Kashgar

Assembled from 17 blocks · 2 evidence · 22 related

1. Story
2. Oasis city at the western end of the Tarim Basin, where the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan rejoin before travellers face the Pamir passes. That convergence, not size or production, is what made it decisive: everything moving between the Tarim Basin and Central Asia had to pass through or near it. Buddhist for centuries, it became a centre of Islamic learning under the Kara-Khanids from the tenth century. The Id Kah Mosque, founded in the fifteenth century, remains its principal monument.
3. Knowledge
4. Kashgar
5. Pamir Mountains
6. Connections
7. Pamir Mountains
8. Northern Tarim route
9. Southern Tarim route
10. Islam
11. Kashgar
12. Samarkand
13. Xuanzang
14. Xuanzang travels to India and back
15. Evidence
16. Eyewitness description of the Tarim oasis kingdoms, the Pamir crossing, Central Asia and seventh-century India, compiled the year after Xuanzang's return. It records the state of Buddhist communities city by city and has been used by archaeologists to identify and locate sites.
17. Argues from excavated documents at seven Tarim and Central Asian sites that most recorded traffic was local and small-scale rather than long-distance luxury trade, and that Chinese government military expenditure was the dominant economic driver in the Tarim oases. A necessary corrective to the popular image of continuous caravans crossing the whole length.