The Wakhan is a long, narrow strip of high valleys in the far north-east of Afghanistan, in Badakhshan province, where the Hindu Kush and the Pamir mountains meet. It reaches east to the border with China, with Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan to the south, and holds the headwaters of the Amu Darya. Most of it lies above 4,000 metres, and locally it is known as the ‘Roof of the World’.
The corridor took its present shape in the 19th-century rivalry between the British and Russian empires, which left a thin band of Afghan territory between them as a buffer. Long before, travellers on the Silk Road crossings, among them the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang and Marco Polo, appear to have passed this way.
About 15,000 people live here, most of them Wakhi villagers in the valleys and Kyrgyz herders in the high pastures. In 2014 the whole district, some 10,000 square kilometres, was declared Wakhan National Park, home to snow leopards, ibex, wolves and Marco Polo sheep with their great spiralling horns.