Dilnoza Duturaeva. Qarakhanid Roads to China: A History of Sino-Turkic Relations. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8: Uralic and Central Asian Studies, Vol. 28. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xvi + 218 pp. $ 131 (cloth); open-access e-book.

Dilnoza Duturaeva’s Qarakhanid Roads to China: A History of Sino-Turkic Relations is an essential contribution to the understudied field of pre-Mongol Central Asian history, particularly the diplomatic and commercial interactions between the Qarakhanid Khaganate (840–1212) and the Sinitic world (Liao, Song, and Xi Xia dynasties). The book highlights the pivotal role of the Qarakhanid Khaganate, the first Turkic Muslim dynasty, in maintaining and reshaping Central Asian trade routes after the decline of the Middle Period East Asian empires in the ninth and tenth centuries. While the Mongol Empire’s role in Eurasian connectivity has been extensively explored, the Qarakhanid period, often dismissed as a “nadir” in Silk Road history, remains marginalized in both Western and Chinese scholarship. Duturaeva’s monograph challenges this narrative by meticulously piecing together fragmentary evidence from Chinese, Persian, Arabic, and Turkic sources, alongside archaeological data, to argue that the Qarakhanids played a decisive role in sustaining and even expanding overland trade networks between the Islamic and Sinitic worlds. The book’s strength lies in its interdisciplinary approach, which combines textual analysis with material culture to reconstruct a dynamic era of cultural and economic exchange. The presentation of a substantial amount of translated material is especially valuable, with a portion of it included in four extensive appendices at the end of the book.