Taklamakan Desert

Assembled from 12 blocks · 2 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. A shifting-sand desert of roughly 337,000 square kilometres filling the Tarim Basin, bounded by the Tian Shan to the north, the Kunlun to the south and the Pamir to the west. It is not a corridor and was not a route: traffic went around its rim, following the meltwater streams that descend from the enclosing ranges and support a chain of oases. This is why the trade cities sit in two arcs rather than a line. Its extreme aridity has preserved textiles, documents and human remains that would not survive elsewhere, which is why so much of the primary evidence for the routes comes from its margins. The name's derivation is contested; the popular gloss 'go in and you will not come out' is folk etymology.
3. Knowledge
4. Taklamakan Desert
5. Connections
6. Northern Tarim route
7. Southern Tarim route
8. Han Empire
9. Han establishes the Protectorate of the Western Regions
10. Evidence
11. 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.
12. A transnational serial property of 33 component sites across China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, covering roughly 5,000 km of corridor: capitals, palace complexes, trading settlements, Buddhist cave temples, beacon towers, passes and sections of the Great Wall. The property is defined as a network of routes, not a road.