The Road That Never Was

Silk Road. Richly redolent with romance and mystery, this title, or its German version Seidenstrasse was first heard in 1877 when Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen (1833-1905), the renowned traveller and geographer from Germany coined it. This was the road network radiating out from China to reach Europe via the great landmass of Central Asia.

The name smacks of travel and high adventure through hundreds of years of travellers harried by bandits and storm, either stinging sand or driven snow. Travel on this road was anxiety-making; it was travel to produce exciting yarns as we know from the works of Wilhelm von Rubruk, Jacopo de Ancona and Marco Polo. In the latter Middle Ages, came the Jesuit priests to claim heathen souls in the name of their god. And then there were the foreign devils, as they have been called, during the 19th century, men who served the imperial cause either of Czarist Russia or Victorian Britain.

The Silk Road has seen it all and in those more than two millenniums that it has been a well-frequented travel and trade route, it has become loaded with glamour, glory and romance. Stretching westward from eastern China, the road trifurcated at the town of Anxi to skirt the Takla Makan Desert, The two southern branches met at Kashgar to travel down to Bactra, modern Balkh or Mazar Sharif in Afghanistan, while the northern branch went through the Ferghana valley to Samarkand. Thence ever westward through Merv, it finally reached the marts of the Levant and the fabulous city of Constantinople.

No branch of the Silk Road entered what is now Pakistan. Yet many erroneously believe that the Karakoram Highway connecting Islamabad with Kashgar is the Silk Road. For starters, the Karakoram Highway, or KKH as it is commonly known, was completed only in the 1980s. Before that there was a sort of road connecting Gilgit with Hunza. Today brochures of the tourism department bill the Karakoram Highway as the Silk Road. But a reading of material left behind by Victorian explorers show that no trade ever went up or down the road between Gilgit through Hunza and into the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Gilgit, sitting on a great east-west north-south axis is not known to have ever been a major trading centre. There is no doubt that it did bustle with some little local trade going as far north as Hunza, east to Skardu and to nearby towns west of it.

This does not mean that there was no ancient road leading down from Kashgar through Hunza Valley to Gilgit and farther south. The remnants of the old road you see clinging to the mountainside is the one by which folks travelled between Hunza and Gilgit before 1983 when the Karakoram Highway was completed.

However, this was not the Silk Road.

And so we set out to right one untruth by travelling up the Karakoram Highway hoping also to provide a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people we meet on the way. From Hasanabdal to Mansehra we were on the KKH proper. Owing to the upgrading work the Chinese are busily executing in the Indus Gorge above Thakot, we gave up KKH to travel direct north through Kaghan Valley. Over the Babusar Pass, we once again joined KKH at Chilas and drove on to Gilgit. Thence to Hunza and finally all the way to Khunjerab Pass. We returned the same route.

On the way we paused at various mountain towns to look into the lives of ordinary people. A shopkeeper in Shogran, a Pakhtun tourist and his family in Naran, the girls who manage restaurants and run a woodwork workshop in Altit (Hunza) and visitors at Khunjerab Pass brought gaiety and colour to our documentary.

Near Gulmit we took time out to leave the highway and walk up a bit along Passu Glacier to talk to shepherds in their high altitude pastures. A bunch of young men utilising the summer school and college break to work as porters for trekking and climbing teams gave us a great insight into the lives of these wonderful mountain people.

We saw that the supposititious name Silk Road was appended upon KKH by tour operators and babus of the tourism department. Sadly, in this telling of untruth, the true glamour of Karakoram Highway was lost. Visitors are no longer mindful of the fact that many precious lives, both Chinese and Pakistani, were lost in the building of the road. Few know that the effort of carving out a road in a region as unforgiving geologically and geographically as the Karakoram Mountains was superhuman and therefore highly admirable.

And to top the glamour aspect of KKH, the border at Khunjerab Pass sitting at about 4700 metres above the sea is the highest paved international border crossing anywhere in the world!

This documentary shows that rather than celebrating KKH as the Silk Road – which it is not – we need to celebrate it for what it is: the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World.

– written by Salman Rashid in July 2016