Samarkand After Genghis Khan: The City That Walked Away

In March 1220, Genghis Khan’s army took Samarkand, the Silk Road city. The walled city on the hill of Afrasiab, home for more than eighteen hundred years, was left behind. At dawn in Samarkand, a train horn sounds beside a bare brown hill, Afrasiab. The film follows the people who walked away, the Chinese travelers who saw the survivors in 1221 (Yelü Chucai and the Daoist master Changchun), and the quarrelling Mongol world of about 1270, and asks what Samarkand really was before Timur’s blue domes. No eyewitness account of Samarkand in exactly 1270 is known, and the film says so. Follow the full route, east to west (The World of Wayward):    • Start Here: The 1270 Silk Road Journey (Ea...   The novel behind this series is Wayward, a trilogy set along this road. Trailer:    • WAYWARD | Epic Silk Road Historical Fictio...   Part of Silk Road Cities, documentaries on life along the Silk Road around 1270. Watch the series:    • Silk Road Cities   Chapters 0:00 The Hill at Dawn 1:20 Marakanda 2:54 March 1220 4:19 The Survivors 5:54 1270 8:01 After the Ruin Sources Scholarship and reference: Encyclopaedia Iranica (Samarqand, Afrasiab, Central Asia in the Mongol period, Paper and papermaking), UNESCO World Heritage listing 603, Bretschneider’s translation of Yelü Chucai’s Xiyou lu, the Chinese text of Li Zhichang’s account of Changchun’s journey, Yule’s Book of Ser Marco Polo, Rolf Gross’s translation of Ibn Battuta’s Rihla, the Uzbekistan Statistics Committee, and Wikipedia (Siege of Samarkand, Chagatai Khanate, Ghiyas-ud-din Baraq, Shah-i-Zinda, Afrosiyob train). The Wayward trilogy These films grew out of the Wayward trilogy, historical novels by Fred Suh set on these roads around 1270. The books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/6502032990?... Music (YouTube Audio Library): “Tiburtina” by Schwartzy; “Sleep Music No. 1” by Chris Haugen; “Jomon Grove” by The Mini Vandals; “From Here on In” by Everet Almond; “Curse Of Old” by Density & Time; “A Distant Call” by Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, Tone Seeker; “Rain Over Kyoto Station” by The Mini Vandals. AI disclosure Narration: AI voice (Kokoro). Images: AI-generated (fal.ai); clips: Google Flow; maps: Natural Earth. These are illustrations, not photographs or archival footage, and were reviewed for historical accuracy. Corrections are welcome in the comments. Subscribe for more of the 13th-century Silk Road:    / @wayward-trilogy   Topics: Samarkand, Afrasiab, Marakanda, Genghis Khan, siege of 1220, Yelü Chucai, Changchun, Mongol Empire, Timur #SilkRoad #Samarkand #MongolEmpire