Current Time in Qo‘qon, Uzbekistan

Qo‘qon, usually written Kokand in English, lies at the western entrance to the Fergana Valley in eastern Uzbekistan, on the fertile plain watered by the Sirdaryo and its tributaries and ringed by the snow peaks of the Tian Shan and Pamir Alay. About a quarter of a million people live in the city, which sits at a crossroads where the routes into the valley from Tashkent, Khujand and Kashgar converge.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Kokand was the capital of a powerful independent state. The Khanate of Kokand, founded in 1709, at its height controlled the Fergana Valley, Tashkent and much of what is now southern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, growing rich on the caravan trade between Russia, China and India. Contemporary accounts describe hundreds of mosques and more than a dozen madrasas in the city. Russian forces conquered the khanate in 1876 and absorbed it into the Fergana province of Turkestan. In the winter of 1917 to 1918 Kokand was briefly the seat of the Turkestan Autonomy, a short-lived attempt at Central Asian self-government suppressed by Bolshevik troops.

The outstanding monument is the Palace of Khudayar Khan, built in the 1860s and early 1870s and once far larger than what survives. Its long facade of glazed tilework in turquoise, white and yellow, its carved gates and its painted ceilings make it one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century Central Asian court architecture, and it now houses a regional museum. The Juma Mosque, completed in 1809, has a superb open gallery whose roof rests on rows of slender carved wooden columns with painted capitals, sheltering worshippers from the summer sun. Other important sites include the Dakhma-i-Shokhon, the burial vault of the khans, the elegant Modari Khan mausoleum and the Norbutabek madrasa, still in use.

Kokand has long been a city of poets and craftsmen. The poetess Nodira, wife of one of the khans, presided over a literary circle here, and the nineteenth-century satirist Muqimiy and the reformer Furqat are both closely associated with the city. Woodcarving, ganch plaster work, ceramics, knife making and silk weaving continue in workshops around the old quarters, and the bazaars are among the liveliest in the valley.

The modern economy combines chemical fertiliser production, textiles, food processing and a very active trading culture, supported by the region's cotton, fruit and silk. Since the opening of a railway tunnel through the mountains in 2016, trains run directly from Tashkent into the Fergana Valley, while the road over the Kamchik Pass carries heavy traffic.

Pedagogical and technical institutes provide higher education, and the city has a young, fast-growing population.

With its khan's palace, its wooden mosque and its craft traditions, Kokand is one of the essential stops on any journey through Uzbekistan.