Silk Road - Whenever this term is mentioned, people tend to think of it as being an historical route which connected ancient china to the various ancient countries in the west through commercial trade ,and scenes of the caravans loaded with silk, china, and tea making endless journeys westward through the desert road and numbers of kingdoms of the western region to reach the Persian gulf and the shores of the Mediterranean.

Silk Road, however, has a meaningful aspect in history than merely being a trade route that it linked up the ancient Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic culture with the ancient Greek and Roman culture and promoted the exchange between the Oriental civilization and the Occidental civilization.

Caravan bells have tinkled for over two thousand years on this road. It used to take a whole year and a half for a caravan to go through Xinjiang, and the journey was arduous, to say the least. Travelers had to fight against the wind, sand, aridity, frost, snow and extreme cold to explore and, above all, to keep their lives.

Silk Road, Now is a three-dimensional transportation network, with a network of highways and crisscrossing railways and airports, transportation on the Winding highways have reached the ¡°roof of the world ¡° ¨C the Pamir Plateau, and into the towering and precipitous Karakoram Mountains, and across the Tarim and Junggar Basins.

On December 1990 the second Eurasian continental land bridge¡ªthe western section of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railroad - was connected with the Republic of Kazakstan, Putting the China-Kazakstan passenger train in operation, thus extending the terminal of this Road further into Western Europe. On 1997 the train connection between Urumqi and Kashgar opened to traffic making it cheaper and easier to travel on the Silk Road.

This ancient road has increasingly become an important channel through which the friendly economic and cultural exchanges between the people of China and the rest of the world are realized.

Xinjiang is located in the center of the Eurasian Continent and had been a hub on the ancient silk road which began in the east, in Chang`an, the ancient capital of China,and stretched all the way to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, with almost half of the road in the territory of Xinjiang. Since ancient time, Xinjiang has been a place where the economies and cultures of the East and West converged and exchanged. Where countless historical figures had been active, leaving behind them numerous historical ruins and relics so that whenever the Silk Road mentioned, Xinjiang is also mentioned.

A tour on the Silk road will not be compelete without a trip to Xinjiang.