Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes

"This is a humongous book filled with beautiful photographs. Some are large enough to spread over two pages, showing famous Silk Road sites and works of art. It’s really a visual treasure. Among all these books, this is the coffee table book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It also has the most expansive definition of the Silk Road. It includes Africa, Europe and Asia. There are fabulous maps throughout the book. The book is set up so that you can look at the maps, figure out what part of the world you’re interested in, and then read about that region in the world. The visual record of the Silk Road is so rich. Some of the most beautiful things that travelled along it were made in China, out of gold and silver, with Central Asian motifs. Some beautiful Sogdian tombs, combining Iranian and Chinese art, are featured. There are also beautiful colour photos of the scenery—of mountains and oases. My Silk Road book ends around the year 1000. In the book, I write about an oasis called Khotan, in the northwest corner of China, that fell to Islamic armies just after the year 1000. The region, which had been Buddhist up until then, was conquered by Muslim rulers. I knew that the Vikings touched down in Canada around the year 1000. And that the Chinese signed a treaty with Northern people called the Liao around 1000 which set up conditions for change. I started wondering if these momentous changes were connected in any way. So, I embarked on a five year investigation into that question. The answer is yes. “The visual record of the Silk Road is so rich” Around the year 1000, people around the globe started to realize for the first time that they could leave home, travel to other places, find out about their neighbors and adopt new approaches. A wave of Islam came to Northwest China as part of that movement. People embarked on ocean travel, who hadn’t strayed far previously. The Vikings cross from Greenland to what is today Canada. New routes linked the continents together. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Silk Road was an early harbinger which showed the promise of exchange with neighbors in the centuries before 1000. In the year 1000, we start to see trade across great distances, despite the fact that nobody had sophisticated transportation technology. Boat building was improved, but those great distances were traversed on land, wind, and animal power alone. The book is about people building new pathways in the year 1000, discovering that they share the globe with other cultures, that their homes are just one part of a much larger picture."