This is an intelligent and therefore an interesting book. Its author works at London's British Library and is responsible for the computerization of many of the incomparably precious manuscripts held there and elsewhere originating from Central Asia. But what she's written here isn't in any way a dry monograph but 10 tales, narrated in a quasi-fictional manner, based on her reading of the ancient documents that are her professional responsibility.
The result is a set of narratives from the Silk Road's great days. Comparisons with medieval collections of tales -- those of Boccaccio or Chaucer, for example -- are inevitable but inappropriate. There the chivalric alternated with the low-life and farcical, but the narratives in this book are largely vehicles for the scholarly author to unload her knowledge, and instruct the reader through the more palatable medium of storytelling.
She begins with a chronological account of this most remarkable of trails. It has been a trading road for as long as there have been people there to trade, and Chinese silk has been discovered in Bactria (modern Afghanistan) dating from 3,500 years ago. But before that it was mankind's greatest migration route eastwards. If, as is now generally believed -- though some Chinese ethnologists dispute it -- we all originated in Africa, and are even descended from a single black African Eve, many of the forebears of the present populations of Asia got to where they are now along this road. (Others probably traveled further south, and by sea).
Susan Whitfield runs the International Dunhuang Project, providing Internet access to over 50,000 ancient manuscripts from the region that are now dispersed in different collections (for more see http://idp.bl.uk). Dunhuang is the name of the town in China's Gansu Province near where a small cave containing over 40,000 Buddhist texts and paintings was discovered by accident in 1900. It had been sealed in the 11th century, and the importance of the texts it contained, Whitfield says, is impossible to overstate. Because of a shortage of paper, many of the sacred texts were copied onto the backs of documents dealing with more mundane matters -- letters, medical prescriptions, even bawdy stories -- with the result that the historical value of the hoard as a whole is beyond measure. Cartloads of these manuscripts were bought within a decade by the British and French sinologists Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot, after which the Chinese authorities closed the cave and removed its remaining contents to Beijing. More manuscripts, however -- including some forgeries made by a local trader -- continued to be available when Japanese and Russian teams later arrived on the scene.
This is a very readable book, yet behind it lies all the authority and judgment of an exceptionally knowledgeable specialist. Susan Whitfield clearly has the instincts of a popularizer, however -- essentially a love of her subject so great that she doesn't want it to remain only the province of experts. The result is that you know you're in good hands, and so can sit back and enjoy the book knowing that even its smallest details are impeccably authentic.
Some of the tales are in actuality miniature travelogues. The first one, for instance, focuses on Samarkand in the 6th century AD. Ostensibly it tells the story of a merchant, but the opportunity is used to give a detailed picture of this famed trading center -- its buildings, the styles of dress there, the goods traded, and so on. The Silk Road existed for such a long time that its story can only be told by means of highly colored snapshots in which time is frozen and the life at one place and time examined in detail. These tales in effect provide such snapshots.
Other, more general details are introduced whenever the opportunity arises -- how both the Bactrian camel and its single-humped Arabian cousin have double-lidded eyes and the
ability to close their nostrils against flying sand, how the older camels would stop and paw the ground at the sites of underground water, and how their cameleers -- often Chinese -- wore shoes soled partly with paper and lined with soft red cloth. The author knows so much detail of this kind that she can't help unloading it at the slightest provocation.
The result is that, despite the organization by "tales," the book is not really very different from conventional histories of social life. There's one chapter on religious life, another on the arts, and so on, both centered round a historical figure fleshed out with details from other people who crop up in the ancient texts. Thus the chapter entitled The Courtesan's Tale, though set in the city of Kucha on the northern Silk Road in the 9th century AD, in effect discourses on the lives of women in general in Central Asia, using digressions as a means of introducing the additional material.
Whitfield admits the book has a Chinese bias, both because she was trained as a China historian, and because China's was the only empire in the region existing at both the start and end of the first millennium AD. In fact, she limits herself in this volume to the period AD 750 to 1000. After that time the Silk Road went into decline. Perhaps the level of the water table dropped, perhaps populations declined, she says. Either way, the sea routes from China's ports replaced it, and sands began to cover the old towns. Only recently was the road's huge historical importance rediscovered.
One moral springs to mind. Wars plagued the region in the period described, but now their causes are forgotten, and dunes once fought over shift unregarded in the wind. Today there is conflict again, but this time the nuclear weapons that might one day be used could render the land radioactive for many thousands of years. Once again, before long, few will remember why men fought there. Who was this Bin Laden? Why did foreigners seek him out? But the damage wrought will, if the wrong decisions are made, not be so easily forgotten.
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