Customer Reviews

Life along the Silk Road

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

_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.

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.

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.

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.

This book is not bad at all but I must say that I expected it to be more specific about the ways of the Silkroad. The author gives us information which is not very particular to this Road. The tales give a lot of Geographical info, info about Buddhism, about the way Monks live a.s.o. but this is not typically Silk Road stuff. Buddhist Monasteries and their rules are almost exactly the same anywhere, the same goes for the making of felt, the described wall paintings etc. It was also written in a very boring style but then again the author is no writer but a Scholar, so we should not be too hard on her.
Christina

An interesting approach to describing life along the Silk Road via fictionalized accounts of different personages: a soldier, a merchant, a courtesan, etc. The book is interesting and filled with minutiae of life and history that the author has gleaned from various period sources. I found its coverage a bit lopsided towards the Chinese end of the road. There is discussion about Central Asia's and Tibet's role in Silk Road history as well, but mainly in the beginning, and there's not enough discussion of what occurred later in the Central Asian region as it began to be influenced more and more by Islam.

This work of historical fiction by the director of the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, fills a big hole in the narrative on the Middle and Late Tang period (700-900) and on the Silk Road itself. Describing the history of a Road is difficult and the best literary expedient is probably that adopted by the Author: a compendium of tales, tales of travellers, merchants, missionaries, monks, military men, princesses (sent as wives). From Samarkanda to Chang'an ten characters narrate the life tales describing happenings in micro and macrohistoric detail. From everyday life to important socio-political turmoils a glimpse of this world becomes possible and very engaging. The Author's intent is evidently that of making this period of history digestible and intriguing for the dilettante and this is also her drawback, since more peered reviewers have noticed a few incongruent associations and some historical errors in the text. However, even if not to be used as a study text, this book keeps all the promises it makes. The Introduction is concise and helps to correctly contextualize the successive tales, maps are explicative and illustrations are a real treat. The spelling of the many Turkic, Chinese, Uighur names is sometimes confusing and the Table of Rulers at the end of the book is to reductive, but the suggested Further Reading is useful and enlightening. Read enjoy and start travelling on the Silk Road, or what is left of it!.

This book is presented with different tales told by different people living along the Silk Road between 750 and 1000. The people e.g. A courtesan, merchant, monk, princess, soldier all have a different perspective. There is much detail to be found in the writing and I found that I needed to read it more than once and tales could be read on there own without much trouble.