, while our companion piece on the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang looks closely at the art, the manuscripts and the pilgrims who paid for the caves.

The same afternoon the group visits Crescent Spring, a small lake in the dunes, and the Singing Sands Mountain, the great dune ridge above the oasis. It is a useful contrast: the caves record what the oasis made possible, and the dunes show what lay around it.

Turpan: an oasis below sea level

On Day 10 the group transfers by coach to the railway station, then takes a high-speed train north-west into Xinjiang and the Turpan Depression, whose lowest point, Ayding Lake, lies about 154 metres below sea level. Turpan sits on the route along the northern side of the Taklamakan, and its archaeology shows how often the oasis changed hands. Jiaohe, built on a narrow island plateau between two riverbeds, was the capital of the local kingdom until about the 5th century AD. The centre then moved to Gaochang, whose king Qu Wentai hosted and supported the monk Xuanzang on his way west. The Tang annexed Gaochang in 640, and from the 9th century to the late 14th the Uyghur kingdom of Qocho ruled from the same city and paid for many of the Buddhist cave paintings in the region. Gaochang and Jiaohe are both components of the UNESCO Silk Roads listing.

Day 11 brings these layers together: the Flaming Mountains, the red sandstone ridges that appear in the classic novel Journey to the West; the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves cut into the cliffs below them; the ruins of Gaochang; the Astana Tombs; and Ayding Lake, now largely a salt flat. On Day 12, on the way to Urumqi, the group visits Grape Valley, the Sugong Minaret, a mud-brick tower the tour page dates to the 1770s, and the karez, the underground channels that carry water from the foot of the mountains to the oasis fields. Without that water engineering, Turpan could not have supported a city, let alone a kingdom.

Will the heat in Turpan be a problem?

It can be: the tour page notes that temperatures around the Flaming Mountains can reach 50 °C (122 °F) or higher, and the ruins at Gaochang and the Astana Tombs offer very little shade. A wide-brimmed hat, sun protection and a refillable water bottle are essentials, and it helps to pace yourself on the open sites rather than trying to see every corner. If heat is a particular concern for you, talk it through with a Tour Specialist before you book.

Urumqi and Heavenly Lake: a mountain interlude

Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, lies on the northern side of the Tian Shan. The tour uses it as a base for a full-day excursion on Day 13 to Heavenly Lake, an alpine lake below Bogda Peak, which the tour page gives as 5,445 metres, with a boat ride on the water and a drive through grazing land used by Uyghur and Kazakh herders.

After a fortnight of brick, earth and desert, it is a reminder that the Silk Road ran between mountains as much as across sand, and that the snowfields of the Tian Shan were the source of every oasis along its foot.

How are the long distances between stops covered?

Mostly by train and coach, with one flight. According to the tour page, the group travels by high-speed train from Xi’an to Lanzhou, from Lanzhou to Jiayuguan and from Dunhuang to Turpan (after a coach transfer to the station), and by coach from Lanzhou to Xiahe and back, from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang and from Turpan to Urumqi. Day 14 is a flight from Urumqi to Kashgar. Day 15, over the Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan, is a long road day: the tour page warns that smaller vehicles are used on that road, that there are no restrooms en route, and that a packed lunch is provided.

Kashgar: where the routes met

Kashgar is the hinge of the whole Chinese route. The northern and southern paths around the Taklamakan converged here, and from here travellers set out over the mountain passes into the Ferghana Valley and beyond. The city has been ruled at various times by Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan powers, and its architecture and markets show it.

The Day 14 sightseeing in Kashgar takes in the Abakh Khoja (Afaq Khoja) tomb complex, the Id Kah Mosque, which was founded in 1442, and the arts and crafts street, together with the old Russian and British diplomatic buildings, reminders of the era when the Russian and British empires competed for influence in Central Asia. Then, on Day 15, the tour leaves China through the Torugart Pass, at 3,752 metres in the Tian Shan, and continues to Naryn, pausing on the way at the stone caravanserai of Tash Rabat. The rest of the route, through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, is set out in our overview of the full Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent.

Is the China leg suitable for solo travellers?

Yes. The tour page describes the journey as designed for couples and solo travellers, and an Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout, with English-speaking national guides in China and local guides at many of the sites. In a small group, meals are shared and the long transfers are easier with companions who are reading the same landscape as you.

What the corridor reveals

Followed in order, the Silk Road in China stops being a romantic name and becomes an argument about geography and power. Xi’an shows the capital that needed the road; Lanzhou and the Hexi Corridor show the frontier the Han had to win to reach it; Jiayuguan shows where a later dynasty chose to draw the line; Dunhuang shows the gateway oasis and the faith that flourished there; Turpan shows how water and shifting kingdoms made an oasis city; and Kashgar shows the market where routes and empires met.

That is how the first half of our Silk Road journey is built. Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you move from the Tang capital to Kashgar at a pace that leaves time to see how each place depended on the next, before crossing into Central Asia to follow the road on to Tashkent.