Chapter 3 Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Tibet 85London and Washington at the time were willing to consider as they launched
yet another war into this “graveyard of empires.”
“Stan” simply means “place of ” in Persian, and hence the many “stans” of
Central Asia are cultural and political names that encompass the historical
regions of the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Afghanis, and so on. This
chapter will include these countries as well as neighboring Xinjiang (some-
times called East Turkestan) and Tibet, today part of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC), as well as the Republic of Mongolia. The history of this region is
rich and complex, and perhaps since it has not been the center of a regionally
dominant power in several centuries, it is not as exhaustively chronicled or
understood compared with its neighbors to the east (China), south (India),
west (Persia, Arabia, and Europe), and north (Russia). The dominance of
much of the region by the Soviet Union throughout much of the twentieth cen-
tury has earned several of the countries the label of “former Soviet republics,”
and some of these regional governments maintain strong if sometimes troubled
relations with Moscow in the post-Soviet era. Xinjiang and Tibet are suffi-
ciently different in their cultural foundations from the dominant Chinese cul-
tural historical narrative, and their connections to this central Asian region are
strong enough, that they are examined here as well, as is the culturally Mongo-
lian portion of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Mongolia itself.The Silk Roads
“Such a fuss over caterpillar spit!” wrote historian James Millward (2013)
about the fine Chinese silk that became the hottest fashion trend and scandal in
many parts of the world including the Roman Empire. The silkworm (Bombyx
mori), carefully nourished with mulberry leaves, produces a fine filament of
saliva that become silk thread after the little creatures are tossed into vats of boil-
ing water and plucked out again. “Caterpillar spit” was indeed all the rage in
Rome, as it was in China and many other parts of Europe and Asia. Silk produc-
tion had been a closely guarded secret of the Chinese empire, then the Han
dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), and it was extremely valuable and coveted on
either end of the Eurasian landmass. Some disapproving Roman writers consid-
ered the sensuous fabric to be both decadent and scandalous, but this did not pre-
vent silk from rising in popularity among wealthy Romans (Millward 2013:69).
Silk was only one of the many precious commodities that were transported
overland between China and the Mediterranean and beyond. The German
geographer, Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen (1833–1905), coined the
phrase “Silk Road” in 1877, 2,000 years after Zhang Qian and thousands of
travelers had been making their way across Central Asia. Horses, spices, and
precious stones and metals also moved along these trade routes, as did ideas,
diseases, and people. In the Roman Empire, precious silk was paired with the
rare purple dye of the murex shell to make purple silk, an exclusive fabric of
royalty. When the western Roman Empire fell, and Constantinople became the