Xinjiang Silk Road Journey: 8 Days from Turpan to Kashgar

Meet in Urumqi, the most landlocked major city on earth, 2,500 kilometres from the nearest ocean. The afternoon is for the regional museum — whose highlight is the Tarim mummies, four-thousand-year-old Europeans with reddish hair and woven wool, buried in the desert's salt-dry sand and uncovered by archaeology in the 1970s onward. They reset everything you thought you knew about who lived here first.

Dinner in the grand bazaar quarter: lamb skewers over tamarisk coals, naan the size of a wheel, and your first taste of Xinjiang's rice pilaf, polo, rich with carrot and mutton fat.

Drive into the Turpan depression and feel the land drop below the sea. Begin with the karez — visit a working channel and see the wells and underground galleries that carry snowmelt from the Bogda range without losing a drop to the sun. Turpan without karez is uninhabitable; with them, it has been a vineyard for two thousand years.

At the day's cool end, the Jiaohe ruins: an entire city carved downward into a plateau between two river beds, abandoned in the Yuan era and left standing like a vase-shaped shadow of itself. UNESCO-listed in 2014 as part of the silk roads serial property. Dinner in a vineyard trellis — the grapes hang overhead, and the raisins dry in air-vented brick drying houses you will see everywhere.

Out early to the Bezeklik thousand Buddha caves, cut into a cliff above the Mutou valley on the Flaming mountains' flank — where the monk Xuanzang is said to have passed and preached in the 630s on his way to India. The remaining murals were badly stripped by German expeditions in 1905-13; the cuts where the panels were sawn out are part of the story, and the rebuilt panels hang in Berlin.

The rest of the day belongs to the oasis: the Emin minaret (1777, the tallest earthen minaret in China), a family lunch of laghman noodles hand-pulled to drumbeat, and the Suleiman's hill viewpoint over the whole depression at dusk.

The long driving day, broken deliberately: lake Bosten's reed shores for lunch, the iron gate pass at Korla, then south into Kuqa (ancient Kucha) by evening. Kuqa was one of the great Buddhist kingdoms of the silk road — the translator Kumarajiva, who carried the sutras into Chinese in the 4th-5th century, was born here to a Kuchean mother and an Indian father.

Evening in Kuqa's old quarter: the grand mosque, the night bazaar's baked buns and yogurt, and the sound of the rawap — the Uyghur lute this town is known for.

West along the Muzart river valley to the Kizil caves, cut from roughly the 3rd century — earlier than Mogao, and painted in a style scholars call Kuchean: strong blues from lapis lazuli, diamond-rhombus compositions dividing ceilings into hundreds of tale-tiles.

Like Bezeklik, the caves carry the scars of the 1905-13 expeditions; your guide reads what remains with honesty about what was taken. Return by the Kuqa grand canyon, a slot of red sandstone deep enough to hold snow in June, and a detour to the Subash ruins — the city temple complex where Kumarajiva studied.

Fly the leg the caravans took a month to walk, over the Taklamakan's western horn, and land in Kashgar by midday. The old city — two square kilometres of lanes, courtyards and overhanging workshops built of rammed earth and timber — is the finest surviving example of a silk road town anywhere on the routes.

Take it on foot in the late afternoon: the potter's lane, the coppersmiths at their anvils, the bread bakers whose naan ovens are sunk into the city wall itself. The Id Kah mosque faces the square; the old city curls around it like a shell.

Morning at the Apak Hoja tomb — the tiled dome the English called the tomb of the fragrant concubine, wrapping the family who ruled the oasis for the Qing in the 18th century. The tilework is the finest in Xinjiang.

The afternoon is Kashgar's Sunday bazaar spirit in whatever day it is: the livestock market outside town if it is a Sunday (goats, camels, and the horse-traders' handshake protocol), otherwise the international bazaar's corridors of silk, knives and dried fruit. End with a long tea in the hundred-year teahouse upstairs over the street, where the men play and the dumplings come with the view.

Transfer for onward flights — over the Karakoram toward Pakistan if your journey continues that way, or back across China. If the Karakoram highway calls, the Khunjerab pass journey can be built as an extension; ask us.