Shadow of the Silk Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

Arabs. In an episode beloved of poets, says the professor, the concubine he adored was executed by the army; and civil war weakened his dynasty for ever. Hu Ji speaks with whispering fastidiousness. I cannot imagine him a Red Guard. But some broken ideal, perhaps, has healed in the rational glow of the Tang.
    In the vanished banqueting hall he is smiling. ‘The emperor had four hundred beautiful horses! He taught them to dance…’
     
    The Silk Road started at the western gate of old Changan. The Xian municipality commissioned a train of camels in commemoration, sculpted in red sandstone, twice life size. But the gate’s site had already been engulfed by a supermarket, splashed with advertisements for credit cards. So the camels occupy a traffic island nearby.
    In Tang times nobody spoke of the Silk Road. It was a nineteenth-century term, coined by the German geographer Friedrich von Richthofen, and it was not a single road at all, but a shifting fretwork of arteries and veins, laid to the Mediterranean. Historians claim its inception for the second century BC , but the traffic started long before accounts of it were written. Chinese silk from 1500 BC has turned up in tombs in north Afghanistan, and strands were discovered twisted into the hair of a tenth-century BC Egyptian mummy. Four centuries later, silk found its way into a princely grave of Iron Age Germany, and appears enframed–a panel of sudden radiance–in the horse-blanket of a Scythian chief, exacted as tribute or traded for furs twenty-four centuries ago.
    Silk did not go alone. The caravans that lumbered out of Changan–sometimes a thousand camels strong–went laden with iron and bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and those returning from the west carried artefacts in glass, gold and silver, Indian spices and gems, woollen and linen fabrics, sometimes slaves, and the startling invention of chairs. A humble but momentous exchange began in fruits and flowers. From China westward went the orange and the apricot, mulberry, peach and rhubarb, with the first roses, camellias, peonies, azaleas, chrysanthemums. Out of Persia and Central Asia, travelling the other way, the vine and the fig tree took root in China, with flax, pomegranates, jasmine, dates, olives and a horde of vegetables and herbs.
    In eras of stability, when the great Han imperium reached across central Asia towards ancient Rome, or the Mongol empire laid down its unexpected peace, the Silk Road flourished. But even inthese times the same caravans never completed the whole route. No Romans strolled along the boulevards of Changan; no Chinese trader astonished the Palatine. Rather their goods interchanged in an endless, complicated relay race, growing ever costlier as they acquired the patina of rarity and farness.
    Beside the carved camels, stranded on their traffic island, Hu Ji’s daughter suddenly asks me: ‘How long is your journey?’
    In the shadow of the sculpted cameleers–central Asian Sogdians, who dominated Silk Road trade for half a millennium–any modern journey faded away. My answer–eight months–would have sounded nothing to these men. They were sometimes gone years. Sometimes for ever. Their bones scattered the sand. In glazed earthenware the Sogdians’ figures–usually crowned by dwarfish hats–look faintly comical. With their popping eyes and knob-like noses, they smack of Chinese caricature. But they grasp recalcitrant beasts, and their quaint-looking shoes are upturned only to reduce friction in the sand. Their chances of death–by bandits or sandstorm or flash-flood–were a calculated risk, a percentage in hard heads. By comparison my own chances–an Afghan mine, perhaps–only frivolously existed. That night, in the idle interval before sleep, I imagined one of these grizzled entrepreneurs.
    He: What are you going for?
    I [piously]: For understanding. To dispel fear. What did you go for?
    He: To trade in indigo and salt from Khotan. Why should your understanding