In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the titanic New Silk Roads project, officially called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Since then, some 150 countries have joined this initiative aimed, among other things, at building roads, railways and ports to promote trade with China. Ten years later, The duty visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two countries at the heart of these new trade routes. Eighth in a series of eight travel journals.
After traveling the new Silk Roads for two weeks, we chose Samarkand, the jewel city of the ancient Silk Roads, as our last stop. After returning from Namangan to Tashkent by road, we jump on a train which takes us, some 300 kilometers to the southwest, to Samarkand, an Uzbek city proclaimed a “crossroads of cultures” by UNESCO which, moreover, has it , inscribed on the coveted world heritage list.
With some 3,000 years of history, Samarkand, founded by the Sogdians, was conquered, among others, by Alexander the Great, who settled in his citadel, Genghis Khan, who razed it to make it his own, and Tamerlane, who beautified it again, thus restoring its glory.
As soon as we arrive, even though night has already fallen, we head for Régistan, a place in the heart of the old city surrounded by three immense madrasas, each a masterpiece of Muslim art which, brought together in one same place, offer incomparable majesty. Through the darkness of the night, the lighting reveals the floral, stellar and animal motifs that adorn the facades of the three Koranic schools — Ulugh Beg, Cher-Dor and Tilla-Qari — built at different times, but presenting a united architectural ensemble. and certainly dazzling.
Inside the religious buildings, interior courtyards, just as flamboyant, with their ceramics decorating every interstice, immerse us in the radiant past of this city which was for centuries at the heart of commercial exchanges between the East and the West. A fertile meeting place where cultures, beliefs and knowledge intertwined before the merchants, loaded with silk or other goods, resumed their journey.
A museum city
Today, the city is filled with visitors from China, Russia, Central Asia and Europe, a sign of the country’s recent opening to tourism. “Our president [Xi Jinping] told us that Uzbekistan is our friend. So we come to discover the country,” explains Tracy Lee, originally from Beijing.
Valerie, a 29-year-old Russian, walks through the “pearl of Uzbekistan” on the arm of her lover. “My husband has a friend who was born here. He told us to come to Samarkand and that we would never forget what we would see there,” she slips.
A frenzy that stuns Akbarjon, who sells souvenirs in the vaults of the Gour Emir mausoleum. “I work every day, I can’t take any breaks because there are so many tourists. »
Our eyes, too, have no rest, constantly charmed by this museum city. First by the Shah-e-Zindeh necropolis, of stunning beauty, by the Gour Emir mausoleum, where the Turkish-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane rests under a 26 meter dome covered with gold leaf, by the Bibi- Khanoum which was for a time the largest in the world, and finally by the Ulugh Beg observatory, an astronomical research center which had no equal in the world in the 15the century.
And we then think back to this wish formulated by François-Bernard Huyghe in The Silk Road or the empires of mirage : the Silk Roads are “proof of the interfertility of cultures”, he writes, “the symbol of a dialogue of the past from which the modern world could draw inspiration”. A dialogue perhaps lost over the centuries on paths traced by distrust rather than curiosity.
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-International Journalism Fund.The duty.