Flemings is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is responsible for the Singapore-MIT Alliance, focusing on distance learning. He sees himself as furthering in the digital age the same west-east contacts the Silk Road pioneered in ancient times. No wonder he is so interested in it, and so absorbing when writing about its history. Yo-Yo Ma calls the Internet the modern Silk Road.
Ma himself describes how he met four Mongolian musicians playing in an Amsterdam street. They had driven there along the ancient route in seven days, and Ma invited them to share a concert stage with him, causing a near-riot of astonishment and acclaim.
This slim book is in invaluable guide to all of this. It has a photographic chapter on the sacred sites of the route (including Mount Kailash), and another that contains speculations on when horses were first tamed, providing the fastest means of travel across land man was to know until the invention of the steam engine in the 19th century.
Technologies moved in both directions. The creation of bronze (copper with a small percentage of tin, and the hardest metal known) happened in Ur in Mesopotamia around 2600 BC, but the tin came from Iran, via the Silk Road.
Printing, by contrast, moved from China to the West, but along the same route.
The editor contributes a fascinating chapter on astrology, linking Japanese mandalas to esoteric astronomical knowledge, culminating in speculation on reasons why the number 108 is so central to Buddhist and Hindu lore and practice. She illustrates the hypothesis with information on the mystical significance of Cambodia's Angkor Thom, on a southern spur of the Silk Road linking it to ancient international sea routes.
Even the less world-shattering chapters are informative and useful. The overview of Iranian cinema, for instance, highlights the honest treatment of the life of ordinary people, praising the sparse style and gentle humanism of Iranian films.
This, the author points out, contrasts strongly with the political and religious rhetoric that sometimes emanates from other areas of the country's national life.
Ma's foundation is nothing if not well-connected. The immensely prestigious Smithsonian Institute and its associated Arthur M. Sackler Gallery were, for example, involved in this book's creation.
Along the Silk Road, which at first glance looks like a coffee-table item, contains some extraordinarily stimulating material. It both looks elegant and is written by experts in their fields.
This combination makes for an enormous achievement, spreading genuine learning in a concise, accessible and attractive form. It's a staggering book, and I will not part with my copy under any conditions whatsoever.
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