OneGate Media
German with English subtitles
1 x 45 min
Worldwide

Traders and discoverers like Marco Polo had to cross deserts or high mountain passes, heavily laden with silk, jade or spices. Today, China wants to revive the for some time almost forgotten connections as super-highways of world trade. ARD-Television correspondent Mario Schmidt has travelled along some of the main routes in China with his team, to see how it looks there today. The journey leads from the old imperial city Xi’an, with its legendary terracotta army, for several thousand miles into the Chinese mountain regions on the border to Pakistan. Schmidt visits the old oasis town Dunhuang in the province of Gansu, meets the discoverer of the colourful mountains of Zhangye and experiences a Tajik wedding, with a view of the 7509-metre-tall Muztagh Ata mountain. High-speed trains rush through the desert, passing old control posts of the Silk Road, modern motorways meander through the mountains as they pass by camels, yak herds and small villages: the old and the new Silk Road meet on countless occasions in front of a backdrop of breath-taking landscapes.