RBSI - The Silk Road The story of one of the world's oldest and most historically important trade routes and its influences on the culture of China, Central Asia and the West By Oliver Wild, 1992 The

Posted on: 29 December 2011

The Silk Road
The story of one of the world's oldest and most historically important trade routes and its influences on the culture of China, Central Asia and the West

By Oliver Wild, 1992

The region separating China from Europe and Western Asia is not the most hospitable in the world. Much of it is taken up by the Taklimakan desert, one of the most hostile environments on our planet. There is very little vegetation, and almost no rainfall; sandstorms are very common, and have claimed the lives of countless people. The locals have a very great respect for this `Land of Death'; few travellers in the past have had anything good to say about it. It covers a vast area, through which few roads pass; caravans throughout history have skirted its edges, from one isolated oasis to the next. The climate is harsh; in the summer the daytime temperatures are in the 40's, with temperatures greater than 50 degrees Celsius measured not infrequently in the sub-sealevel basin of Turfan. In winter the temperatures dip below minus 20 degrees. Temperatures soar in the sun, but drop very rapidly at dusk. Sand storms here are very common, and particularly dangerous due to the strength of the winds and the nature of the surface. Unlike the Gobi desert, where there there are a relatively large number of oases, and water can be found not too far below the surface, the Taklimakan has much sparser resources.

Read more :
http://ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html

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In 2005 Ifollowed it overland from Beijing to Xian,Dunhuang,Urumchi,Kashgar,Bishkek,Tashkent,Bokhara,Samarkand,Khiva,Turkenistan,Mashed,Esfahan,Tabriz,Istanbul,Budapest,Vienna,Venice,Milan,Paris and finally London and the Royal geographical Society..took 3 months..great trip..

Wow! Congratulations Michael Abbott! And how entirely appropriate that you finished at the RGS! (As a Central Asia buff, you traversed the heart of 'my' country).

Few British travellers did the silk route in late 18th or Early 19th centuray.From Leh to Akashay Chin and to Tibet /Afghanistan,as these areas were once called part of "HINDUSTAN" and their experience described in their books are very inetresting.

It will be worth repeating the same.

Michael Abbot is just saying that to make us all jealous. :-(

Believe me...it was a long way,a very long way. I had a blow up globe with me and I remember looking at it Tehran and thinking..crikey..I seem to have been away for ages and I am not even half way home yet...would I do it again...of course..

my dream is to traverse the route as Sir Aurel Stein did from Kashmir ....wish i was born in 19th century, i would hve made it...(((

My family were involved in frontier life in the mid 19th century..there is a now "infamous" city in Pakistan named after one of them...I was able to visit some of the places Captain james Abbott visited in the 1840s..and in Khiva I was allowed to see into the room(now unsafe to enter) where he met the Khan and pursuaded him to side with the British not the Russians...great stirring stuff..

@Ajmal..I stayed in Kashmir for a month in 2007,it is one of my favorite places...and on the Silk Road trip I was lucky enough to visit the 1000 Buddha caves and to see the Uiger mummies in Urumchi..My Ph/D was supposed to be done in Esfahan,but it has been cancelled due to the political situation there..

Descended from THE Abbott of Abbottabad fame! I'm sure it must have been stirring indeed!

O boy, o boy, o boy.

There were 4 sons,all of whom were active in The Great Game.Their father was an HEIC merchant in Calcutta.General Fredrick Abbott achieved notoriety by blowing up the great bazaar in Kabul,(an act he regretted for the rest of his life).Gen Augustus was involved in the siege of Jalalabad,and General Saunders Abbott,from whom I am directly descended, worked with Sir Henry Lawrence in the Survey Dpt,fought in the Sikh Wars and was Commissioner for Umbala and later Hoshiarpur.After his retirement he was involved in railways in India.The final members of my family to leave India left in the 1950s...We were there for over 150yrs..Probably why I love the place too...