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T Magazine

T’s May 17 Travel Issue

Highlights

  1. Letter from the Editor

    The Silk Road’s Enduring Romance, and Eternal Influence

    Last May, when our known world was one way, we began planning these stories. By last month, when we were finishing work on this issue, the world was another way.

     By Hanya Yanagihara

    An 18th-century map from China purporting to be a copy of one drawn there in 1418, based on the explorer Zheng He’s travels around the globe. While some have claimed that it proves Zheng He arrived in the Americas before Christopher Columbus, scholars have questioned the map’s authenticity.
    CreditUniversal Images Group/Getty Images

  3. A Poetic Journey Through Western China

    For years, Silk Road travelers made the grueling trek past towering mountain ranges and ancient cities now lost to time. Centuries later, one writer attempts to retrace the journey.

     By Anna Sherman

    A temple on Crescent Lake at Mingsha Shan (Echoing Sand Mountain) near the town of Dunhuang in Gansu, China. Dunhuang was an important strategic base along the ancient Silk Road, near the entrance to the Hexi Corridor.
    CreditZhang Xiao

  4. How the Buddha Got His Face

    His image is so commonplace that you could believe it must always have existed — yet for six centuries after his death, he was never once depicted in human form.

     By Aatish Taseer

    A painting of a multitude of sitting Buddhas on the walls of Ajanta, the caves of Maharashtra, India. Believed to have been created between the first and second centuries B.C. and the fifth century A.D., the caves are one of the oldest Buddhist sites in the world.
    CreditBridgeman Images

  1. In Uzbekistan, Coming to Terms With the Country’s Dazzling History

    Central Asia was once home to several bustling trade cities. Today, traveling through them reawakens a distant, though not forgotten, past.

     By Aatish Taseer

    The prayer hall of the late 18th-century Juma Mosque in Khiva. Its design — which features more than 200 elm or other wood columns, over two dozen of which date back to either the 10th or 16th century — differs from those of most open-air mosques of the region, creating a more secluded environment for worship.
    CreditRichard Mosse

  2. How Silk-Making Represents a More Hidden Side of Georgia’s Past

    The sumptuous craft was introduced along the country’s trade routes centuries ago. Even now, links to this delicate tradition still remain.

     By Esi Edugyan

    The New York- and Brussels-based Swiss artist Nicolas Party created these paintings inspired by the Georgian landscape and art of silk-making exclusively for T. Here, a river runs through the verdant Greater Caucasus Mountains.
    CreditArtwork by Nicolas Party. Photo by Weichia Huang

  3. Follow the Silk Road, Book by Book

    Compiled by our contributors, a reading list for recreating the ancient trade route from the comfort of home.

     

    <strong></strong>The Rainbow Mountains at the Zhangye Danxia National Geopark in Gansu.
    CreditAlamy

  4. The Silk Road: The Route That Made the World

    In T’s May 17 Travel Issue, four writers retrace the land routes of ancient explorers, looking at food, religion, art, poetry and silk-making.

     

    CreditTk

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