The Central Asian Steppe and Great Silk Road

The Central Asian steppe forms the western arm of the Eurasian Steppe Belt, an almost unbroken grassland corridor running some 8,000 kilometers from Manchuria to the Hungarian Plain, and its Kazakh sector alone covers roughly 804,000 square kilometers, making it the largest dry steppe region on Earth. Bounded by the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea in the west, the Tian Shan and Altai ranges in the east, and the Siberian taiga to the north, the steppe is a temperate grassland of short bunchgrasses and feather grass (Stipa) shaped by a sharply continental climate: summers in the Kazakh steppe city of Astana (renamed Nur-Sultan from 2019 to 2022 and then reverted to Astana) can exceed 35°C, while winters regularly fall below minus 30°C. This climatic extremity, combined with low and unreliable rainfall averaging 200 to 400 millimeters a year, made large-scale sedentary agriculture difficult across most of the region before Soviet-era irrigation, and instead favored extensive pastoral nomadism organized around seasonal migration between summer pastures (jailoo) and winter shelters (qystau).