Uzbekistan

The demographic centre of Central Asia, holding the cities the Silk Road was famous for. Samarkand and Bukhara were among the great centres of Islamic learning - al-Bukhari, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us algorithm, all came from this region - and Timur made Samarkand his capital in the fourteenth century, filling it with monuments built by craftsmen deported from everywhere he conquered. His grandson Ulugh Beg built an observatory whose star catalogue was the most accurate before the telescope. Three khanates, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand, ruled the region when Russia conquered it between the 1860s and 1880s during the contest with Britain. Soviet border-drawing in 1924 created an Uzbek republic deliberately shaped so that no Central Asian republic was ethnically coherent, leaving Uzbek populations across all its neighbours and interlocking enclaves in the Fergana valley. Cotton monoculture drained the rivers feeding the Aral Sea, which has largely disappeared - one of the worst environmental disasters caused by planning. Islam Karimov ruled from 1989 until 2016, crushing protest at Andijan in 2005. The country is doubly landlocked, one of only two. Tashkent is Central Asia's largest city. Tashkent is the capital, rebuilt after an earthquake destroyed much of it in 1966. Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Shakhrisabz are all World Heritage sites. The country has more people than any other in Central Asia. Registan square in Samarkand is its best-known image. The Uzbek language was switched from Cyrillic to Latin script after independence. Plov, cooked in enormous cauldrons, is the national dish.

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