Nine Cities on the Road from Gansu to the Mediterranean

Start on the Yellow River, where Lanzhou is the capital of Gansu and, in its page words, historically a major link on the Northern Silk Road. Today it is still a rail hub joining western China to the east, with a 2020 census population of 4,359,446.

Osh sits in the Fergana Valley in southern Kyrgyzstan. UNESCO estimates it is more than 3,000 years old, and its bazaar is said to have stayed on the same site for about 2,000 years as a Silk Road stop. Sulayman Mountain, a World Heritage Site within the city, is thought by some researchers to be the Stone Tower that Ptolemy described.

Khujand stands on the Syr Darya at the mouth of the Fergana Valley and is about 2,500 years old. Alexander the Great captured it in 329 BC and renamed it Alexandria Eschate. It was called Leninabad from 1936 to 1991, and it remains a commercial hub for northern Tajikistan.

Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan lies about 120 kilometers north of Tashkent and is one of the three Kazakh cities of republican significance. Its page traces its history to ancient times as part of the Silk Road, and it had a population of 1,274,296 in 2025.

Samarkand in the Zerafshan River valley was a crossroads of the Silk Road between China, Persia and Europe. Alexander the Great captured it in 329 BC as Maracanda, and in 1370 Timur made it his capital and drew artisans from across his empire, which began the Timurid Renaissance. UNESCO inscribed its historic core in 2001.

Bukhara lies on the Zeravshan River about 140 miles west of Samarkand. It prospered on Silk Road trade, became a major center of Islamic scholarship in the Islamic Golden Age and was the birthplace of the hadith scholar Imam Bukhari. About 140 monuments survive, including the Kalan Minaret, the Samanid Mausoleum and the Ark fortress.

Crossing into Iran, Tabriz is the capital of East Azerbaijan province and has served at various points as a capital of Persia. Its page stresses its position on trade routes linking Iran to the Caucasus and Anatolia, which kept it a center of trade and Azerbaijani Turkic culture.

Mosul stands on the Tigris in northern Iraq, across the river from the ruins of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. It grew into a major medieval trading and religious center, and it suffered extensive destruction during the 2016 to 2017 battle to retake it from the Islamic State.

The path ends at Aleppo, a major Silk Road trading hub and the Ottoman Empire third-largest city after Constantinople and Cairo. Its page says trade shifted away from land routes after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and that the Battle of Aleppo from 2012 to 2016 caused severe destruction.