The Silk Road through China

The phrase "Silk Road" is a 19th-century coinage by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen — at the time the routes themselves had been quiet for half a millennium. What the term names is not a single road but a network of overland trade corridors connecting Han China (and later the Tang and Yuan) to Central Asia, Persia, and beyond. Silk moved west; gold, glass, horses, ideas, and Buddhism moved east.

Within modern China the canonical route runs from the eastern capital — Xi'an for most of the Han and Tang period, sometimes Luoyang — out through the Hexi Corridor (the long narrow strip between the Qilian mountains and the Gobi), past Lanzhou, Zhangye, and Jiayuguan, to Dunhuang where the corridor splits. From Dunhuang, the southern Silk Road skirted the Tarim Basin's southern edge through Hotan and Yarkand to Kashgar; the northern Silk Road ran through Turpan and Kuqa. Both met at Kashgar, where the road exited through the Pamirs into Central Asia.

Today the corridor is travelled almost entirely by high-speed rail: the Lanxin HSR (Lanzhou–Xinjiang) reaches Urumqi in roughly 12 hours; an extension reaches Kashgar via slower conventional rail. The full eastern-to-western trip takes a minimum of seven days at speed; fourteen if you stop for the cultural cluster around Dunhuang and the Turpan side trip. Add three days for the Karakoram Highway descent towards Pakistan.

Most travellers come for the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang and the Sunday bazaar at Kashgar — those are the hard endpoints. Between them, Zhangye Danxia, Jiayuguan, and Turpan's ruined cities are the strong middle. The corridor is hot and dusty in summer (Turpan is the hottest place in China, regularly above 45°C), and bitterly cold in winter. The strong shoulder seasons are May–early June and September–October.