But also, from my journeys — physical and literary — along the ancient Silk Road, Kyrgyzstan feels to me to be historically central. Not “center” as one tends to think of it, but center in the sense of being between everything. Between greater Russia to the north, greater India to the south, greater Iran/Persia to the southwest, greater Europe to the west, and greater China to the East, and their various historical variants over time.

To be a buffer, at some times, a mixture of many, as in Navikat (near Krasnaya Rechka), with temples of many world religions.

To be a border between ancient giant forces, such as the great Battle of Talas which defined, in a way, the limits of both East and West. And during the Great Game when it was part of the border zone between the Russian Empire to the north and the British Empire to the south.

To be buffeted, at other times, by great winds of historical change, such as the storm of Islam or the storm of Genghis Khan.

And Kyrgyzstan also contains the underappreciated Saimaluu Tash — a spiritual “center” for more than 4,000 years that is even today more inaccessible than Machu Pichu and must have been so much more so in ancient times. Not a “center” where many lived or even many ever came, but a center perhaps more holy for its inaccessibility.

The mountains south of the steppes of Kazahkstan. The mountains east of the Ferghana Valley and the deserts of Uzbekistan. The green mountain valleys north of the High Pamirs of Tajikistan.

A center that is not defined by everything it is not, such as China’s Middle Kingdom, what what is Chinese and what is Barbarian. Instead, a center that is defined by everything it is — everything it absorbs and adapts from those around it and those who move across it as they the Kyrgyz have themselves always moved.

A center that is defined not by where it is, a noun, as a place with a settled tradition might have, but a center defined by how it moves and what it does, as a people with a nomadic tradition has, a verb.

Also, consider, a heart is not defined by where it is but by what it does. (Although, of course, it is more effective if it is somewhere in the range of the body center.)

I asked a young woman, the daughter of a family with a Comm Based Tourism-KG homestay in Tamchy, what she thought of a new Silk Road developing through Kyrgyzstan, a new globalization as the former Silk Road was an early globalization. She said she thought it would be good business. Such a great answer.