Browsing: Forgotten Geography
On the banks of the Karakash River, north of the Karakoram, Shahidulla once marked the point where the hardest mountain…
Beyond the Karakoram, in the great oasis city of Yarkand, Indian merchants once maintained their own lodging houses, shops and…
FORGOTTEN GEOGRAPHY Taklakot: Gateway to Kailash Before modern pilgrimage arrangements and motor roads, Taklakot stood at one of the most…
At a bend of the upper Indus, where Ladakh meets the Tibetan plateau, a tiny settlement survived for centuries because…
Near Demchok in eastern Ladakh, a small mountain stream has carried several names through history. Behind the modern Charding Nullah…
Between Dumchele and the great bend of the Indus lies a long stretch of pastureland that rarely appears in conventional…
Today Aksai Chin is viewed almost entirely through the prism of borders and strategic rivalry. Yet older routes across the…
Along the northern rim of the Tarim Basin, modern Aksu occupies the site of an old oasis kingdom remembered in…
The oasis of Turpan was one of the great meeting places of the northern Silk Road. Could an older Indic…
On the northern Silk Road, between Kucha and Turpan, lay a kingdom remembered in Indic tradition as Agni-desa, in Chinese…
Before it became modern Kuqa, Kucha was one of Central Asia’s great Buddhist kingdoms, a meeting ground where Indian learning,…
At the western edge of the Tarim Basin, Kashgar stood where routes from India, Central Asia, Persia and China met.…
Beneath the modern name Hotan lies the memory of Gosthana, a Buddhist kingdom where Indian, Iranian and Central Asian traditions…
Could an old Indian geographical tradition preserve the memory of the river system that sustained the great oasis kingdoms of…
Long before the Karakoram became synonymous with borders and strategic frontiers, its passes formed part of a great network connecting…