Kashgar

city · earth

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.