SIXTH TONE SIXTH TONE Why a Silk Road Travelogue Is Taking China by Storm Despite China’s massive investment in Central Asia, the region remains an enigma to most ordinary Chinese. But a hit new book aims to change that. Like many in China, Liu Zichao used to consider Central Asia a strange and mysterious land. The former journalist recalls being on an assignment in the western Chinese city of Khorgos in 2010 and a local truck driver telling him that on the other side of the snow-capped mountains ahead of them lay Almaty. At the time, the name meant little to Liu. His knowledge of Kazakhstan, he says, was limited to a vague sense of its history as a stopping point along the ancient Silk Road and its socialist past as part of the Soviet Union.