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With a nod to the storytelling traditions of the ancient central Asian bazaars that it describes, Life Along the Silk Road is a wily half-breed of a history book. Mixing narrative and historic minutiae, each chapter introduces an inhabitant of the Silk Road at the end of the 10th century. Following the lives and stories of the Merchant, the Soldier, the Monk, the Courtesan, and others, Susan Whitfield brings the dramatic history of pre-Islamic central Asia down to a human scale, fleshing out the battles of conquest and trade with the details of everyday life.
Whitfield is the director of the British Library-sponsored Dunhuang Project, which makes a remarkable collection of ancient Silk Road manuscripts, including those acquired by legendary explorer Sir Aurel Stein, available on the Internet. Her knowledge of this treasure trove of primary material shows throughout the book. What is the choicest cut of meat from a camel? The hump. The Chinese recipe for curing possession by demons? It involves a number of ingredients, including a broiled centipede, with all the legs removed. What ancient Silk Road town was famous for its dancing girls? Read and see. --Ken Peavler
Book Description
In the first 1,000 years after Christ, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants, and military men traveled on the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Linking Europe, India, and the Far East, the route passed through many countries and many settlements, from the splendid city of Samarkand to tiny desert hamlets. Susan Whitfield creates a rich and varied portrait of life along the greatest trade route in history in a vivid, lively, and learned account that spans the eighth through the tenth centuries. Recounting the lives of ten individuals who lived at different times during this period, Whitfield draws on contemporary sources and uses firsthand accounts whenever possible to reconstruct the history of the route through the personal experiences of these characters.
Life along the Silk Road brings alive the now ruined and sand-covered desert towns and their inhabitants. Readers encounter an Ulghur nomad from the Gobi Desert accompanying a herd of steppe ponies for sale to the Chinese state; Ah-long, widow of a prosperous merchant, now reduced to poverty and forced to resort to law and charity to survive; and the Chinese princess sent as part of a diplomatic deal to marry a Turkish kaghan. In the process we learn about women's lives, modes of communication, weapons, types of cosmetics, methods of treating altitude sickness in the Tibetan army, and ways that merchants cheated their customers. Throughout the narrative, Whitfield conveys a strong sense of what life was like for ordinary men and women on the Silk Road--everyone from itinerant Buddhist monks, to Zoroastrians and Nestorian Christians seeking converts among the desert settlers, to storytellers, musicians, courtesans, diviners, peddlers, and miracle-workers who offered their wares in the marketplaces and at temple fairs. A work of great scholarship, Life along the Silk Road is at the same time extremely accessible and entertaining.
Customer Reviews:
Very interesting.......2006-11-11
This book was very interesting. It really brought the Silk Road to life. I loved reading about various aspects of Silk Road life through different people's perspectives. I especially liked the inclusion of several women's perspectives.
It seems as though the book got most interesting 2/3 of the way through.......2006-01-08
This book was not the most light reading historical fiction. (For a good, proper example, I'd recommend trying "Memoirs of a Geisha." That was an excellent book.) There is a way to make historical fiction more interesting, but for most of the book this author did not find it.
The Silk Road is something that is known about through popular mythology, but about which few historical details are given.
It was interesting to know that that particular area was very multicultural.
There was also exposition of some new information, not commonly known: 1. While there has been a Chinese state for around 2,300 years, much of the time it was very ineffectual or unable to be strong over long distances. 2. Tibet was at one time a great military power. It seems that the latest friction between Tibet and the central government of China is actually a continuation of something that has been going on for 1,000 years. 3. Arabs, at that time major military powers, played a fairly prominent role in some of the many clashes that occured during the setting of this book. 4. The Parsees of India had their origins in one of the MANY ethnic groups discussed in this book.
Overall the book is not that memorable, but still a fairly worthwhile read.
Vivid.......2003-03-09
For historical dilettantes like me, it's easier to understand a time and place not through a recitation of the places and dates of battles and monarchial successions, but through the lives of people who lived then and there. Traditional histories say who won the battles, but not what life was like between those battles. Here, a qualified academic tries to accomodate people like me, showing Central and Eastern Asisa's history during the heyday of the Silk Road through a series of brief vingettes profiling the lives of various types of people who lived then. The professor's writing is stiff, but her intentions are honorable and her technique is effective. Her depiction of the Silk Road through its denizens drew me in with everyday detail from the period, which placed the greater historical details, like Chinese dynastic changes and which nations gained ascendancy at what time, into a context I could understand. I imagine others, including university students, might benefit from the author's methods.
Well researched, not as well written.......2002-10-28
While the characters of this book were very interesting and the research helped to create a deep and rich group of people, I found that there were issues for me with the writing style itself. Whitfeild is a gifted historian and does her homework very well, but there are times when she lapses into cliched and confusing language that alienates me from the characters she has created. For a good history lesson, I recommend it, but for a rewarding read, it falls a little short.
a gem with a fault.......2001-10-18
Susan Whitfield has written a book that I couldn't put down, and that probably has more to do with me than with the book, because I have just returned from a trip tracing the Middle and Southern Silk Roads (1500 photos taken over 6 weeks, 7 slide shows given so far) and am still basking in the historical richness of this area, as well as its infinite links to world history at large. I liked especially the coeval Table of Rulers from the empires of the Franks, Turks, Arabs, Tibetans, and Chinese, and the Eastern Roman Empire. The book is marred by one defect shared by so many others, with the exception of Joseph Needham's magnum opuses on Chinese science and Edward Schafer's Golden Peaches of Samarkand, viz. the omission of a table of Chinese/Turki/Sanskrit proper names of people and places to go with the English spellings. This leaves the savvy reader with the unending task of trying to figure out who or what she is talking about based purely on previous acquaintance. Even so prestigious and recent a publication as the Mummies of Urumqi or the Mummies of the Tarim Basin still suffers from this egregious defect. With her accessibility to historical material, it would be somewhat of a disservice to withhold this information for some trivial (or utilitarian) reason such as making the book more expensive, or lack of proper typeset. The latter might have been an excuse prior to the computer age, but with so many multilingual packages and XML/UML widelyl available, the excuse is rather lame. Both these authors should issue a Web-based Appendix for all interested parties. If they do that, I'd feel comfortable making their books 5 Stars.
Customer Reviews:
"Chop Stuart".......2007-09-30
Travellers come in many flavors, just like ice cream. Some try to "get in" with the natives of the places they go in order to learn more about foreign ways and perceptions. Others prefer to challenge themselves with tests of strength and endurance, paddling up jungle rivers or scaling giant peaks. There are innumerable variations. However, there is one type of traveller whose tales tire me very quickly. That is the type who likes to regale their readers (or listeners) with the total awfulness of everything, to impress (?) people with what they had to put up with, and to tell how ___________ the people were. (choose from among....greedy, stupid, venal, tricky, persistent, dirty, lying, impossible) Occasionally they meet one or two different individuals who only prove the point about the rest.
Stuart Stevens did not know anything about China. His attitude seems to hover most of the time around the level of "frat boy goes China". He managed to recruit two other babes in the woods, plus Mark Salzman, who did know Chinese, had spent a couple years in China already and had written a decent book about it. It would be interesting to hear Mark's opinion of this trip. That travelling rough in Third World countries tends to be difficult is hardly news. Of course, it all might not have been nearly as bad as Stevens says because he is so securely fastened into the "vomit, spit, and urine everywhere" school of travel writing. Stevens had the idea to contact a famous solo traveller from the 1930s, Ella Maillart, a Swiss lady, who had journeyed with a British man along the southern edge of the Takla Makan desert in Xinjiang province (once known as Chinese Turkestan). He tries to retrace their steps, but fails totally and completely. He is forced by Chinese bureaucracy to take the usual tourist route around the north of the desert, winding up in Kashgar, almost to Pakistan. This is an interesting part of the world, and when Stevens can get away from his lightweight moaning about the primitive conditions, the cold (who told him to go in December ?), the bad food, and duplicitous, intransigent Chinese, he writes a nice description. In fact, I would say that this is a well-written travel book with nice flashes of humor, but focussed mostly on the negative. The author takes a leaf from Carlos Castaneda in his "Conversations with Don Juan". He just repeatedly fails to get the message. If he had only decided early on that Chinese hate to tell others "NO" directly, but prefer to give some excuse which may sound lame to Westerners, but which indirectly tells the recipient that "what you are asking is not possible", we could have been spared all the incredulous, open-mouthed astonishment at the Chinese bureaucrats' "lying ways". What we have here is a failure to communicate. I'm sure this is all part of a non-organized trip to Turkestan, but it is not the major part, nor is it a very interesting part. If you are into the Yuck School of Travel Writing, this work is just up your alley. If you would like some sort of perspective on Xinjiang, its people, history and problems, give this book a miss.
It's all about the journey.......2002-04-21
Stevens provides a humorous recounting of a romp through Western China attempting to follow the trail of 1936 travelers Fleming an Maillart along the ancient Silk Road. Night Train to Turkistan is entertaining for its quirky characters including infuriating bureaucrats, reluctant Chinese interpretor (Mark Salzman, author of Lying Awake and Iron and Silk), a six foot female athlete who draws a crowd of suitors and gawkers everywhere she goes, and proprietors of various roadside establishments.
The four travelers are just outrageous and creative enough to actually make their way from Beijing to Kashgar and back, despite a multitude of bureaucrats that seems hellbent on prohibiting them from doing just that. The book starts out with the quartet delivering skis to a national ski team in a country with no ski areas, in the hopes of obtaining a vaguely official-looking reference letter that might unlock some door somewhere. It goes on from there.
This was a fairly quick read, and, as other reviewers have noted, it's not heavy on anthropological or historical insights. But I don't think the intent of the book was to provide these insights. This is a case where getting there is all the fun. The book is all about the journey, and those who have attempted to journey through bureaucratic developing nations are likely to recognize the types of frustrations and seemingly inexplicable events and policies recounted here. The book is all about crammed unheated buses and trains and low-flying planes and various other conveyances. It's about imperfectly built Russian hotels and incomprehensible bus stations and greasy roadside noodle stands and scheduled group pit stops and increasingly implausible explanations from government workers, desk clerks, and pencil pushers. This all sounds like an incredible bore, but Stevens' entertaining descriptions take you there and hold your attention to the end. If you are looking for an anthropological or historical treatise on Western China, you will be happier looking elsewhere. But as a humorous recounting of a journey through Western China, this one fills the bill. It is primarily from the perspective of a traveler, and the insights are limited, but the observations of a traveler are well worth the price of the book.
As an aside, several of the other reviewers suggest that this book was set in 1989 or around the time of the protests in Tiananmen Square. In fact the book was published in 1988, and the journey occurred in 1986, both prior to the protests in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. It is unfair to suggest that the author was minimizing the events of that spring, as they had not yet occurred.
Probably his best.......2001-08-11
As I have stated in other reviews, I do not like the author's personality too much(favorite quotation from another review: "Stu's a jerk, but...") But this book takes an unlikely premise and turns it into a very gripping account of a travel through Asia. I also highly recommend the book written by one of the other travellers here, Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk.
Very funny, but lightweight........2001-04-04
Stevens and three friends (including author Mark Salzman) follow the route of Fleming and Maillart, a 1930s adventure couple from Beijing to Kashgar, the capital of Chinese Turkistan. This is a fun little book, at times truly hilarious, as Stevens blithely recounts the squalid horrors of traveling in a Third World country, or is challenged again and again by mendacious, obstinate bureaucracy who will say anything to prevent them from traveling. But there's not much history or anthropology to speak of, other than a few comments about the Tibetans or Uighurs, or passages from Fleming's book. Nor does Stevens come to any novel or shrewd insights about China, other than the Cultural Revolution must have sucked, although no one will talk to him about it, and its bureaucracy is like an army in its cold homogeneity. It even dismisses the Tienanmen Square riots at the end! A lightweight, amusing travel piece; it could have bean more meaningful, such as Salzman's books or Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy.
It is better to travel than to arrive........2000-03-15
Especially if you are *not* travelling in a metal tube at thirty thousand feet, rebreathing used air and eating microwaved pap. If you travel by the same means as the local people, you will not only meet normal people, you will experience actual life. Remember the anecdote "Solipsism? I refute it thus!" (kicking a stone). In a bus bouncing along a chinese road you will have reality pressed upon you for hours, and you'll notice and remember. Train travel is far more comfortable but not always possible. I had read the book, and arrived at Golmud remembering what he said about the pit toilet (confirmed at a similar site, though no dead rats seen), and the Golmud hotel (hot water available and friendly staff for me) as was the confusion when trying to extract clear statements. His descriptions are accurate, and although seeming a little intemperate from the armchair viewpoint, they are the common currency of those who have actually struggled with the reality of being there. Yet the area is worth the journey, fascinating to anyone hopelessly romantic enough to go there. Those who have to live at Golmud have other views, very understandable ones.
Book Description
The Silk Road cuts through one of the most extraordinary landscapes on the planet. A vast region separating China from the Mediterranean, it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth—a forbidding terrain of hostile deserts, treacherous mountain ranges, howling winds, searing heat, and blistering cold. No stranger to unforgiving territory, Nick Middleton follows in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo, overland from China to Istanbul, surviving, as they did, the life-sapping Gobi Desert, the icy mountain passes of Tibet, and the daunting Steppes of Turkmenistan. Part Oxford professor, part Indiana Jones, Middleton spins together his outrageous feats of endurance with insightful commentary on our planet and its peoples.
Book Description
In 1998 renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silk Road Project, Inc., a nonprofit foundation devoted to the living arts of peoples of traditional Silk Road lands. One of the major components of this exciting, multiyear venture has been the commissioning of new works by composers from Silk Road regions to be played in concerts and festivals throughout the world. An equally fascinating part of the project is the exploration of ways that traditional cultural expression can help revitalize contemporary culture, a goal exemplified by this volume, itself part of the Silk Road Project activities.
The greater Silk Road encompassed certain sea routes and the loose system of trails that crossed the mountains and deserts of Central Asia to connect East Asia and the Mediterranean. This historical network, at its height from the second century B.C.E. until the fourteenth century, was the most cosmopolitan area on earth. Merchants carrying fine silks and lacquers westward from China would mingle with traders bringing fragile Roman glass to the east or with Indians seeking markets for carved ivory cosmetic boxes and gold ornaments for fashionable women. It was by these routes, too, that the religions of Buddhism and Islam, among others, spread throughout Asia.
This richly illustrated, lively book is keynoted by Yo-Yo Ma's candid insights into contemporary music and the Silk Road. Distinguished contributors who explore the present-day Silk road and its absorbing history include a composer, an ethnomusicologist, an archaeologist, a photographer, a scientist, a film critic, and two art historians.
Customer Reviews:
Picture the Silk Road.......2003-10-04
Even without the essays, ALONG THE SILK ROAD would be a visually fascinating book. The numinous photographs by Kenro Izu are art in themselves, and I looked at all the other pictures, too, before reading the text. The great variety has allowed the designer to create a book that is dynamic on the page, and the pictures themselves show everything from ancient art objects to present-day Uyghur street musicians, from landscape to Buddhist imagery on silk. They catch something of the scope of time, geography, and cultural sweep that the Silk Road Project is addressing in many ways. I thought the variety of articles worked very well, too: interview, personal reflection, travelogue, and sound scholarship with a light touch. The different voices and topics make clear that the project has room for many approaches to exploring the contacts, differences, and fusions of a vast region that has for eons been bound up in all sorts of exchanges and reciprocal influences, most of which I knew nothing about until I read this book. It's a great introduction to what a deeply humane America artist, Yo-yo Ma, has been up to recently, and more importantly to a part of the world that has stimulated him and his fellow artists. As the recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated, our fate is bound up with a part of the world that most of us don't know enough about. The good news is that learning about the region can set you thinking all sorts of new and exciting things.
hit and miss.......2003-07-03
Contents:
Introduction by Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis
1. Conversation with Yo-Yo Ma by Ted Levin [music]
2. Melodic Migration in NW China by Bright Sheng [music]
3. Fashioned from Fiber by Elizabeth Barber [textiles]
4. Astrology and a Japanese Star Mandala by Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis [astrology]
5. Sacred Sites along the Silk Road by Kenro Izu [photography]
6. Traveling Technologies by Merton C. Flemings [metallurgy]
7. Iranian Cinema by Hamid Naficy [film]
As the table of contents shows, this introductory work is rather a mixed bag in both quality and content, much of it originally published elsewhere in longer form. Hits include the pieces on music, textiles and metallurgy. The piece on astrology probably won't find a general audience and the pop art chapter on Iranian film seems oddly out of sync with the rest. Photos and illustrations are good. Text is a double-spaced 144 pages with fairly wide margins. There are irritations such as the p. 42 suggestion identifying the ancient Xiong Nu as ancestors of modern Hungarians that show outside review was needed (the common blunder of confusing Huns and the similar sounding Hungarians). Bright Sheng's piece discusses White Mongols and Yellow Mongols without really explaining the terms and one has to wonder why we have the music composer writing about history. Elizabeth Barber's piece shows the influence of the theories of Victor Mair, with whom she has worked. These theories of ancient Iranian influence on China (what Mair terms the "East Asian heartland") are not so universally accepted as the text suggests, or, at least, not everyone discusses them as much as does Mair. One gets the feeling that the book was thrown together fairly quickly and haphazardly in order to have merchandise to sell at the concerts of Yo-Yo Ma's worldwide Silk Road tour. In these circumstances it was probably too much to hope that it would have the same excellent quality as the tour itself.
Trading Cultures.......2003-04-14
The world's two largest Buddhist sculptures were once at Bamiyan, Afghanistan. There, travelers found not only lodgings and supplies but also Buddhist instruction. It was one of the stops on the Silk Road, running from E Asia to the Mediterranean cities of Aleppo, Antioch, Sidon and Tyre.
19th-century German explorer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen thought up the term Silk Road. But the road was much older than that, at its busiest from about 2,200 years ago, until about 600 years ago. It was kept up, for farflung trade in carved ivory cosmetic boxes, cotton, gems, gold ornaments, horses, incense, jade, lacquer ware, linens, Roman glass, silk, spices, tea and woolens. But it also was a way for culture and know-how to be swapped. For example, from the east westward, the road spread knowing how to smelt metal and make cast iron, glass, gunpowder and steel.
Particularly sections on cultural trading in music I found most interesting. Sometimes it's not obvious why we need to know history. But in this case it's long ago, but not long gone. Ancient musical influences still are seen today. For example, qin opera in Shaanxi province has happy tunes, which is common in Chinese music. But it also has sorrowful tunes, which isn't common. They're based on a scale of 8 pitches in the octave. They're also sung in a shouting style. Neither's common in Chinese music. But both are, in the music of Central Asia, where they came from during Silk Road times.
ALONG THE SILK ROAD also brought up a musical mystery. The first town at which east-bound Silk Road travelers stopped inside China was Dunhuang. There, merchants, pilgrims and traders built Buddhist temples inside the rock, in the Mogao caves, about 1,400-1,500 years ago. They also had painted about 45,000 wall paintings. Many dealt with the Western Pure Land, the supposed source of all good music. So some even had music scores, in ancient notation. Modern music scholars feel they know the pitches. They don't agree on rhythm and meter.
However, the money needed for further research may be out there. In 1998 world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silk Road Project, Inc. The project's a nonprofit foundation to help artists nowadays in Silk Road lands. It's most known, since winter 2001, for paying for music works played in concerts and festivals around the world.
Elizabeth Ten Grotenhuis has edited a clear, nicely illustrated book. She sets the stage for the more in-depth CAVE TEMPLES OF MOGAO by Roderick Whitfield. Her sections on music are invaluable for THE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOOLS OF GOD: MUSICAL TRAVELS IN CENTRAL ASIA by Theodore Levin and CARAVAN TO AMERICA: LIVING ARTS OF THE SILK ROAD by John S Major and Betty J Belanus.
Average customer rating:
- Clueless on the Silk Road
- Quite a trip, awful story
- An Amateurish Effort
- Let's get real
- Fascinating Account of a Wildly Adventurous Bike Ride
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On The Trail of Marco Polo: Along the Silk Road By Bicycle
Brady Fotheringham
Manufacturer: McArthur & Company Publishing, Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1552782530 |
Book Description
In 1997, Brady Fotheringham set out to retrace part of this historic trail on a mountain bike. Three months, 3000 miles, and numerous arrests later, he arrived in New Delhi with a multitude of unforgettable experiences that travel readers and biking enthusiasts will delight in sharing.
Customer Reviews:
Clueless on the Silk Road.......2006-09-03
This is the worst book about Central Asia I've ever read. There are annoying factual errors on every other page. Even the title of the book is erroneous. The author travels north from China south into India and simply cuts across the east-west routes of Marco Polo/Silk Road. This is an annoying, useless book by a clueless author.
Quite a trip, awful story.......2005-06-30
This was a bad book. No one should read this book, I shouldn't even have bothered finishing it. I did in part because I wanted to bitch about it and in part because it should have been a good story. Journalist travels by mountain bike from Xinjiang, China to India, detouring into Afghanistan on the way. The problem was it was like hearing some boring, arrogant, idiot tell you about a life experience you can't imagine he's cool enough to have experienced. Plus, the book is riddled with factual errors. I noticed them in the area I had some knowledge about, China, but that made me wary of the rest of the text. For example, the author falls into the trap of identifying China as a stagnant country that's history was immobile until the West intervened, at which point it put up defensive barriers. Take this line that I had to read to everyone of my housemates: "The Chinese were convinced they lived in the hippest coolest, most riteous place on dear Mother Earth." Such bad writing. He also misnames the common term for a government job an "iron rice bowl" and calls it instead "iron rice." An iron rice bowl is a bowl you can use your entire life, "iron rice" is just hard to eat. Finally he is irritated when he is kicked out of a Chinese only hotel because he believes there is no such thing and that what he is facing is merely corruption. I don't know how one could visit China and miss the fact that you can only stay in half the hotels. I'd agree the policy is funky, but it is a policy.
He writes China off as a bureaucratic hellhole after only a few weeks there and much prefers Pakistan, in part because it is very cheap. Although he talks about the country's poverty he seems not to connect his financial good fortune of traveling in a cheap country with the country's economic woes.
In the end, even without the above faults, the book was boring in comparison to the trip's promise. He spends little time on any one subject and you really don't get a sense of his travels. He mostly seems to list off events and gloat about stupid deeds he got away with like photographing Afghan women in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, photographing military compounds and riding bikes through "lawless Kohistan," despite warnings from all sides.
An Amateurish Effort.......2004-08-06
I applaud the author's pluck but unfortunately that is the only thing this book has going for it.
First off, cycling the route taken by the author is not nearly an achievement or a rarity as the author makes it seem and his actual time on the bike is only a few weeks. I've met people who cycled all the way from Germany to Beijing. Also the author seems to be a rather unseasoned traveller, such as packing way too much and carrying around too much cash.
The writing in this books is truely awful, so bad it makes you wonder if there was even an editor, so bad that it gives me hope that I too can publish a travel book. My respect for Canada has been dented ever so slightly by the fact that some Toronto newspaper named this book as one of its "Notable Books".
It is obvious that the author knew very little about the history/culture of the areas he was visiting when he was visiting them. It seems that after the trip he read a few books to obtain this knowledge but the historical/cultural background in this book is just a weak cut and paste job.
In the short Afghanistan section the author crosses the tenuous line between adventurous and lunatic which is what made it the most interesting section.
The only reason I am giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is because I travelled the same route (minus Afghanistan) so the book's descriptions of the various places jogged some pleasant memories for me and it was mildly interesting for me to read another person's point of view.
Let's get real.......2004-04-11
This review I found on the web gets it about right:
Once it seemed that every arts graduate believed him- or herself pregnant with a great novel, only the need to make a living preventing it from coming to term. Most never found time to discover just how difficult even the first paragraph would be, luckily allowing them to keep intact their image of themselves as Hemingways manqu¨¦.
Then, extended trips around Asia were still alternative. Now it¡¯s those who haven¡¯t pogoed across the Gobi who are the unconventional ones, and the travelogue has replaced the novel as the daydream magnum opus-that-might-have-been. The banana pancake paradises of Asia are full of the footsore catching up with their diaries. Brady Fotheringham¡¯s On the Trail of Marco Polo seems to be one of these.
The title, at once populist and meaningless, sets the tone for the whole book. Polo has been dead since 1324 which makes him a little hard to pursue, and Fotheringham doesn¡¯t follow any route usually attributed to the merchant, although he travels by air, bus, and bicycle from Beijing to Islamabad, and briefly into Afghanistan.
The cover ill-prepares you for the contents. Fotheringham was ¡°determined to cycle the desolate Chinese desert¡±, but not determined enough, apparently¡ªhe skirted most of it by bus. He ¡°cycled over the world¡¯s highest pass.¡± The Khunjerab is in fact merely the world¡¯s highest paved-road border crossing.
But getting through the book is itself a dangerous journey, as it swerves from clich¨¦ (¡°The journey is the destination¡±) to tautology (¡°who navel-gaze at themselves¡±), and from freewheeling grammar (The Romans ¡°wondered where this ¡®wool of the forests¡¯ was arriving¡±) to the completely incomprehensible (The Silk Road¡¯s ¡°brutal history is an indelible stamp on the annals of Central Asia¡±). Much of the historical material is inaccurate filler between thin narrative, and even simple place names are misspelled.
Fotheringham knows no Mandarin, and can narrate little but his own bewilderment in China, even failing to record accurately what he sees, placing the Great Hall of the People inside the Forbidden City (built centuries earlier), and failing to notice that the common ¡°dog-lion¡± of his photo-caption is a completely different and rarer beast, the Chinese unicorn. He makes unwise detours into other foreign languages, getting both the German name of the Silk Road and the Kyrgyz word for their white hats wrong.
He plans to survive by using his ¡°street smarts¡±, but apparently has none. On arrival he is immediately cheated by a taxi driver, and then loses his credit card. He grossly overloads his bike but takes inadequate provisions, photographs border installations and has his film forcibly exposed, and suffers a series of thefts through his own carelessness. He spends anxious hours detained in police stations. Regrettably, they let him go.
In amongst sanctimonious pro-traveller, anti-tourist bleating (from a man who makes straight for McDonald¡¯s and the Hard Rock Caf¨¦, and plays rock music through handlebar-mounted speakers) there are enough howlers to confirm Fotheringham as the William McGonagall of travel writing.
The Chinese were ¡°no different from us than we were from them.¡± ¡°Canada is big, but you never get close enough to see it except from an airplane.¡± ¡°If you¡¯ve never seen a camel in person, you¡¯ll never forget one.¡± ¡°It would be about as inconceivable for Tibet and Xinjiang to secede...as it would be for Liechtenstein to successfully invade Europe.¡±
The book does raise one interesting question, however. How on earth did it get into print?
Fascinating Account of a Wildly Adventurous Bike Ride.......2003-07-04
Having always had a fascination with the Silk Road, this book immediatly caught my eye while wandering the bookshelves.
It was very much a travelogue in it's style - and was written very well. A clear chronological narrative combined with history and a snapshot of all that he was seeing and feeling. I could imagine myself sitting on the bike encountering one adventure after another.
He definately has high standards as to who constitutes a real traveller! He had a very condescending attitude towards the 'tourists' that were experiencing this harshly beautiful region via the luxury of air-conditioned buses.
Others may think he's absolutely mad for embarking on this adventure... He's lucky that he came back in one piece from this trip- especially through Afghanistan. Fate obviously on his side.
Highly recommend this to anyone desiring an introduction to the modern day Silk route.
Book Description
This first edition text examines the remarkable histories of the societies and peoples who fostered Eurasian trade and communication in the almost two millennia before 1500 C.E. A study in the early history of “globalization,” the commercial and cultural exchanges explored in this volume provide students not only with a greater knowledge of the past, but also a deeper understanding of our world today.
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Bazaars of Chinese Turkestan: Life and Trade Along the Old Silk Road
Peter Yung
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 019590270X |
Book Description
The Silk Road was once the main artery for the exchange of goods, culture, and art between China, the Middle East, and Europe. It was along this timeless highway that the great religions of Buddhism and Islam were to enter China. In Bazaars of Chinese Turkestan, acclaimed photographer and
filmmaker Peter Yung provides an intriguing photographic essay that travels down the Old Silk Road to the present-day marketplaces of Chinese Turkestan.
With photographs of great beauty, accompanied by an evocative text, Yung takes us on a fascinating journey through the Taklimakan Desert--the "Desert of Death"--to the flourishing oases of Turkestan, whose inhabitants learned long ago how to turn the sandy wastes into rich farmland and
vineyards. We meet merchants selling yarns and dyes, silk and rugs, jade ("fished" from the rivers) and gold, daggers and shish-kebab, melons and pilaf. And we get a sense of the colorful people who visit the bazaar, the Uygar men with shaved heads and the women in bright silk dresses, billiard
players in the open air, young boys watching an old man make paper beneath a trellis of grape vines. And along the way, Yung provides an illuminating commentary on the region's history, describes the legendary trading cities of Kashi, Shache, and Hotan, and discusses current efforts to maintain the
Islamic heritage and identity of Xinjiang.
Bazaars of Chinese Turkestan takes us to a world few of us knew existed. It is a mesmerizing book that will captivate everyone who yearns to travel to far-off places, to leave civilization behind and explore the unknown byways of the Old Silk Road.
Customer Reviews:
beautiful photography.......2001-01-22
Anyone interested in the Silk Road will appreciate this unique look at life in this remote region.
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