Journal

Genuinely thrilled to be speaking at the 20th edition of the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Paris, which runs 6-7 November, https://www.womens-forum.com/. And particularly delighted to share the stage with Rebecca Henderson.

One of the most memorable things I saw in Samarkand was a skull showing intentional distortion, presumably as a display of status, dating from the 7th–8th century. It was on display at the Afrasiab Museum – and was found at the ancient settlement of Afrasiab, once the location of ancient Samarkand. I confess, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sprang to mind.

The magic of Samarkand was only slightly dented by the fact that our hotel bedroom looked onto radio antennae and a Chicken Express restaurant’s neon sign. The Hotel Emirkan was a gilder’s delight, with gold, or at least gilt, everywhere. But it also gave us our first taste of power cuts and water outages.

We got a chance to see something of the mountains when we went out to visit Timur’s intended tomb in Shakhribaz, his birthplace, though his body never arrived. Once again, life was a fascinating blur of mosques, madrasa, palaces, mausoleums and necropolises. Though, to Elaine’s displeasure, the Siyob bazaar remained stubbornly closed for repairs.

Still, the absolute highlight of the entire Samarkand visit, at least for me, was the one to the observatory founded by Ulugh Beg (1394–1449). He was a truly remarkable figure – a prince, astronomer, and mathematician who ruled over Samarkand in Central Asia. His story is a blend of science, power, and tragedy, the tale of a ruler more interested in the stars than in conquest.

He was a grandson of the legendary conqueror Timur, or Tamerlane, who established the vast Timurid Empire. After Timur’s death, Ulugh Beg’s father, Shāhrukh, ruled from Herat, while Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand, one of the empire’s most important cities.

Unlike his warlike ancestors, though, Ulugh Beg was passionate about learning and knowledge, especially astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. Under his rule, Samarkand became on the great intellectual centres of the Islamic world.

He founded the Ulugh Beg Madrasa (1417–1420), or university, in Samarkand’s Registan Square, where mathematics and astronomy were central to education – a rarity at the time.

And then, around 1420–1424, he also built a massive observatory, the Gurkhani Zij (aka Ulugh Beg Observatory) – one of the most advanced in the world before the invention of the telescope. (I will cover more of his story in my third Substack post, published on Friday.)

Sadly, Ulugh Beg’s devotion to science made him a poor politician and warlord. After his father’s death, rival princes and religious conservatives turned against him. His own son, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, rebelled – likely under the malign influence of clerics who viewed Ulugh Beg’s secular and scientific interests as impious, akin to black magic.

In 1449, he was captured and executed on his son’s orders while on pilgrimage to Mecca. No wonder so many of the emirs and khans whose images we saw as we travelled the old Silk Road cities looked so haggard and haunted. But his legacy liveds on. Even if his observatory was destroyed soon after his death, his star catalog spread through Persia, India, and eventually Europe.

I returned to London feeling as though I had been on a pilgrimage, something that I will explore in my fourth Substack piece, to be posted on Saturday, 1st November. Will drop the link in here when the post is live. But this trip sparked a line of thinking that has also given a radically new slant to the book I have been working on this past year. More on that, I hope, anon.

In retrospect, Bukhara was probably our favourite Silk Road city. But then we arrived in the midst of a Biennal artistic festival, with all sorts of weird and wonderful exhibits scattered across town. And our hotel was smack bang in the centre of the city, which was a gift.

We visited many of the key mosques and madrasas over several days, but two highlights for me were the “Ark” fortress, a royal town-within-a-town, and, later, going out to the Sitorai Mokhi-Khosa, also known as the “Palace Like the Stars and the Moon.” This was a country residence of the Emir of Bukhara, built in the late 19th to early 20th century. These days, it houses a museum of decorative and applied arts.

Back in the city, I was also very struck by the Chatham-Ayub Mausoleum, site of “Job’s Spring.” There’s a useful link to the theme of the abuse of water resources in the region, which I will tackle in my second Substack post, to be launched on Wednesday.

The weather has been exceptionally kind to us, with open blue skies and warm, but not uncomfortable temperatures. Throughout, too, we have really enjoyed the food in the local restaurants – and Bukhara was no exception.

As we walked into Khiva, there was a palpable sense of entering a trading hub in a vast desert. These was a taste of dust on the air. This is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That said, much of the city now feels a bit like a film set, beautiful, but there to impress outsiders. Still, maybe that was always part of the game.

Once in Khiva, we visited a wide range of attractions, including the Ichan Qal’a, the ancient citadel surrounded by crenellated walls, the Juma Mosque, the Muhammad Amin-Khan Madrasa, the Mausoleums of Pahlavan Mahmud and Sayid all-Uddin, and the Madrasas of Islam-Khodja and Alla-Kuli, and the Tash-Kauli Palace.

For me, at least, there came a point where the architecture and decoration began to blur a bit, but the city is certainly impressive. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, 14th October, we walked through the city walls for the last time to head off across the Kyzylkum Desert – said to have red sands, though we reflected that they mainly seemed to be various shades of khaki.

Along the way, we crossed the River Oxus, aka the Amu-Darya, whose still vast expanse brought home the scale of the challenge Alexander the Great faced back in 329 BC when in pursuit of his enemies. But I tell the tale of what is happening in the second of my Substack posts, to be posted on Wednesday, 29th October.

Happily, we got to Bukhara with few losses along the way – but that is a story for the next post in this series.

I had long been fascinated by the history of the Silk Roads and the stories of the people who travelled along them, from Marco Polo to (more balefully) Genghis Khan. I had read books like Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game and much of Peter Frankopan’s magisterial The Silk Roads. All of which had whetted my appetite to learn (and see) more.

So joining an ACE Cultural Tours trip to the Silk Road cities in Uzbekistan seemed like a good idea. And a timely one, given the way that China’s President Xi is playing up Silk Road branding in relation to the digital, infrastructure and health aspects of his country’s Belt & Bridge initiative. These are themes I plan to cover this week in my Rewilding Markets channel on Substack.

In addition, I plan to do four posts on this site as a more personal (and briefer) series of blogs, one each on Tashkent (where our journey began) Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand. We arrived in Tashkent, via Istanbul, on Saturday, 11th October, and then departed for Istanbul and London again on Tuesday, 21st October. What follows in these four posts is brief summary of what happened in between, as we travelled the length and breadth of the country.

As I began to process the images of the trip, however, it strikes me that the overall impression given will be a bit glitzier than the reality sometimes was. So this seems like a good time – and place – to than our British and Uzbek guides, Steve Mastin, the tour director, and Muminov (said) Saijon, our local guide, who accompanied us throughout, but is normally based in Samarkand.

Before we set off, I knew little about Tashkent, I confess, though I do remember reading, as a teenager, the news of the massive earthquake back in 1966 – which destroyed some 80% of the city. It has certainly recovered, though the Soviet influence is still evident in various parts of the city.

We flew from Tashkent International airport to Urgench integration airport, en route to Khiva. And that’s the subject of the next post.