The end of one Silk Road

Before the discovery of the sea route to India, the Silk Road was the most important connection between the Orient and the West. Its last great era was experience during the time of Mongols, when the entire route from China to the Mediterranean was part of one collective empire. Interestingly enough, the trade route was never known as the Silk Road historically. It was given this name by a German geographer Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen in 1877. The overland link quickly lost its importance as trade across the seas developed. Today it has been replaced in China with the railway line Lanzhou-Hami-Urumqi.  While in China, my traveling group was supposed to board an overnight train from Liuyuan, Kansu to Turpan, Xinjiang.  Ultimately, this trip never came to fruition due to a safety concern on the rails.  Just two weeks before we arrived in the city, at least 27 people died during rioting in a suburb of Turpan. The security presence was heavy everywhere in Xinjiang and no one wanted a bunch of educators to get stuck in the cross fire between Uyghur’s overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minority and China’s Han majority.  As far as my vision of taking a train across the desert to experience the hardship of journey to the west, it disappears without a trace.

On October 2^nd, U.S. law enforcement officials shut down Silk Road, the online drug market.

(More Information available at: http://nation.time.com/2013/10/02/alleged-silk-road-proprietor-ross-william-ulbricht-arrested-3-6m-in-bitcoin-seized/#ixzz2gc0xbCgv) For whomever is interested in exploring this website, it's too late.  However, I did.  Before my trip to Xinjiang, I asked my students to pick a catchy title for my blog. I got an answer the next day.  "anything but Silk Road, it's a website you can buy drugs, heroin even firearms”, and my student was absolutely right. I clicked the website for the first time and that was also the only time I have seen this deep sea home page.