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 24 The Old Silk Road If any place deserves to be haunted, it is the Old Silk Road. For amid the ruins of ancient Buddhist cities, once strung like prayer beads across the forbidding terrain of Central Asia, there have occurred more mysterious happenings, rich pageantry, magical rituals, sinister intrigue, heroic battles, and cruel massacres than the imagination can encompass. —audrey ronning topping, 2010 Before Halvor left Peking, he met with an old friend, the Swedish archaeologist , explorer, and cartographer Sven Hedin, at the Grand Hotel des WagonLits . Hedin was preparing for another expedition in search of the ruins of the legendary lost Buddhist cities along the Old Silk Road. He had first met Halvor in 1896 in Fancheng while mapping the interior provinces of China. Hedin had sought the advice of the veteran missionary because he was familiar with the terrain in Hubei Province. While both men sported stylish brush mustaches and dressed in Chinese clothes, Hedin, in horn-rimmed spectacles, looked more like a scholar than an explorer. His five-foot, four-inch frame barely reached Halvor’s shoulders, but he would prove to have the endurance of a giant. They walked the streets of Fancheng in search of local storytellers who, for a price, would tell legends about the lost cities. The tales had been handed down by word of mouth, told and retold for centuries. Like stars that emit beams light-years after they cease to exist, the lost cities, once strung like Buddhist prayer beads along what was then called the Emperor’s Route, have sparked the imagination of mankind for millennia. The storytellers told of haunted cities vanquished by ruthless armies and left to be buried with their monumental Buddhist art beneath the shifting “singing sands” of the Gobi and the dreaded Taklamakan, the Desert of No Return. The Old Silk Road became the first trans-Asian highway to link the two superpowers of the world—Imperial China and the Roman Empire. It was actually not a single road, but a network of trails twisting like silken ribbons through seven thousand miles of the most exotic and treacherous terrain on earth. Although some 360 once-thriving cities along the trade route have long since 200  home leave and return disappeared, the snow-tipped sentinels of Tian Shan, the Heavenly Mountains, still bear witness to the triumphs and tragedies of eternal China. The road began in Chang’an, now Xi’an, where Eurasian and Chinese merchants loaded precious silks, jewels, and luxury goods, along with their families and households, onto the mile-long caravans of covered wagons pulled by camels , horses, yaks, oxen, mules, and donkeys, to begin the trek West. The caravans rested at the caravanserais, strategically situated at intervals of from one to three days’ march along the route. These oasis towns evolved into great Buddhist cities complete with gold-encrusted palaces, elaborate temples, and monasteries filled with monumental works of art depicting the life of the Buddha. The Emperor’s Route achieved its greatest glory in the tenth century, during the golden age of the mid–Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907). By then, the Roman Empire had fallen, and Italy, Spain, and northern Europe were controlled by Germanic tribes. Although the Buddhist civilization experienced periods of peace, the history of the Old Silk Road was violent and cruel. For centuries, the cities had survived attacks by feuding nomadic tribes and competing Central Eurasian empires, but the death knell sounded for Buddhist civilization when the Uighur ruler of Kashgar converted to Islam in the tenth century. The Arab cavalry swept through Central Asia on a mission of rape and pillage, systematically wiping out whole populations. Rivers were diverted, irrigation channels cut off, people starved, cities burned. Most of Central Asia became Moslem and has remained so to this day. After the Moslem invasion came Genghis Khan and his Golden Horde. By 1211, the Mongol chief, on his way to carving out the largest empire on earth, had unified Mongolia and begun the conquest that devastated Central Asia. The Mongols destroyed any city, Buddhist or Moslem, that refused to join his armies or pay due respect. Migrations of whole populations began and continued for centuries. No one has recorded the full horror of those years, but when Hedin and other foreign archaeologists discovered the ruins of the vanished cities some eight hundred years later, they told of the desert strewn with so many human bones that travelers piled them up as trail markers...

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