Nexus - 0108 - New Times Magazine-pages

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could see long lines of workers constructing a real road. Sometimes we drove for miles through a multitude of manual labourers. Some were using crowbars and sledgehammers to break rock from the surrounding mountainsides, while others were using small hammers to break that into smaller stones which others would, in turn, spread onto the roadway. All the stone was moved from place to place by handcarts. They lived in this bleak and desolate place, housed in large camps of de- mountable corrugated iron sheds or rough canvas yurts. Later that night we finally arrived in Kaxgar, the “bright pearl on the Silk Road”. The Kaxgar Oasis is situated on the edge of the desert Tarim Basin at the junction of the Tien Shan - the ‘heavenly mountains’ - and the Muztagh Ata range. To the north, past the grazing lands of Dzungaria lie the rich pastures of Kir- gizia; to the south past the Khotan Oasis, the Karakorum Pass links the Yarkand Valley with Kashmir. To the east across a terrible wasteland called the Takla Makan, Yumen - the ‘jade gate’ - and the end of the Great Wall of China which extends to fortress of Jiayuguan ~ ‘the impregnable pass under heaven’; and two weeks by caravan to the west over the Russian Pamirs is Andizhan and the road to Tashkent and Samarkand. In the 3rd Century BCE, nomadic Indo-Scythian tribes crossed the Pamirs into Iran and India. In the centuries that followed, Kaxgar became a crossroads for trade and cultural exchange between China, India, Persia and as far as Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. Buddhism spread to China and Ceylon. Art and commerce flour- ished. In later centuries westward-moving Turkic and Mongol tribes occupied the oases towns of the Silk Road. Germany Invades Russia - Peter Krygsman