I have read perhaps a dozen books in recent years about the Silk Road, the amazing ancient network of trade and cultural routes linking China and the Mediterranean coast. All were good in their own right and I recommend a couple of them below, but none have the combination of beautiful prose and deep insight as does Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road.
From the east on the Silk Road came Chinese gunpowder, printing and paper, the astrolabe and compass, silk and Buddhism. From the west came woods, fruits, metals, musical instruments and Christianity. And that was just for starters.
Thubron is an Englishman who speaks Mandarin and Russian and has spent a lifetime traveling throughout Asia. His trek began in Xian in central China and went west through ethnic lands where the Chinese are populating, paving over and plowing under settlements, shrines and cemeteries in their relentless mission of make everything everywhere modern and Chinese. Then Thubron crossed several former Soviet republics, war-ravaged Afghanistan and Iran before ending his trek in Antioch in Turkey.
And Thubron did it the hard way, traveling third-class or no class in a variety of conveyances ranging from rattletrap buses to donkey carts. He stayed in decrepit inns and farmer’s houses, battled the local bureaucracies and once was quarantined by health officials because of the SARS virus.
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