Jalsa Urubshurow grew up in the United States speaking Mongolian. His parents had left for America in 1952 to escape Stalinist persecution, and his father was from Kalmykia, in the Russian south. When Mongolia became a democracy in 1990 he went to see his father’s homeland, and the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Dashiin … Read more
Dunhuang is an oasis, a green patch on the old southern Silk Road with the Gobi on every side, and Jangala, the hotel says, takes its name from a Sanskrit word for an oasis in the wilderness. It opened on 15 September 2021 in Qili, a town just outside the city, and a month later, … Read more
Peter Wong Man-kong, who had turned his father’s Hong Kong shipyard into an industrial group and sat in China’s National People’s Congress, travelled the Silk Road in 1992. According to Chinese accounts published at his death, he was struck that foreign visitors knew more about Dunhuang than local people did, and that the region had … Read more