China's northwestern Xinjiang region is culturally as much Central Asia as it is China. Look at the faces of men under their little square-shaped traditional hats, look at the women in traditional dresses of colourful cloth embroidered with hundreds of shiny buttons abundantly reflecting the sunlight. Listen to the sound of Uyghur music and of Uyghur language, in which 'good morning' is 'günaydin', just like in Turkey, 7,000 kilometres away. Look at the mosques, their minarets and tall iwan entrance gates strikingly resembling those in Bukhara and Samarkand.

Many peoples, cultures and religions have passed by the oasis and desert towns of Xinjiang, since more than a couple of millenniums the inevitable hubs of commerce and transit along the Silk Road. Marco Polo was definitely not the first Westerner to come here, there are records of envoys and exchanges mastered by Alexander the Great and of Roman visits along the ancient Silk Road. The Silk Road, ancient backbone of Xinjiang, splitting up in two main routes to circumvent the deadly inhospitable Taklamakan Desert, a scorching hot, giant heap of sand of a thousand kilometres from east to west and four hundred kilometres from north to south. On the edge of that desert, north and south, cities emerged, grew, prospered and eventually often disappeared into oblivion. Kashgar, Yarkent, Hotan in the south, Kuqa, Korla, Turpan in the north. They are on the itinerary you are about to explore digitally. Archaeologists dug up their mudbrick ruins from the sand, thus recounting the region's history of Buddhist influence acquired from India and Islam imported when Turkic khanates assumed control over the south of Xinjiang in the 10th century and in the wake of Mongol invasions of northern Xinjiang four centuries later. Much more cultural evidence of the past would be ours to admire and cherish, be it from the Han, Tang or Qing eras of effective Chinese rule, or from the times of Buddhist and Muslim dominance, if only not so many bulldozers had been indiscriminately at work at the time of China's Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. How many centuries of history can one all but wipe out in eleven years? A great deal, so it appears. But admitted, a lot of effort has been made since to restore things, even if restoration has at times been mixed up by the initiators with scientifically unfounded reconstruction and even if the multi-ethnic nature of Xinjiang's cultural and historical root is being concealed or twisted a bit too often. It's less of a problem for you who consult these digital pages – for which my sincere thanks - than for the people who are at loss...