The steppe and the oasis cities between China and Persia carried horses, silk, faiths and armies across Eurasia. These articles follow the nomadic confederations and the trade routes that connected the settled empires on either side.
Babur lost Samarkand three times, took Kabul in October 1504 without a fight, and beat Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat on April 20, 1526, with 700 roped carts.
· 1504Shah Ismail's Safavid army feigned a retreat outside Merv on December 2, 1510, then cut a bridge and killed Shaybani Khan, founder of the Uzbek state.
· 1510Anthony Jenkinson reached Bukhara on December 23, 1558, for the Muscovy Company, found no trade "worthy the following," and returned to Moscow in 1559.
· 1558The Sher-Dor madrasa in Samarkand carries a portal mosaic of a beast chasing deer under a human-faced sun, built for governor Yalangtush Bahadur by 1636.
· 1636Peter I ordered Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky to turn the Amu Darya and win the khan of Khiva. In 1717 his force was divided into five and destroyed.
· 1717Qianlong's monument, translated by Amiot in 1776, records the Torghuts' eight-month march from the Volga to the Ili in 1771; counts of the dead disagree.
· 1771Ármin Vámbéry left Tehran in March 1863 as the dervish Reshid Efendi, saw the khan of Khiva and the emir at Samarkand, and was back on January 20, 1864.
· 1863The phrase came from an 1840 letter and a 1901 novel. The events were Russian armies taking Tashkent, Samarkand, Khiva, Kokand and Merv, 1865 to 1884.
· 1865Kaufman took Khiva on June 10, 1873. The khan knelt June 14, ended slavery June 24 and in August signed 18 articles ceding the right bank of the Amu Darya.
· 1873The Draft History of Qing on the 1875 debate, Zuo Zongtang's march to Urumqi, Turfan and Kashgar, Yaqub Beg's death at Korla in 1877, and the Ili treaty of 1881.
· 1877Ordek forgot a spade at a Lop Nor ruin in March 1900. Going back for it, he found a second site that 1901's documents named Loulan, a Han-era kingdom.
· 1900A 2018 NASA workshop put the 1908 Tunguska blast at 10-20 megatons at 10 km. A 2025 paper traces its 80 million trees figure to an unsourced 1930s guess.
· 1908Moscow cut Turkestan, Bukhara and Khorezm into republics named for nationalities in 1924-25, on Stalin's definition of a nation, and revised them to 1936.
· 1924An IAEA table printed in 1998 counts 456 Soviet nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from August 29, 1949; the site closed in August 1991, a date the UN kept.
· 1949At 22:28:34 Moscow time on October 4, 1957, an R-7 rocket from Tyuratam put an 83.6-kilogram sphere into orbit. Its beeps lasted three weeks.
· 1957The world's fourth largest lake lost its rivers to Soviet cotton after 1960. NASA recorded the eastern basin gone in 2014; a 13 km dike saved the north.
· 1960A shallow shock under central Tashkent on April 26, 1966 left over 300,000 of 1.5 million people homeless. Official deaths were counted as eight or 10.
· 1966Rakhmonov and Nuri signed the General Agreement on Peace and National Accord in Moscow on June 27, 1997. A UN commission and UNMOT then oversaw its terms.
· 1997
