If you get to buy articles like Hui Muslim hats, Tibetan bags, Kazakh carpets and colourful Qiang dresses or savour dishes like roujiamo, lamina and laghman, which region would it be?
The Silk Road, which is not a place but regarded as a journey - from the edges of the Mediterranean to the central plains of China, through high mountains and inhospitable deserts.
A new book 'The Silk Road: A Biography from Prehistory to the Present Day,' authored by Jonathan Clements, offers a chronological outline of the region's development and also provides an introduction to its languages, literature and arts.
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Clements lays stress on the fascinating historical sites which feature on any visitor's itinerary besides on the writings and reactions of travellers through the centuries.
He argues that historical accounts have an inevitable bias towards civilisations that leave a footprint and the Silk Road, therefore, is a slippery historical object.
"Entire civilisations have risen and fallen on the Silk Road leaving perilously little evidence of themselves," the book, published by Speaking Tiger, says.
For thousands of years, the history of the Silk Road has been a traveller's history, of brief encounters in desert towns, snowbound passes and nameless forts. It was the conduit that first brought Buddhism, Christianity and Islam into China, and the site of much of the 'Great Game' between 19th-century empires.
Today, its central section encompasses several former Soviet republics, and the Chinese Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. The ancient trade route controversially crosses the sites of several forgotten kingdoms, buried in sand and only now revealing their secrets.
"Fully experiencing the Silk Road requires more than a fridge magnet from the gift shop - break Shaanxi bread into small chunks and cast it into your mutton soup; hear the call to prayer outside a Kashgar mosque; feel your aching calves as you struggle up the steps to a Buddhist grotto; smell the faint rasp of sand in the air, even in a modern city. And then your souvenirs will truly be keepsakes, reminding you of those memories," Clements writes.
According to the author, there is an undeniable romance to
the Silk Road.
"The sand gets everywhere, in tough scratchy grains like biscuit crumbs, and in faint dust like talcum. The black winds make everything grubby and scuffed. The glittering towers of the new cities will soon turn brown and dull. The new mosques and temples of the devout will lose their bright tiles. Life on the Silk Road is a constant, Sisyphean struggle, as it is at Dunhuang, to keep the sand at bay. Travel on it, and know that the wonders you see, and now, you yourself, are but a fragment of its rich history," he says.
Clements terms the different cuisines of the region as cheap and ever-surprising treasure troves which are not to be missed. Some of the popular dishes are roujiamo, which is a burger-like bun stuffed with tender hunks of grilled meat and green peppers; lamian or pulled noodles and laghman, which is stir-fried vegetables and mutton spattered with incongruous tomato sauce.
There are odd dishes too like the one called da pan ji which is made of a chicken run over by a tractor and presented with a saucy stew piled high with onions and peppers.
"Even odder is apke or goat's head soup, which features much of the unfortunate animal's digestive system, from its lolling tongue still in its skull, all the way down to the reamed and re-stuffed intestines, which are turned into a long, meaty sausage coiled in a simmering broth," Clements writes.
