Tashkent
Silk Road oasis destroyed by Genghis Khan (1219), Russia (1865), and a shallow earthquake (1966) — rebuilt each time at the same coordinates because the geography is non-negotiable. Central Asia's largest city, now 7.3% GDP growth.
A magnitude 5.2 earthquake destroyed Tashkent in 1966 — modest by seismic standards, but shallow enough to level a city of two million. Only one building survived intact: the Navoi Theater, built by Japanese prisoners of war whose construction techniques proved superior to everything else in the city. Workers from all fifteen Soviet republics arrived to rebuild, and within three and a half years they had replaced a two-thousand-year-old Silk Road city with a model Soviet metropolis of wide boulevards, metro stations decorated like underground palaces, and prefabricated apartment blocks. Many builders occupied the new homes themselves rather than returning to their home republics, permanently altering Tashkent's ethnic composition. The city that emerged was architecturally Soviet, demographically reshuffled, and geographically identical — because the oasis remained.
Tashkent exists where the Chirchiq River descends from the western Tian Shan mountains into the Central Asian steppe, creating a fertile valley on the Silk Road between China and Europe. The name — 'stone city' from Turkic tash (stone) and kent (city) — signals permanence in a landscape of nomads. Genghis Khan destroyed it in 1219; the Russians captured it in 1865; the earthquake leveled it in 1966. Each time, the oasis-plus-crossroads logic regenerated urban life at the same coordinates, like scar tissue forming over the same bone structure.
Independence in 1991 brought economic transition, and President Mirziyoyev's reforms since 2016 — currency liberalization, tax restructuring, economic opening — represent the latest remodeling event. Uzbekistan sold $9.8 billion in gold in the first nine months of 2025, a 70.5% increase that has made gold the defining export, replacing the cotton that earned Uzbekistan international sanctions for forced labor until the ban was lifted in 2022. The IMF projects 7.3% growth for 2025, with 228 new industrial projects worth 13 billion euros planned from 2026.
With 3.1 million residents, Tashkent is Central Asia's most populous city — a Silk Road oasis that keeps rebuilding itself from geographic first principles regardless of which political system occupies the surface.