On the Ancient and Reopened Silk Road between China and Pakistan

In the cold, dusky dawn outside the old British Consulate at Kashgar, in Western China, pony carts slowly gather, their bells lightly jingling. Street sweepers work in the moonlight, stirring up a whirlwind of dust as the first cry of the muezzin sounds from Id Kah Mosque. Suddenly there’s a burst of firecrackers, and a lorry packed with boxes lurches onto the street. The lorry is bound for Pakistan. It’s a 400 kilometer journey from this remote town in Xinjiang Province to the Khunjerab Pass, at 4,800 meters the highest border crossing in the world. From there, it’s another 1,000 kilometers through some of the world’s highest mountain ranges to journey’s end at Rawalpindi, the old quarter of Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad.

A thousand years ago this journey took months, traveling by camel, yak and mule. Kashgar was the western end of the ancient Silk Road, and the junction of its three routes leading from China to India, Tashkent and Samarkand and ultimately reaching the Mediterranean and Rome. A steady stream of merchants, missionaries, travelers, traders and invaders used this dangerous highway. Among those who followed the route was Marco Polo, the fourth-century Chinese pilgrim Fa Hsien and even that most adventurous of American presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, who traveled part of the way. Until recently the journey was as treacherous as it had been 10 centuries before. And for the past few decades, the Chinese-Pakistan border has been closed to all but an unofficial trickle of traders and nomads. But in 1978 there opened what Pakistan proclaimed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the 800 kilometer Karakoram Highway (KKH), stretching from just north of Islamabad to the border with China at the Khunjerab Pass.

The KKH marked the start of the gradual easing of border restrictions and the revival of the ancient Silk Road. On May 1, 1986, the snow-clad Khunjerab Pass was formally opened to foreign travelers, resurrecting one of the greatest adventure routes in Central Asia. The news spread like wildfire along the travelers grapevine, together with dire rumors of the journey’s hazards on the unfinished road from Kashgar. Not for nothing, apparently, did the Khunjerab get its name, which means Valley of Blood. At the Chini Bagh, Kashgar’s former British Consulate, a vital listening post in the 1890s during “the great game” (the shadowy struggle between Britain and Russia for Central Asia).

In a gesture of friendship, China provided many of the 24,000 men who were involved in the construction of the KKH. Frequent landslides and massive rockfalls accompanied the blasting work, an earthquake in 1974 blocked the road, glaciers knocked out bridges (including one named Friendship Bridge). By the time the KKH was finished, more than 400 men, one for every other kilometer, had lost their lives, killed in landslides, hurricanes or, in one extraordinary incident, when a pebble fell hundreds of meters to smash through a workman’s skull. All along the KKH are memorials in their honor. Though landslides and mudslides are still hazards of the KKH, they are nothing compared to the horrors of the old caravan route. In many places you can still see the old way, a frighteningly narrow track precipitously edging the rock face, supported by stone walling and linked across chasms and gorges by rickety wooden bridges. But none of the brilliance or bleakness of the landscape prepares you for the former princely state of Hunza or for Karimabad, its tiny “capital,” topped by ancient Baltit Fort, 1 1/2 hours from Passu.

Gilgit, renowned as the home of the original “no-rules” polo, was once the trading center of the Silk Road. Now given a new lease of life by the KKH, it’s a major junction for Gilgit-Xinjiang barter trade. No longer, it’s true, are you likely to see camels from Kashgar or yaks from the high Pamirs plodding into the bazaar, today the streets are packed with Suzuki pickups and private jeeps for the growing tourist and trekking trade. But Gilgit’s bazaar still has the unmistakable buzz of a prosperous, exotic market town. Hundreds of stores sell everything from Sri Lankan tea to German guns, Russian cotton to Karachi “moonlight” (a glittering synthetic cloth, all the rage in Kashgar) and, from China, shovels and spades, crockery and silk. A century ago, Gilgit’s only link with the outside world was a rough mule track to Kashmir, it took a month then to reach Srinagar. Now it takes 30 minutes to fly to Rawalpindi, a spectacular trip on a Fokker Friendship that skirts some of the world’s highest peaks. By road, along the KKH, it’s a mere 15 hours.