Which desert did the ancient Silk Road skirt around?

The Taklamakan, in western China, which caravans went around rather than across - the northern route along the foot of the Tian Shan and the southern along the Kunlun, both linking oasis towns fed by meltwater, and rejoining at Kashgar. The name is often glossed as go in and you will not come out, which is folk etymology but captures the local view.

It is a sand desert of shifting dunes with almost no water, and the oases it strings together were the actual Silk Road - the route was not a road but a relay of markets, with very few people travelling the whole distance. Goods changed hands many times, and so did religions, technologies and diseases: Buddhism reached China this way, and so, later, did plague.

The dryness has preserved things spectacularly. The Tarim mummies, found in the basin and dating back nearly 4,000 years, are so well preserved that their clothing, hair colour and tattoos survive - and their appearance and woollen twill textiles prompted decades of argument about who they were. Genetic work published in 2021 concluded they were a local Bronze Age population descended from an ancient north Eurasian group, genetically isolated but culturally connected in every direction, which is a more interesting answer than any of the migration theories.