China Silk Road.

The Silk Road represented, in the past, an important link for trading of goods and knowledges between Europe and Asia. Nowadays still has a main importance in trading and development between the several cultures and minorities of modern China.

This section is in the Chinese province of Gansu. Its capital province, Lanzhou City, is the engine for a huge area. Its population is over 5 millions people and its development is unstoppable. Its position lets it be nowadays a link for trading to west and north.

In the southern area of the province we find the village of Xiahe. In Xiahe there is the biggest and important Tibetan temple of China.
( see "China Monlan festival": Photos -- "China Monlan festival": further information ...).

Travelling to north the Classical Silk Road begins. The itinerary goes through the Hexi corridor, licking the Alashan plateau and the Tenggeri desert, ending with the Taklimakan desert.

Out of Lanzhou the development is less evident and the landscape is typically rural. Driving to the village of Wuwei the road runs through high mountains and deep valleys. Wuwei is an oasis at the border of Tenggeri desert, where people tries to cultivate plants to resist the hard climate, in order to stop the desert advance.

Gansu cities long the Silk Road don't maintain the old charm that I suppose they had during the caravans era. They all feel the effects of Chinese economical development, and of mineral exploitation of the region. They are fairly developed and in their centres we can find several new buildings. After Wuwei we find Zhahngye, Jayuguand and finally Dunhuang.

Travelling to Zhahngye, for a long distance we lick the old Chinese Great Wall and the railroad to Urumqui,whose presences seems to remind a past when Mongols and trading caravans from Europe passed and lived these lands.
We arrive in Jiayuguan driving through a big and windy plateau, where agriculture is fairly developed, thanks to the water-holes made during the 60'es. Jiayuguan is famous for the Fortress built on the top of the Jiayu pass, dated 1372 and recently restored. This fortress was the last west stronghold of the Chinese empire.

To Dunhuang we still drive on a plateau and the presence of the desert is more and more evident.
The landscape begins to be arid and sometime scraped off by sand and wind. In Dunhuang we find the Mogao Caves, dated the Wei dynasty (350-550 a.C.) and Tang dynasty (618 - 907 a.C.). Their presence symbolizes the importance of the Silk Road for the cultural exchange between people since ancient times.

Han fall, in 220 a.C., meant the end of Confucianism and the beginning of the charming Buddhist teaching from India about Nirvana and personal salvation. The caves, in fact niches dug in rock, are a few hundreds. In several representations statues and wall paintings in them describe Buddha's life and story, his teaching, his followers. The references to Indian gods and Hindu practices are very frequent in many paintings and takes back to the Buddhism origin and diffusion. The sizes vary from about one meter of the smallest caves, to 40 m of the biggest one, nr. 96, in which you can find a huge representation of Buddha, 35 m tall. Thanks to the desert air lacking in humidity and rock stability all that kept wonderfully till nowadays.

Arriving Dunhuang we can immediately see the desert dunes of the "singing sands", as Marco Polo called them. These high dunes raise over 1500 mt. Their presence remembers us that now we are in the Taklimakan desert. Sometimes, from the top of the singing dunes, we can see camels caravans transporting tourists or supplies for the kiosks recently opened between the dunes. From a far point of view these caravans give a picturesque and old charm to this place. We arrived here through a main commercial and cultural road of the past, that keeps giving its contribution to the Chinese development today.