Five -stans where Silk Roads taught continents to meet
Central Asia usually means five countries, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, nicknamed the -stans after a Persian suffix meaning land. Silk Road caravans once crossed it between Europe and the Far East, and it holds the world's northernmost sand desert, at Buurug Deliin Els in Mongolia.
The Soviet Union's narrow Middle Asia left out Kazakhstan, but soon after the 1991 break-up the leaders of the four other republics met in Tashkent and declared Kazakhstan part of the region, the definition now most used. UNESCO in 1978 cast a far wider net, from Afghanistan and northern India to Mongolia. Alexander von Humboldt was among the first geographers to treat the area as a distinct region.
Before about 1000, most inhabitants were Iranian peoples such as Bactrians, Sogdians and Chorasmians, along with semi-nomadic Scythians. Turkic migrations later made it the homeland of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks and Uyghurs, and Turkic tongues displaced Iranian ones except in Tajik-speaking areas. Persian and Islamic culture, arriving across the Kopet Dagh, dominated high culture until the Russian conquest, while most nomadic invaders came from the north-east.
The landscape spans the Tian Shan mountains, the Kyzyl Kum and Taklamakan deserts and broad treeless steppe that forms part of the Eurasian Steppe. Much of it is too dry or rough to farm, so herding supports most people, and cities cluster where irrigation is possible. The Syr Darya rises in the densely settled Ferghana Valley and the Amu Darya in ancient Bactria, both flowing to the Aral Sea. The region is warming faster than the global average.
From the mid-nineteenth century until near the end of the twentieth, the area belonged to the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan still has about 7 million Russians, 500,000 Ukrainians and some 170,000 Germans. Squeezed between Russia and China, the region has usually been a battleground for outside powers, though regional integration has gained momentum since Uzbek president Islam Karimov died in 2016.
Source: Central Asia
