Kashgar

One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, sitting in the Tarim Basin near the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and for more than two thousand years the place where the Silk Road put itself back together. Traders coming east had to go round the Taklamakan, north or south, because nobody crosses it, and the two routes met again here, which is why a city in the middle of nowhere became one of the great markets of Asia. The Id Kah Mosque still holds the centre of it and the Afaq Khoja mausoleum stands outside with its dome and four minarets. The old city is mud brick, reddish brown, and much of what you see now is reconstruction. 782,662 people at the 2020 count, about 85.8 percent Uyghur and 13.5 percent Han. It became a Special Economic Zone in 2010 and it is the Chinese end of the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan.