The One Book That Made Me Move to Manali | Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

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Gulshan Book Store, Srinagar

I feel, book shops of a place really hold the pulse of the region. And, i reached the Gulshan Book Store in Srinagar, as soon as i landed in Kashmir for the first time of my life in 2021. My interest in regional history to orient myself better in the present context, lead me into a prompting conversation with the owner who handed me a battered copy of Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk and said, “you'll like this one.” Reader, she had no idea what she'd just started.

Quick orientation before the story kicks off, because you'll want the map in your head. The Silk Road, was the trending travel itinerary back in the day and an adventurous traveler wanted a piece of its glorious trade benefits. Remember Marco Polo? A 17yr old Italian, mesmerized by the stories from the Silk route, traveled with his father to witness it first hand and stayed back to serve at the unforgiving court of Kublai Khan, Mongolia, one of the most powerful and rich markets of the world of the time for 17 years. The Silk Route in short was where everything happened and everything else was shaped. From religion to love, politics to war, from cuisines to architecture. If you think what you ate for lunch is indigenous of your country / state / region? Then fortunately / unfortunately you need to start all over again.

North & South Routes of the Silk Route

So, Silk Route was never one neat road, more like a situation ship with several branches. Starting from China spanning across the world until Persia, when a Persian kings obsession for Silk made the entire world move on their haunches. Around the Taklamakan Desert it splits: a northern path through Turfan and Kucha, a southern one through Khotan and Yarkand. They reunite at Kashgar like an on-again-off-again couple, then the southern route keeps going two directions: west through Uzbekistan's Samarkand and Bukhara, and south over the brutal Karakoram Pass into Ladakh, Kargil, Leh and Kashmir. I traced that second line on a map and realised, wait, that's basically my backyard.

Quick LinkedIn-style bio for Peter Hopkirk, except nothing about him screams corporate: the man spent years chasing obsessive, slightly deranged men across deserts nobody sane would visit twice, just to write 250 pages about it. You don't write a book like this unless you're a little unwell about history yourself. Which, fair warning again, is exactly the kind of person who ends up finishing it in one sitting. I did.

Here's the part that actually explains the title. “Foreign devil” wasn't Hopkirk's invention for drama, it's what locals across the region genuinely called the outside explorers who showed up in the early 1900s, because of what they left with. Centuries earlier, Buddhism itself had travelled this exact route out of Gandhara in what's now Afghanistan, carried physically as manuscripts and sutras into Chinese Central Asia, sealed inside cave libraries for a thousand years. Not just old books, sacred, priceless ones. Then a wave of very determined Europeans turned up and started boxing them off to London, Paris, Berlin. Foreign devils, indeed.

And then the actual plot kicks in, and it reads like a spy thriller, not a history book. Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, Paul Pelliot, a whole cast of obsessive, slightly unhinged men, all racing each other across the Taklamakan Desert like it's some 1900s reality show nobody signed a release form for. Kashgar, Khotan, Turfan, Dunhuang, places I'd barely heard of, suddenly felt like the center of the world. Half these men were double agents in tweed, mapping territory for empires while pretending to just love old pots. Sven Hedin was suspected of working for the Germans the whole time. I was hooked before I even hit the actual Silk Road part.

Then the part that broke my brain completely: the Library Cave. Near Dunhuang, inside the Mogao Caves, the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas,” Stein talked his way into a sealed chamber shut for almost a thousand years and found tens of thousands of manuscripts and paintings just sitting there, waiting. An entire civilisation's trade, religion and daily life, preserved by accident in the middle of a desert. I put the book down and just sat with that for a minute.

Markets of Bukhara, Uzbekistan

That's when it actually clicked for me, this obsession I already had with Central Asian trade. This was never just about silk. It's how food, art, architecture, religion, even language, physically travelled the world on the backs of yaks and camels, carried by traders who had zero idea they were shaping history, and definitely weren't building a personal brand while doing it. Want to know why a dome in Samarkand feels like it's in conversation with a monastery in Ladakh? Or why the pulao on your plate has roots in Persia? Read this book. That connective-tissue feeling, watching an entire hemisphere's culture trace back to a handful of trade roads, is genuinely what blew my mind.

The last chapters are the sobering part, and honestly, they matter more than the adventure. All these treasures, once found, got carted off to museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Delhi, far from the communities whose ancestors actually made them. Real cost behind a very romantic story. It's part of why I care so much about how I run trips now: see it where it belongs, don't just take from a place like it owes you a photo.

North wall of Manali as seen from my home

I won't lie, that book took my commitment in a way very few things have. Not casually interested, fully in it, like deleting the dating apps because you found the one. I started researching these old trade corridors properly, not a hobby I'd grow out of, something I needed to physically stand on, especially that southern spur through Kashmir and Ladakh. No wonder Indian Himalayas were on the hit list of every foreign traveler as it still has treasures from the past. Remember the antique shops on the mall roads of these locations? Understanding how badly i wanted to be on these routes myself, i chose to shift to Manali from Sikkim in 2022. From there on how i saw Manali, completely changed and became the Gateway of Trans Himalayas, the launch pad for Passes and the trade center than a overconsumed tourist spot. My love for Manali gradually took its shape :)

Tap on the link to checkout the Pashmina Route

Cut to now, i make real road expeditions and tours around these trade branches as a way to learn more, share more and create more!

And that's the honest, slightly embarrassing origin story behind something I'm about to tell you more about: we're building an actual tour out of a section of that exact route. Not the Uzbekistan stretch, the other one, the mountain spur through Zanskar, Kargil and down into Kashmir. The same wool road these traders and explorers were obsessed with, now something you can actually walk, or drive, yourself.

Check out the Pashmina route story here.

All because a bookstore owner in Srinagar handed me the right book at the right time.

More soon.