The Silk Road Is Still Open

The Afrosiyob train leaves Samarkand at 7:10 AM. It is a Spanish-built high-speed rail that covers the 270 kilometers to Bukhara in about ninety minutes, cutting through the Zerafshan valley at speeds that would have taken a camel caravan three weeks. The passengers are mostly men in suits, women with laptops, students with headphones. Nobody looks out the window at the cotton fields. Nobody mentions the Silk Road. This is just Tuesday.

Here is what most travel writing gets wrong about Central Asia: it treats the Silk Road as something that ended. A relic. A brand for tourism campaigns. But the corridor between Samarkand and Bukhara has never stopped being a trade route. The goods changed — silk became cotton, spices became natural gas, camels became freight trains — but the movement never paused. People have been traveling this exact path for over two thousand years, and they are still doing it today, just faster and with better wifi.

At a chaikhana outside Navoi, I sat with a long-haul driver named Rustam who was moving construction materials from Tashkent to Turkmenabat. He had been driving this route for twelve years. When I asked if he ever thought about the history of the road he traveled, he looked at me like I had asked if he ever thought about breathing. "This is just the road," he said. "It goes where it has always gone." He poured me green tea from a thermos that had seen better days and offered me a piece of bread that his wife had baked that morning. The hospitality was automatic, ancient, unchanged.

The Bukhara train station is new and clean and completely without charm, which is exactly right. It is a station, not a monument. The monuments are in the old city, fifteen minutes by taxi, where the Kalyan Minaret still towers over everything the way it has since 1127. But between the station and the minaret, there is a modern city of 280,000 people who are buying groceries, arguing about parking, checking their phones. The Silk Road is not a museum exhibit here. It is infrastructure. It is the reason this city exists and the reason it keeps existing. The caravans just look different now.

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