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Camel train
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A camel train is a series of camels carrying goods or passengers in a group as part of a regular or semi-regular service between two points.
ar 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.
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Encyclopedia
A camel train is a series of camels carrying goods or passengers in a group as part of a regular or semi-regular service between two points.
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 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.
Australia
In the English-speaking world the term "camel train" often applies to Australia, notably the service that once connected a railhead at Oodnadatta in South Australia to Alice Springs in the center of the continent. The service ended when the train line was extended to Alice Springs in 1929; that train is still called "the Ghan", a shortened version of "Afghan camel train."
United States
The history of camel trains in the United States consists mainly of an experiment by the United States Army. On April 29, 1856, thirty-three camels and five drivers arrived at Indianola, Texas. While camels were suited to the job of transport in the American Southwest, the experiment failed. Their stubbornness and aggressiveness made them unpopular among soldiers, and they frightened horses. Many of the camels were sold to private owners, others escaped into the desert. These feral camels continued to be sighted through the early 1900s, with the last reported sighting in 1941 near Douglas, Texas.
Camel caravan organization
While organization of camel caravans varied among countries and periods, Owen Lattimore's account of caravan life in North China in the 1920s gives a good idea of what camel transport was 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 the way of Inner (or, prior to Mongolia's independence, Outer) Mongolia. Prior to Outer Mongolia's reaching effective independence of China (circa 1920) same firms also run caravans into Urga, Uliassutai, and other centers of Outer Mongolia's, 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 centers in today's Gansu, Ningxia, and northern Qinghai. Some of the oldest Hohhot-based caravan firms had history dating to the early Qing Dynasty.
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