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Background reading for the tour |
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The Silk Road has fascinated travellers, explorers, historians, theologians,
artists and many another group for centuries, even before von Richthofen gave
it the name. The result is that there are many hundreds of books written on it,
from straightforward travel guides to esoteric studies of particular aspects of
the Road, such as the magnificent Buddhist art to be found along it.
The following is a sample of the books which the pilot party found to be
helpful. They are recommended, but are by no means the only books which will
give an insight into the Road and life along it. There are, of course, numerous
travel guides to China which include places along the Silk Road (from Lonely
Planet, for example) and you may wish to consult one of them, but most of their
preoccupations, such as how to travel and where to stay, will not be yours, so
the following list concentrates on books about the road itself.
We found The Silk Road, by Judy
Bonavia and revised by William Lindesay and Wu Qi to be an excellent general
guide to the Chinese part of the Road, well written and illustrated.
One book which is quoted by so many subsequent writers that it is almost a
seminal work is ¡°The Gobi Desert¡±
by Mildred Cable and Francesca French. The authors, plus Evangelina French
(Francesca¡¯s sister), were Christian missionaries in the Gobi Desert in the
1920s and 30s, and their descriptions of the desert in the northern Tarim basin
still make evocative reading. The book was long out of print, but was reprinted
in paperback by Virago in the 1990s.
The early 20th Century in the Tarim basin was shaped by adventurers, collectors
and explorers interested in the Buddhist history and art of the region.
Pioneered by Sven Hedin and followed up by a collection of international
collectors, notably (Sir Marc) Aurel Stein, they not only discovered much of
the art which had been hidden for centuries, but removed most of it to the
Louvre, the British Museum and other places. A very readable introduction to
the background and search is to be found in Peter Hopkirk¡¯s ¡°Foreign
Devils on the Silk Road¡±. On the same topic a more
recent book by Susan Whitfield (Curator of the current Silk Road exhibition at
the British library) entitled ¡°Aurel Stein on the Silk
Road¡± focuses on this one explorer.
For an insight into the general political times of the region before and during
Stein¡¯s time, when many countries, but particularly the UK and Russia, were
striving for influence in the region, Peter Hopkirk¡¯s book ¡°The
Great Game¡± makes interesting reading, but this is not
so directly related to the Silk Road.
This tour has an association with the British Library exhibition on the Silk
Road, and many of you who are interested will have heard of it through that
exhibition. Many of the most modern and scholarly publications on the Road are
by experts at the British Library. The exhibition catalogue ¡°The
Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith¡± in either its
full version (400 pages, with 350 colour illustrations) or the shorter version
(48 pages, 30 illustrations) is edited by Susan Whitfield, Curator of the
Exhibition, who has a deep historical insight into the Road and its times.
Dr Whitfield has written an evocative and enlightening book called
Life along the Silk Road, which is a portrait of 10
(composite) figures who might have lived during the Tang Dynasty (broadly 700
to 910 AD). It is very readable and really brings to life the history of the
era when the Road was at its peak.
For those who like to handle and perhaps possess a good book, there are two in
particular which are worth looking at.
The Silk Road, by Dr Frances
Wood, who is Head of Chinese, Manchu & Mongolian Collections at the British
Library, is published by the Folio Society, is an excellent account of the Road
over the last two millennia, and like all Folio books is beautifully presented.
A paperback edition is to be published in association with the current
exhibition at the British Library.
A recent ¡°coffee-table¡± book (but none the worse for that) is
The Silk Road - Art and History by Jonathan Tucker,
published in 2003. it covers the whole Road, not just the Chinese end, and has
a wealth of detail with lavish illustration.
You will not want to read all these, of course, since taken as a whole there is
a lot of repetition and overlap, but a selection will be worth some attention.
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