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1997
Route in China (CHINA - Gansu province)
Bec2004-09-19 17:03:14
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Lanzhou
I arrived in Lanzhou around noon and found a nice room at the Lanzhou Mansions Hotel just across from the train station for only 3.00 US$. This is the station seen from my room.
I had been lucky in Xi'an but the odds evened out in Lanzhou for the Gansu Regional Museum where I had hoped to see evidence of early east-west trade was closed. I visited the university and found that for some unknown reason, I could send e-mail but nor receive it. As I had seen plenty of lamaist monasteries in Tibet and Mongolia I did not make the detour to visit the one at Xiahe and took the next night train proceeding up the Gansu corridor.
Lanzhou, located at the southern end of the Gansu corridor was of enormous strategic value as the bolt of the silk road to the west.
Gansu
Gansu province is a narrow corridor between two ranges of the Qilian mountains. It was an obligatory passageway between the lush, green plains of the ancient Chinese lowlands to the east and the dry highlands that lead to Central Asia and Persia to the west.
On the other side of this northern range lies inner Mongolia which was impassable by traders because inhabited by barbarian nomadic tribes (the turkic Hsiung-nu in Han times and various mongol tribes in Tang and Ming times) and still worse, the Gobi desert.
To the south, the mountain plateaus of Qinghai province were even more hostile to human life. The silk road generally had alternate routes along the way but here, traders and armies had no choice, they had to follow the Gansu corridor (also known as the He Xi corridor).
The corridor is mostly barren but a string of oasis like the Zhing Shue (clear water) Oasis shown here made it passable for trade and conquest between China and Central Asia.
Camel caravans, travelling from oasis to oasis through deserts like this, opened trade routes between
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See photographs from:
China Gallery
