Camel Train - North Africa, Asia and The Middle East

North Africa, Asia and The Middle East

By far the greatest use of camel trains occurs in North Africa, to conduct trade in and around the Sahara Desert. In antiquity, the Arabian Peninsula was an important route for the trade with India and Abyssinia.

Camel trains have also long been used in portions of trans-Asian trade, including the Silk Road. As late as the early twentieth century, camel caravans played an important role connecting the Beijing/Shanxi region of eastern China with Mongolian centers (Urga, Uliastai, Kobdo) and Xinjiang. The routes went across Inner and/or Outer Mongolia. According to Owen Lattimore, who spent five months in 1926 crossing the northern edge of China (from Hohhot to Gucheng, via Inner Mongolia) with a camel caravan, demand for caravan trade was only increased by the arrival of foreign steamships into Chinese ports and the construction of the first railways in eastern China, as they improved access to the world market for such products of western China as wool.

While organization of camel caravans varied over time and the territory tranversed, Owen Lattimore's account of caravan life in northern China in the 1920s gives a good idea of what camel transport is like. In his Desert Road to Turkestan he describes mostly camel caravans run by Han Chinese and Hui firms from eastern China (Hohhot, Baotou) or Xinjiang (Qitai (then called Gucheng), Barkol), plying the routes connecting those two regions through the Gobi Desert by way of Inner (or, before Mongolia's independence, Outer) Mongolia. Before Outer Mongolia's effective independence of China (circa 1920) the same firms also ran caravans into Urga, Uliassutai, and other centers of Outer Mongolia, and to the Russian border at Kyakhta, but with the creation of an international border, those routes came into decline. Less important caravan routes served various other areas of northern China, such as most centres in today's Gansu, Ningxia, and northern Qinghai. Some of the oldest Hohhot-based caravan firms had a history dating to the early Qing Dynasty.

"In The Desert" ("Верблюды", lit. = "camels") is a "traditional Russian" song, performed by Donald Swann. He provides an English-language translation after every line. The song is extremely repetitive, rendering the translation largely redundant, "a whole caravan of camels is approaching".