Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

"This is probably the most fun book. It’s a great read about different late 19th-century explorers from Central Asia who excavated the Silk Road sites that people still travel to today, as well as the documents and artifacts that made their way into European museums and collections. Each chapter is about explorers from a different country. It’s written in a very lively fashion. Some Europeans just documented with sketches or if they could, they took photographs, and left everything they excavated onsite. But most removed things. They hacked away at paintings and damaged them. The book goes into great and fascinating detail about the mechanics of travel and shipping these treasures back to Europe."