Mrs Harris: Professor, this is so exciting! Today will be my first time to see the Silk Road.

Professor Xu: Well, I’m so happy to hear that you’re excited but I should tell you that the Silk Road was never just a single overland trading route. 

Mrs Harris: Really? So it’s really a number of routes, is it? Going east to west?

Professor Xu: That's right. It's actually a network of routes, with a major one going westward between Chang’an (Xi’an) and Byzantium, which was the Turkish capital we now call Istanbul. Also included on this route were Samarkand, now known as Temirtau, in Kazakhstan and Bukhara, a town in present-day Uzbekistan. The route also took in Damascus in Syria.

Mrs Harris: That’s interesting because even today those places get relatively few visitors.

Professor Xu: Yes, some of these places are remote even now and the journey along these routes may be too arduous for a lot of people.

Mrs Harris: Were there any other major routes?

Professor Xu: Yes, one went southward from Xinjiang through present-day Afghanistan into Europe, and another into Pakistan and finally to India.

Mrs Harris: So the idea of a single Silk Road is just a myth, is it?

Professor Xu: I ’m afraid so. The first of seven rather persistent myths! The name, Silk Road, was coined in 1877, by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, who used the term many centuries after the routes had deteriorate and fallen into disuse.

Ferdinand von Richthofen: Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) was a German geographer, explorer, and scientist who invented the term “Silk Road” in 1877 having explored Central Asia in the 1870s.

Key words:

remote: far away in distance or space 

arduous: extremely difficult and involving a lot of effort

deteriorate: to become worse 

Mrs Harris: So, Professor, what’s the second myth?

Professor Xu: Well, the name itself makes us think that the Silk Road routes were entirely dedicated to the silk trade. In fact, the caravans along these routes not only carried silk but also, even before silk, Chinese jade and priceless stones, as well as porcelain, glass, metals, and herbs and spices.

Mrs Harris: But I guess silk must have been important. I mean it must have been held in high regard.

Professor Xu: That’s right. Silk was in all likelihood the most famous and sought-after product for a very long time — from second century Roman times right into late medieval Europe in the fifteenth century. Of course, only the affluent could afford such a luxurious fabric.

Mrs Harris: What made silk so desirable to so many people?

Professor Xu: It has a number of properties that make it unique: it is smooth and luxurious, easy to wear, highly absorbent and thus easy to dye, and it is also wonderfully lustrous. Most important of all perhaps is that the fabric is cool in summer and warm in winter. Now I’ll tell you the third myth.

Key words:

dedicate to: to spend your time and effort doing something 

caravan: a group of people and vehicles travelling together especially in a desert

priceless: extremely valuable and impossible to replace 

sought-after: wanted by many people but not easy to get 

absorbent: able to take in or hold a lot of something, especially liquid 

lustrous: bright and shiny 

Mrs Harris: I think I can guess what it is. Having sold all their silk and all the other things, the traders must have brought back products that were in demand in China. Am I right?

Professor Xu: Yes, indeed. While most people think only about Chinese goods going west towards the Mediterranean and Europe, these were in fact reciprocal trade flows, and European produce such as honey, wool, and furs, came along the Silk Road into China. So trade was very much a two-way process. Also, let’s put to rest yet another myth right now. During its peak use in ancient times – that’s between 200 BC and 400 AD – very few people travelled along the whole of a route. They had no need to because teams of merchants generally made short trips to exchange goods with others making similar short trips to the east or west. Historical figures such as Marco Polo from Venice and Xuan Zang from Xi’an were unusual in travelling as far as they did along these routes. Marco Polo incidentally spent 24 years travelling in China and parts of Central and East Asia, while Xuan Zang made his classic sixteen-year journey from China to India.

Marco Polo: Marco Polo (1254–1324) was an Italian merchant from Venice who claimed to have travelled to and stayed in the court of the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan for many years. He wrote an account of his journeys, The Travels of Marco Polo, which became popular for introducing China to the West.

Xuan Zang: Xuan Zang (602–664) was a Chinese Buddhist monk of the early Tang dynasty who undertook a sixteen-year journey bringing the teachings of Buddhism from India to China. His travels inspired the classic story Journey to the West.

Key words:

put to rest: to finally show that something is not true 

Mrs Harris: We’re talking a great deal about trade, Professor Xu, but was there any other kind of exchange going on between people when they met on the routes?

Professor Xu: You’re ahead of me again, Mrs Harris, and this brings us neatly to our fifth myth! The Silk Road routes not only carried goods but also ideas, values and religious beliefs, languages and literature as well as arts. In other words, cultures came into contact along the Silk Road routes and some intercultural exchanges led to events of seismic proportions. The Silk Road was the major route used by Buddhist scholars to travel to and from India to bring Buddhist teachings and scriptures to China for translation and dissemination, particularly between the sixth and eighth centuries AD. Later, Islamic ideas also travelled along the road. There were of course other, less welcome, consequences of exchange: diseases of all kinds were transmitted by merchants, monks, pilgrims, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers along the way.

Key words:

seismic: causing a great change in a situation 

dissemination: the making of something such as information or knowledge available to a lot of people 

Mrs Harris: Are the major Silk Road routes passable today? I’ve heard that some are — or this just another myth?

Professor Xu: Most of the original routes have been eroded, or covered up by the desert over time, or destroyed by successive empires. However, the Silk Road legacy lives on: this is especially seen in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, where Marc Aurel Stein and other Europeans in the early twentieth century (five centuries or more after the Silk Road had been forgotten) found around 800 caves which had been occupied between the fourth and fourteenth centuries. These caves are quite breathtaking: 492 are decorated with exquisite murals and paintings, and nearly every one shows a mingling of Chinese elements with other international influences. The explorer Marc Aurel Stein and colleagues — very controversially — took thousands of ancient manuscripts to London, Paris, St Petersburg and Japan, while Chinese scholars removed others for safekeeping to Beijing.

Mrs Harris: Losing those precious treasures from China must have been very painful. Were the manuscripts very old?

Professor Xu: Yes, one was the world’s earliest printed book. It was printed in 868 AD. However, the cultural knowledge in the manuscripts has spread around the world and today, through Cultural collaboration, international teams of experts are making a digital archive of all the Dunhuang manuscripts to share with the world. Of course, at the same time, economic development continues, with new wind farms being built in the desert areas that fringe many of the Chinese sections of the routes. Cultural exchange along the Silk Road continues to take place between Chinese and international tourists, who visit the sites of ancient cities that have been buried such as Khotan, or go to see the famous oasis at Urumchi, or explore the cave murals at Dunhuang.

Marc Aurel Stein: Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862–1943) was a Hungarian-British archaeologist who discovered many fragments of the ancient Silk Road in Central Asia, including the Mogao caves in Dunhuang in modern Gansu in 1907. The earliest printed book referred to in the text is known as the Diamond Sutra; it and around 40,000 scrolls were removed from the Mogao caves by Stein and his colleagues.

Key Words:

erode: to gradually reduce the strength or importance of something, or to be gradually reduced in this way 

breathtaking: extremely impressive or beautiful 

exquisite: extremely beautiful and delicate 

a mingle of: mixing together 

oasis: a place in the desert where there is water and plants and trees grow 

Mrs Harris: A lot of people believe that the Silk Road routes changed world history, but that now they have no role to play. How do you feel about that? 

Professor Xu: To be honest with you, I think this is our seventh and final myth: that the Silk Road routes have no purpose now and so have no future. Actually, the routes are not jus t a part of ancient history, they are also part of the developing present. They are likely to be developed and extended with rail links between China, central Asia and Europe, and the routes have inspired the building of the “New Silk Road Economic Belt” with Central Asia, and the “Maritime Silk Road” with other Asian countries. These new Silk Roads will no doubt keep the cultural exchanges going.