Tashkent

Old chaikhanas and bright avenues; the oasis turns to the future.

Tashkent—'the Stone City'—is the largest metropolis in Central Asia and one of its oldest oases, a caravan halt on the road for two thousand years. Rebuilt grandly after the 1966 earthquake, it now braids Soviet boulevards, soaring modern towers, and the surviving lanes of the old town with their chaikhanas and the great Chorsu bazaar.

Here the journey leaves the deep desert behind and gathers itself in a working capital, where the rhythms of trade still hum beneath a 21st-century skyline. Tashkent is the hinge between the antique Silk Road of Samarkand and Bukhara and the steppe roads climbing toward Kazakhstan and China. We pause in the oasis-turned-capital before the road bends north.

The oldest oasis, awake to the future.