Transport yourself back a thousand years. The Silk Road is at its height, and we are at its beginning: somewhere in eastern China, in a humble, windowless hut, dark and silent, without furniture or people. But if you listen closely, there is a noise, a faint rustling. It is silkworms gorging themselves on mulberry leaves. A silkworm's life is short and unspectacular: it eats, it spins a cocoon, and then is killed by its merciless human keepers. Its silken resting place is soon unwound, then spun into a cloth legendary for its exquisite softness and beauty. This precious material, coveted everywhere but made by a mysterious process known only inside China, now begins a long and hazardous journey.
The Silk "Road" is a misnomer, for actually it was many roads, many slender filaments originating in thousands of towns and cities all over eastern China. They threaded their way west, skirted the deserts of Turkestan, gradually coalescing into just a handful of trails hacked out of some of the world's most impenetrable mountains. If the bundles of precious silk survived crossing these formidable barriers--the Pamir, the Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram-- they then descended to the Indian Subcontinent. Here the Silk Road swiftly multiplied again, spawning hundreds, then thousands of diverging tracks that brought Chinese goods to Persia, Arabia and Europe, then returned the treasures of those faraway lands to eager Chinese connoisseurs.
With so many Silk Roads, then, how is the modern-day traveler to choose? Easy: most of them are barred, for they pass through inhospitable areas (see "Exploring the Southern Silk Road," which appeared in the last issue), or cross closed borders. But one track needs only a tourist visa to obtain access, and doesn't require your own four-wheel-drive truck. So let us sample the highlights of this fascinating and still-navigable trade route.
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