Silk
Road - is a phrase that conjures up
images of narrow pathways winding across vast tracts of desert and
snow-crowned mountain peaks, colorful steppe tribes and the rhythmic
jangling of camel bells.
Whenever the silk road 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.
However, the silk road 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.
Now, with a network of highways and crisscrossing railways and airports,
transportation on the Silk Road is a three-dimensional transportation
network. 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 the Silk Road
further into Western Europe. On 1997 the train connection between
Urumqi and Kashgar opened to traffic making the trip to ancient
city of Kashgar easier and cheaper.
The 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. It is now bursting
with new life. |
