Stories of the Silk Road
February 22, 2010
After reading the required material from the Francis Wood book The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia, I could not help but notice the alarming exchange of culture and knowledge through-out the silk road history. This exchange has been a recurrent theme in the course, one of pivotal importance. When the Arabs invaded Kashgar, they had learned from the Chinese how to make paper. The method needed to make paper was also learned by the Russians and the West when both also invaded the land. We also see that Grunwedel, a German explorer, discovered the ancient city of Kharakhoja/Gaochang/Khocho/Qoco and was surprised to find that the city was not only Buddhist but manuscripts in Sanskirt, Uighur, Mongolian, Ancient Turkish, Chinese and Tibetan were also found. Manichean and Nestorian relics were also discovered alluding to the fact that exchange of culture was central across the silk road.
I was also interested to see that most scholars took an extremely subjective view of the environment and people that surrounded them. Along with this, Hedin and others wrote very poetically about the dangers of their expeditions and dramatized/romanticized the areas in which they traveled. Above all they “exoticized” the people and the land from which they came from. One interesting example of such subjective views stems from Huntington’s supposed “scientific evidence” in which he “proves” that changes in climate have an affect on human beings in the region. He concludes, “we should expect to find that people in extremely hot, dry countries like Persia and Chinese Turkestan, where parching wings abound, are nervous, emotional and uncontrollable. As a matter of fact they are not so nervous as might be expected; but they are certainly highly emotional and very lacking in self-control”.
