At the western edge of the Tarim Basin, Kashgar stood where routes from India, Central Asia, Persia and China met. Could one of its older names preserve a Sanskrit memory of that crossroads?
By Pooja Bhatia
Few cities embody the idea of the Silk Roads as completely as Kashgar.
Standing near the western edge of the Tarim Basin, below the great mountain systems of the Pamirs, Tian Shan and Karakoram, Kashgar occupied a position of extraordinary geographical importance. Routes arriving from China, the Tarim oases, Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent converged in its vicinity. Merchants could move from here towards Yarkand and Khotan, westwards towards the Ferghana Valley, southwards towards the high passes leading eventually towards Kashmir and north-west India, or eastwards along the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert.
Its modern name is familiar.
Its older names are considerably more complicated.
Among the names discussed in connection with Kashgar is Śrīkīrāti, a Sanskrit form whose proposed association with the city opens a fascinating but unsettled chapter in the historical geography of Central Asia.
In Beyond the Himalayas: Rediscovering India’s Forgotten Geography, Bharat Nanda examines Śrīkīrāti while exploring the older geographical vocabulary that connected the Indian world with the great oasis settlements beyond the Himalayas. Importantly, he does not treat the identification as beyond dispute. The book explicitly notes that there is no broad scholarly consensus establishing Śrīkīrāti as the definitive ancient Sanskrit name of Kashgar and presents the question as one requiring further linguistic, textual and archaeological investigation.
That caution is particularly important in the case of Kashgar because this city accumulated several names across different languages and historical periods.
A City With Many Names
The earliest Chinese sources knew the kingdom around Kashgar principally as Shule, or Shu-le.
Other traditions preserve different forms.
The Greek geographer Ptolemy appears to have known a place in this region as Kasi, while the seventh-century Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang recorded a form rendered as Kasha. Later Islamic and Turkic traditions produced forms much closer to the name Kashgar familiar today.
This multiplicity is precisely what one would expect from a major international crossroads.
Names moved with travellers.
Chinese chroniclers wrote foreign names according to Chinese phonetic conventions. Indian Buddhist traditions rendered places through Sanskrit. Persian and Turkic speakers produced their own forms. Greek geographers heard names transmitted through still other intermediaries.
Consequently, tracing one modern name backwards through two thousand years of multilingual transmission is rarely straightforward.
This is why Śrīkīrāti must be approached as a historical question rather than an established replacement for Kashgar.
Where Does Śrīkīrāti Enter the Story?
Some modern discussions of Buddhist geography identify Śrīkrīrāti or Śrīkīrāti with Kashgar.
One such tradition links Śrīkrīrāti with a kingdom enumerated in the Candragarbha, a section of the Mahāsaṃnipāta-sūtra, and cautiously identifies it with Kashgar, known in Chinese sources as Shule. The identification is described as possible rather than certain.
Other modern writers have gone farther and translated the Sanskrit expression in the sense of “fortunate” or “glorious hospitality”, seeing in it an evocative name for a city that welcomed travellers from several directions.
The attraction of such an interpretation is obvious.
Kashgar was, historically, a place of hospitality in the most practical sense. Caravans rested there. Merchants exchanged goods. Travellers gathered information about conditions on the next stage of their journey. Religions and languages encountered one another in its markets and settlements.
But attractive meaning cannot substitute for philological proof.
The important question is not whether Śrīkīrāti sounds appropriate for Kashgar. It is whether a sufficiently strong chain of textual evidence connects the Sanskrit form with the same geographical place represented as Shule in Chinese records and Kashgar in later usage.
That evidence remains uneven.
Another Old Name: Śailadeśa
The complexity deepens because another Indic form appears in historical scholarship: Śailadeśa, sometimes written Sailadesa.
UNESCO’s documentation of the Silk Road sites of India explicitly identifies Kashgar as Sailadesa when describing the ancient routes connecting northern India, Bactria and the Tarim Basin. In the same passage it gives older Indic names for several neighbouring places, including Yarkand as Chokkuka, Khotan as Kustana or Godana, Aksu as Bharuka and Karashahr as Agnidesa.
Older Indian historical writing also records Kashgar as Sailadesa. A twentieth-century history preserved through the Archaeological Survey of India’s digital collections similarly lists Sailadesa as the kingdom corresponding to Kashgar, alongside other Sanskrit or Indianised names for the Tarim Basin kingdoms.
This creates an important distinction for the researcher.
The evidence for Śailadeśa/Sailadesa as a historical Indic name associated with Kashgar appears considerably easier to document in established Indian historical writing and UNESCO material than the more specific claim that Śrīkīrāti was the Sanskrit name of Kashgar.
That does not necessarily make Śrīkīrāti wrong.
It means only that the history of Kashgar’s names is more complicated than a simple equation.
And that complexity is exactly what historical geography must preserve.
Kashgar at the Meeting of Roads
Whatever name different traditions used, there is little uncertainty about Kashgar’s geographical importance.
UNESCO describes the Silk Road as a network rather than a single road, with northern and southern branches surrounding the Taklamakan Desert. The northern route passed through Turpan and Kucha before reaching Kashgar. The southern route ran through Khotan and Yarkand before turning north to meet the other route at Kashgar.
This made Kashgar one of the great junctions of Eurasia.
To the west lay routes across the Pamirs towards Central Asia.
To the south-west were routes leading towards Bactria and Afghanistan.
To the south lay the difficult approaches towards the Karakoram and the wider network connecting with Kashmir and Ladakh.
To the east stretched the oasis chain towards China.
Kashgar was therefore not simply one stop among many.
It was where several geographical worlds met.
India’s Road to Kashgar
India’s connection with this network is well documented.
UNESCO identifies one important route through Srinagar, Gilgit and the Karakoram Range, while other routes connected India with Central Asia through Gandhara, Kapisa and Bactria. From there travellers could enter the Tarim Basin and eventually reach Kashgar.
Another UNESCO account of Himalayan trade routes stresses the importance of Kashmir and Ladakh in linking the Indian subcontinent with the oasis routes of Central Asia. Traders moved through Nubra and Ladakh towards Yarkand, while the same networks helped transmit Buddhism, art and other cultural influences.
These routes gave Indian merchants and monks direct opportunities to encounter Kashgar.
That matters when assessing old Indic names.
A Sanskrit or Buddhist geographical name for Kashgar would not necessarily have arisen from distant speculation. It could have emerged within a genuine network of travel and transmission.
Indian knowledge of Kashgar was part of lived geography.
Buddhism Across the Mountains
Commerce was only one dimension of these connections.
Buddhism transformed the Silk Roads into intellectual routes.
UNESCO emphasises that the Silk Roads carried religious beliefs, artistic traditions, scientific knowledge and cultural practices alongside merchandise. Buddhism in particular moved from India through Central Asia towards China, leaving behind monasteries, cave temples and translation traditions across the route network.
Kashgar belonged to this Buddhist geography.
The wider Tarim Basin contained some of the most important Buddhist centres outside India. Khotan flourished on the southern route, while Kucha became a major centre of Buddhist scholarship on the northern route.
Kashgar stood near the western entrance to this cultural world.
Travellers arriving from India or Bactria could pass through the region before proceeding towards the oasis kingdoms farther east.
Conversely, Chinese monks travelling towards India moved through the same western corridors.
The result was a chain of intellectual contact extending across mountains that modern maps often encourage us to regard primarily as barriers.
Xuanzang and the Memory of Kasha
One of the most important travellers to move through this world was Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim.
His journey from China to India and back remains one of the great sources for the historical geography of Central Asia. UNESCO highlights Xuanzang’s travels as particularly valuable because his accounts preserve information about the societies, religions and routes he encountered.
On his return journey in the seventh century, Xuanzang passed through the Kashgar region and recorded a name commonly rendered as Kasha.
This form is important because it demonstrates again how the same place could appear differently within different textual traditions.
Shule in Chinese historical records.
Kasha in Xuanzang’s itinerary.
Sailadesa in some Indian historical traditions.
Śrīkīrāti in another proposed Sanskrit identification.
Kashgar in later usage.
Instead of forcing these forms into a single neat genealogy, it may be more useful to see them as evidence of a city known to many linguistic worlds.
The Problem With Ancient Equivalences
There is a natural temptation when studying forgotten geography to produce simple formulas:
Ancient name = modern name.
Sometimes this is possible.
In other cases, it is misleading.
Ancient sources may refer to a kingdom rather than a city. A name may describe a broader region. Settlements may move while retaining an old political name. Chinese transliterations may reproduce foreign pronunciations imperfectly. Sanskrit sources may preserve names through Buddhist literary traditions that differed from contemporary spoken usage.
Kashgar illustrates nearly all of these difficulties.
Even the relationship between the names Shule and Kashgar has generated scholarly discussion.
This is why Nanda’s treatment in Beyond the Himalayas is valuable when it remains cautious. Rather than presenting Śrīkīrāti as an unquestionable fact, the book draws attention to a geographical tradition that deserves further investigation.
Such questions should stimulate scholarship, not replace it.
A Wider Indic Memory of the Tarim Basin
There is, however, a larger point that is far easier to establish.
Indian geographical and Buddhist traditions clearly possessed names for several places within the Tarim Basin and neighbouring Central Asian world.
UNESCO’s Silk Road documentation itself lists Kashgar as Sailadesa, Yarkand as Chokkuka, Khotan as Kustana or Godana, Aksu as Bharuka, Kucha as Kuchi and Karashahr as Agnidesa.
Older Indian historical scholarship likewise discusses these settlements as part of a region deeply influenced by the movement of Buddhism and Indian culture.
One does not have to accept every proposed etymology to recognise what this evidence means.
The Tarim Basin existed within the geographical horizon of Indian civilisation.
Its cities were known.
Its routes were travelled.
Its monasteries participated in Buddhist networks.
Its places entered Indic geographical vocabulary.
This broader conclusion is far more significant than any single disputed name.
So Was Kashgar Śrīkīrāti?
At present, the most responsible answer is: possibly, according to one strand of Buddhist geographical interpretation, but the identification should not be treated as conclusively established.
There are modern sources connecting Śrīkīrāti with Kashgar, including discussions based on Buddhist textual geography.
At the same time, UNESCO and established Indian historical material more readily document Sailadesa or Śailadeśa as an Indic name associated with Kashgar.
The existence of these multiple traditions should encourage investigation rather than embarrassment.
It tells us that Kashgar was important enough to be remembered in several cultural worlds.
A city at the crossroads rarely belongs to one language.
Its merchants rename it.
Its pilgrims transcribe it.
Its conquerors record it.
Its neighbours pronounce it differently.
Centuries later, historians attempt to reconstruct what each name meant.
A Crossroads Beneath the Modern Map
Kashgar today can appear geographically distant from India.
The historical routes suggest otherwise.
Across the Karakoram and Pamirs moved merchants, monks, envoys and pilgrims. Through Kashgar passed goods and ideas travelling between South Asia, Central Asia and China. Buddhism used these routes to cross continents. Indian geographical traditions preserved memories of the oasis world beyond the mountains.
Bharat Nanda’s Beyond the Himalayas uses Śrīkīrāti to reopen that older geographical conversation. The precise identification may still need stronger evidence, but the question it raises is valuable: what names did Indian travellers and Buddhist scholars use for the great cities they encountered beyond the Himalayas?
In Kashgar, the answer may never be singular.
Śrīkīrāti may represent one strand.
Śailadeśa another.
Shule another.
Kasha another.
Kashgar eventually became the name remembered by the modern world.
But beneath that modern name lies something more important than a linguistic puzzle.
There is a memory of movement.
A memory of merchants arriving from distant valleys.
A memory of monks crossing mountains in search of scripture.
A memory of roads connecting Kashmir and Central Asia.
And a reminder that one of the great cities of the Silk Roads once stood inside a geographical world far more interconnected than contemporary maps suggest.
Recovering that world is not about replacing Kashgar’s modern name.
It is about remembering all the roads and languages that reached it.
That is forgotten geography.
Pooja Bhatia is a media analyst and law graduate with an interest in history and geopolitics.
