FoxClocks. Timely News.

Some Trivia
Afghanistan is 4½ hours ahead of Greenwich. Should you leave Afghanistan at its remote north-eastern border with China, though, don’t forget to set your watch 3½ hours forward to Chinese Standard Time (GMT+8). This is the greatest time change on the planet; jet-lag by foot, it seems, is possible.

Such a dramatic change is primarily due to the fact that China - uniquely for a country of its size - has a single time zone, convenient only for Beijing and Eastern China. Presumably this is something of a political statement by the Chinese Government. The time changes at China’s border crossings with Tajikistan and Pakistan - both GMT+5 - are almost as precipitous.

More fundamentally, it is remarkable that Afghanistan and China share a border at all. The narrow finger of Afghanistan reaching out north-east to touch China is known as the Wakhan Corridor (Google Maps, Google Earth). Its borders were established by a number of boundary agreements between the Russian and British Empires in the late Nineteeth Century to act as a buffer zone between British India and Russian Central Asia^[1]. These agreements ceded to Aghanistan territory between the Amu Darya to the north (the River Oxus of Antiquity) and the Hindu Kush to the south. East of Lake Sarikol, the supposed source of the Amu Darya, the northen edge of the Wakhan corridor was sufficiently remote that it was not demarcated until 1895. Afghanistan and China demarcated their border only in 1963^[2], although this must have been something of a formality, given the region’s major watersheds.

And so today, at the far eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, on top of the Wakhjir Pass almost five kilometres above sea level, you can look east 210 minutes into the future.

A little more about the Wakhjir Pass
The Wakhan Corridor and the Wakhjir Pass in particular are remarkable for more than temporal peculiarities. The Wakhjir Pass is at the confluence of three of the world’s great mountain ranges: the Karakoram to the south-east, the Hindu Kush to the south and the Pamir to the north. It lays on what was once the main route between Yarkand and Kabul, one of the many Silk Roads; Marco Polo may or may not have crossed, but his namesake sheep still frequent the area. During the Great Game, Lord Curzon and Sir Francis Younghusband passed this way. Other visitors include HW Tilman, Sir Aurel Stein and perhaps the 7th Century Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang.

The pass may also be very close to the true source of the Oxus. Curzon and Tilman and were both of the opinion that the Oxus rises not in Lake Sarikol, but from a small ice-cave about ten kilometres south of the Wakhjir. It seems that the ice-cave still exists. Interestingly, Tilman writes:

“Wood’s great journey of 1838 and his discovery of the lake [Sarikol] to which he gave the name Victoria was thought to have settled the matter, and the Pamir river issuing from that lake was held to be the true parent stream. It was upon this geographical basis that the Boundary Agreement of 1872 with Russia was made.”

If this is the case, and the true source of the Oxus lies south of the Wakhjir Pass, huge tracts of the Wakhan Corridor should have fallen to the Russians, and Afghanistan and China would not share a border at all.

The Wakhan Corridor has seen few outsiders since the decline of the Silk Roads six hundred years ago and the Wakhjir Pass has been effectively closed since Mao’s Communists took power in 1949. Recent visitors to the region include the biologist and conservationist George Schaller^[3] (2004), John Mock and Kimberley O’Neil^[4] (also 2004) and Mark Jenkins, Doug Chabot and Greg Mortenson^[5] (2005). The accounts of their journeys are fascinating.

But it seems that no outsider has crossed the Wakhjir Pass for decades, perhaps since Tilman in 1947.

References and further reading
US Department of State. International Boundary Study: Afghanistan - USSR (1983, pdf)
US Department of State. International Boundary Study: Afghanistan - China (1969, pdf)
M Aurel Stein. Description of the route over the Wakhjir Pass in Ancient Khotan (1907)
National Geographic. Lifetime Achievement: Biologist George Schaller
John Mock & Kimberley O’Neil. The Source of the Oxus River: A Journey to the Wakhan Pamir & Across the Dilisang Pass to Misgar (2004)
Mark Jenkins. Afghanistan: A Short Walk in the Wakhan Corridor (Outside Magazine, Nov. 2005)

Addendum
Go Hirai of the Japanese Alpine Club reached the top of the Wakhjir Pass in 2001, but did not cross into China. You can read his account here (pdf), although the English is a little awkward in places; the description of the crest of the pass is tantalisingly vague.

As unlikely as it sounds, Mock and O’Neil have developed a tourism brochure for the Aga Khan Foundation-Afghanistan, called Wakhan & the Afghan Pamir, published in 2006. You can see a preview - and some fabulous images - at the photographer Matthieu Paley’s site http://www.paleyphoto.com. It’s not possible to link directly to the brochure - look under the ‘Books’ menu.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 01:51 GMT and is filed under FoxClocks, GMT, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.