Life along the Silk Road [Paperback]

Susan Whitfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Enlightening new book. . . . recounts the history of the eastern Silk Road, from Samarkand to Chang'an, through 10 individuals--composites based on the historical record--who lived in different city-states along the eastern Silk Road from the 8th to the 10th centuries. Whitfield's skillfully crafted tales take readers on a journey back to the heyday of the Silk Road and enable them to relive its people's unusual existence."--Liya Li, "The Bloomsbury Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 253 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (August 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520232143
• ISBN-13: 978-0520232143
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #207,021 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

123 of 124 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Transported in a Time Machine March 17, 2000

By Daan Bronkhorst

Format:Hardcover

The period of the Middle and Late Tang, from around 700 to 900, is one of the most facinating eras of Chinese hisotry. In particular the An Lushan rebellion, around 750, brought about a change from an outward looking world culture to a gradually shrinking Chinese view of the world. Few good or lively books have been written about this period. Susan Whitfield has portrayed the period by a reconstruction of the life and times of ten individuals, all of them historical and ranging from a humble monk and soldier to a top salesman and a princess. At some pages, the reader may feel transported by a time machine: one hears the sounds, smells the smells and hears the multilingual crowds in the capital of Chang'an or the various desert posts. One major quality of this book is that it is not written solely from a Chinese point of view, but includes many details of the customs and perceptions of the peoples of Central Asia. The author has clearly digested a wealth of historical data and translated those into a book which one would like to read in one sitting - which is an inhuman undertaking given the sheer joy and shock of all the little anecdotes, background facts and human insights. No previous knowledge of Chinese history is necessary to relish these stories.

60 of 63 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Vivid March 8, 2003

By Daniel H. Bigelow VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Decent and entertaining introduction to the eastern Silk Road December 28, 2009

By Tim F. Martin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

_Life along the Silk Road_ by Susan Whitfield was an interesting introduction to the rich and varied history of the Silk Road, the fabled path (or really paths) that trade took between China and lands to the west. Not aiming to be a comprehensive history, the author took the unusual step of portraying the cultures and events of the eastern Silk Road between AD 750 and 1000 by showing how things looked to (and affected) ten different individuals. Though each chapter tended to focus on how key political events and foreign cultures appeared to each of the ten individuals the author did provide glimpses into the lives of these people.

Some are historic characters who actually existed, others are "composite," comprised of the details of several people. Owing to "relative richness of primary sources in Chinese" and partly because the author is a China historian, the individuals picked do tend to reflect a Chinese bias. It is also significant that China was the only empire that existed at both the beginning and the end of the first millennium AD and before the spread of Islam to the eastern Silk Road.

However, Chinese bias aside, the story is clearly about Central Asia, albeit as seen through the eyes of not only the Chinese but the other empires that competed for control of the eastern Silk Road; Arab, Turkic (primarily Uighur), and Tibetan.

The introduction chapter was the most informative and wide-ranging. In it the reader learns that there was not one Silk Road but multiple paths and that also it was not only silk that was traded along it; horses, salt, wool, and jade were also major trade items.... The distances covered (altogether over 3,000 miles) was not the only daunting challenge to merchants; massive mountain ranges with peaks as high as 20,000 feet, deadly deserts, and bandits had to be dealt with as well. Though the Silk Road was of major importance for centuries, by the end of the tenth century trade became increasingly maritime in nature.

The region covered in the book corresponds to modern day eastern Uzbekistan, western China, Mongolia, south to the Himalayas and including Tibet. Today that region is largely occupied by Turkic peoples, mainly the Uighur, as well as Chinese colonists and is more Islamic than not. In the time period covered by the book it was more Indo-European in character, mainly Buddhist, and a great deal more cosmopolitan, with many towns and cities home to Turks, Indians, Chinese, Tibetans, and Mongolians as well as followers of Manicheism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and shamanism as well. Many Silk Road towns, once some of the most populous cities in the world, now have largely been reclaimed by the desert sands due to a decline in population and a drop in the water table, a land now rich in archaeology but vulnerable to thieves looking for artifacts to sell on the black market.

The major source of information for this book and indeed much of the scholarship done on this region and era comes from the over forty thousand documents uncovered in a Buddhist cave complex outside Dunhuang, now in Gansu province, China. Sealed up in the eleventh century, it was uncovered by accident in 1900. Though many of these precious scrolls, paintings, and sculptures have been lost since then for various reasons (and others tainted by the existence of forgeries), more than enough remained; the "importance of the Dunhuang documents cannot be overstated." A whole field of study, Dunhuangology, grew up around the study of the documents. Not only were there many Buddhist texts, but as paper was rare and often recycled (and once Buddhist scripture was written on paper it was considered nearly blasphemous to destroy at that point), many non-Buddhist writings were preserved, unique in providing glimpses into the lives of everyday people.

If there is one over-arching point that can be grasped from the book (and the introduction), it is this; "the history of Central Asia over this period is characterized by a complex succession of power struggles." The lives of the ten people in this book were vastly affected by the fortunes, rise, and often precipitous falls of the Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, Arab, and the other powers (such as autonomous city-states like Samarkand) that continually fought for control of the eastern Silk Road, sometimes in three-way struggles in which an "ally" could switch sides in the middle of a battle. Even when an empire was not defeated on the battlefield it could collapse or fall into chaos due to serious internal disturbances, such as a 755 rebellion led by a general of the Chinese army against the Tang dynasty and when earlier that same year the Tibetan emperor was murdered during a revolt by his ministers.

Ok, the tales. There are ten of them and they are arranged in chronological order, though several overlap and a few even briefly mention some of the stars of the other tales. They vary in how much they focus on the actual life of the person whom the tale is about but most give a decent glimpse of what it was like to be such a person in a particular occupation. Some of the tales seem to be more about the political events of the time and the tale was just a convenient way for the author to discuss them while others read like fiction almost, one even with flashbacks. The ten tales, in order, are the merchant's tale (about a Sogdian merchant from Samarkand who has braved the Silk Road many times), the soldier's tale (about a Tibetan soldier), followed by tales about a Uighur Turk horseman, a Chinese princess being married off to the Uighur kaghan to cement a political alliance, a Kashmiri Buddhist monk, a Kuchean courtesan, and the last four set in Dunhuang, about a Buddhist nun, a widow, a government official, and an artist, one who painted some of the very caves the Dunhuang scrolls were found in. Read more ›

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting November 10, 2006

By Sky

Format:Paperback

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.

31 of 38 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Well researched, not as well written October 27, 2002

By C. L. Schoon

Format:Paperback

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.

39 of 51 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars a gem with a fault October 18, 2001

By Eugene Tsiang

Format:Hardcover

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.