Treasures of the Great Silk Road

Turkestan – the great landmass of Central Asia and Western China – is an intriguing meeting point of civilizations. Four major invasions – Greek, Arab, Mongol and Russian – together with Persian, Turkic and Chinese cultural influences, have made their mark on this vast and sometime forbidding region. The Great Silk Road ran to the West through it, while nomad and urban peoples combined over the centuries to produce a cultural flowering under Timur and his successors in the late medieval and earl