Forty kilometres of mountain road funnelled armies, Buddhism and silk for millennia
The Khyber Pass climbs just over a thousand metres through the Spin Ghar mountains between Peshawar and the Afghan border. Persian kings, nomad invaders, Mughal founders and British railway engineers all fought to hold it, because this short gap linked Central Asia with the Indian subcontinent.
The main pass runs 40 kilometres from Jamrud, near Peshawar, up to Landi Kotal, whose summit sits 1,028 metres high and 5 kilometres inside Pakistan; a lesser stretch continues about 13 kilometres into Afghanistan. Asian Highway 1 now follows it. Villages in the pass belong to Afridi clans, and for centuries Pashtun groups such as the Afridis and Shinwari have charged travellers for safe passage, their main income and one they defended fiercely.
Invaders poured through it: the Persian ruler Darius I, Sassanid kings such as Shapur I, Saka and Yuezhi nomads, the White Huns and later Mongol raiders. Indian empires seldom reached beyond it, the Mauryan king Chandragupta being an exception. Trade followed conquest from the Kushan era onward. Greek influence moved south into India and Buddhism moved north, and the pass became a crucial link on the Silk Road, carrying silk, jade and rhubarb west while Gandhara added ivory, pepper and textiles from India.
Muslim conquerors used the route too, from Mahmud of Ghazni and Timur to Babur and Nader Shah. The Mughals struggled to tame the local tribes, and Ahmad Shah Durrani was the last great conqueror to march through. In the nineteenth century the pass became a prize in the Great Game, as the British East India Company tried to keep Russia out. Ranjit Singh's Sikh forces took it in 1837, and their general Hari Singh Nalwa built Jamrud Fort to guard it. Once the Second Anglo-Afghan War was over in 1880, Britain held the area and paid local tribes to keep the road safe.
British engineers laid roads, telegraph lines and, after the First World War, the elaborate Khyber Pass Railway from Jamrud to Landi Kotal, opened in 1925. The saying Khyber to Kanyakumari summed up the full span of British India. During the Second World War, rows of concrete dragon's teeth went up across the valley floor against a feared Axis invasion.
Source: Khyber Pass
