The Silk Road was never one road

The term "Silk Road" was invented in 1877 by a German geographer named Ferdinand von Richthofen. The traders who moved goods across Central Eurasia for two thousand years had no name for the routes they were using. The name is a 19th-century intellectual construct applied retrospectively to a phenomenon that was never one road, never a single corridor, and never primarily about silk.

That naming problem matters now because the phrase "Silk Road revival" is doing a lot of work across government tourism boards, UNESCO press releases, and Chinese infrastructure announcements — and it is worth being precise about what is actually returning, who is paying for it, and why.

What the routes actually were

The Han dynasty sent its first envoy westward in 138 BCE, not to open trade but to seek military alliances against nomadic rivals. The resulting network of routes — plural, from the start — connected the Mediterranean to China via a web of desert oases, mountain passes, and river valleys. What moved through them was not just silk: paper, porcelain, tea, and gunpowder travelled west; wool, gold, glass, grapes, and cotton moved east. Buddhism spread from India into Central Asia and then China along these corridors in the first centuries CE. Islam spread into Central Asia in the 7th and 8th centuries along the same pathways. The bubonic plague, in the 14th century, moved from Central Asia to Europe following the same commercial networks.

The routes were at their most economically significant during the Tang dynasty's golden age and the Mongol period, when the Pax Mongolica allowed relatively safe passage across Eurasia for the first time. The opening of sea routes to Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries reduced the overland routes' commercial relevance. They did not disappear — they contracted.

The cities that mattered most were the ones positioned at nexus points. Samarkand, in the fertile Zerafshan valley of what is now Uzbekistan, sat at the intersection of routes heading toward China, Persia, India, and the Mediterranean. It was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220 and rebuilt. In 1370, Tamerlane made it his capital and spent the following decades reconstructing it using craftsmen seized from across his conquered territories — architects from Persia, master tilemakers from Khorasan, engineers from India. The Registan, Shah-i-Zinda, and Bibi-Khanym Mosque are the remnant of that effort. The architectural vocabulary is distinctively Timurid: enormous domes, intricate geometric tile mosaics, an aesthetic of mathematical precision applied to sacred space. Samarkand was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001 as a "Crossroad of Cultures."

Bukhara, 250 kilometres to the west, was the Samanid intellectual capital in the 9th and 10th centuries — a city that produced Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and housed one of the Islamic world's great libraries. Its historic centre, with approximately 140 surviving architectural monuments, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1993.

What is actually returning

In June 2014, UNESCO inscribed the "Silk Roads: Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor" — 33 component sites across China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The inscription formalised a political and cultural narrative: that these routes constitute a shared heritage worth protecting and promoting.

What changed Uzbekistan — the country that contains Samarkand and Bukhara — was not UNESCO but a change of president. Islam Karimov, who ruled from independence until his death in 2016, ran a closed, authoritarian state where tourism infrastructure was minimal and independent travel was genuinely difficult. Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who took power in September 2016, began relaxing visa requirements within months of assuming office. By 2019, EU and US citizens no longer needed advance visas. The results are measurable: Uzbekistan received approximately 1 million visitors in 2016. By 2024, that figure was 8.2 million.

The infrastructure change is real. The Afrosiyob high-speed train — a Talgo, built in Spain — connects Tashkent to Samarkand in two and a half hours. The extension to Bukhara takes just over three hours. The limitation is that tickets are extremely hard to obtain: tour operators and resellers book months in advance, and independent travellers who try to buy them two weeks out will regularly find none available. This is a logistical fact worth knowing before planning an itinerary.

The geopolitical frame

The most visible investor in Central Asian connectivity is China, and China's relationship to the Silk Road narrative is complicated. The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, explicitly frames itself as a revival of Silk Road connectivity — China building the roads, railways, and energy pipelines that were once the arteries of Eurasian trade. In December 2024, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: 523 kilometres, 50 bridges, 29 tunnels, passing through Kashgar. Expected completion 2028–2030.

The BRI funds infrastructure that enables tourism, trade, and Chinese soft power simultaneously. At the Chinese end of the corridor — in Kashgar and across Xinjiang — travel is possible with a standard Chinese visa, but the surveillance density is unlike anywhere else the traveller will have been. Police checkpoints, mandatory identification scans, and the political context of Xinjiang's Uyghur population make the Chinese section of the Silk Road routes difficult to engage with simply as heritage tourism.

Post-2022, Russia's traditional dominance in Central Asia is receding. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan all declined to endorse Russian actions in Ukraine, and each is pursuing what regional analysts call "multi-vector" foreign policy — balancing Russian, Chinese, and Western relationships simultaneously. For travellers, the practical effect is that the region feels increasingly open eastward and uncertain northward. Uzbekistan particularly has positioned itself as an accessible, internationally oriented destination.

What the Registan is

You arrive at the Registan in Samarkand and the scale makes you adjust your expectations upward before you have crossed the square. The three madrasas — the Ulugh Beg (built 1417–1420 by Tamerlane's grandson, himself an astronomer), the Sher-Dor (1619–1636), and the Tilya-Kori (1646–1660) — form three sides of a plaza roughly the size of a European cathedral forecourt, each façade covered in tile mosaics of cobalt, turquoise, white, and gold. The minarets lean slightly inward; this may be intentional, or may be centuries of settling. The tiling is not decorative in the Western sense. The geometric patterns encode mathematical relationships in Islamic art that were developed concurrently with the intellectual work happening inside.

Ulugh Beg was a working scientist as well as a ruler. His observatory outside Samarkand, still partly excavated, was the largest in the 15th-century world. The madrasa he built was a real centre of learning: mathematics, astronomy, and theology taught alongside each other. The building is still standing. The observatory is ruins. But the combination — ruler as scientist, architecture as knowledge — is the thing that makes Samarkand different from a preserved monument. It was, at its height, a place where ideas of consequence were produced.

Shah-i-Zinda, the necropolis northeast of the city, is quieter and, for many visitors, more affecting than the Registan. A central avenue of mausoleums built over several centuries, each using different elements of Timurid tile work. Some are cobalt, some mosaic, some painted glazed brick. You walk through them chronologically, from earlier to later, watching a craftwork tradition develop. There are no crowds at 8am.

What is worth going for

The routes are now practically accessible in ways they were not a decade ago. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan all have manageable visa regimes for most Western passport holders. The Afrosiyob train is the spine of a Samarkand-Bukhara itinerary. Bishkek to Almaty overland is a standard crossing. The Pamir Highway in Tajikistan requires a separate permit but is otherwise open.

What makes it worth the logistical effort is not the heritage narrative — the Silk Road story is now heavily marketed and partially manufactured. What makes it worth it is that these are places where very different things happened, in very different languages and religions and political structures, over a very long time, and the evidence is still there in the buildings. Samarkand is not a theme park. It is a place where the 15th century left unusually durable remains.

The connectivity is returning — by train, by visa reform, by infrastructure investment. What the routes carry now, as then, is not just goods but the influence of whoever controls the arteries. The interesting question is not whether to go. The interesting question is who writes the story of what these places mean.

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Sources

• UNESCO. (2014). Silk Roads: Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor. UNESCO World Heritage List. whc.unesco.org.
• UNESCO. (2001). Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures. UNESCO World Heritage List. whc.unesco.org.
• UNESCO. (1993). Historic Centre of Bukhara. UNESCO World Heritage List. whc.unesco.org.
• Millward, J. A. (2013). The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
• Frankopan, P. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History. Bloomsbury.
• Uzbekistan Tourism Statistics. (2024). eturbonews.com; UNWTO data.
• China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway groundbreaking. (December 2024). Various agency reports.