Shadow of the Silk Road

Once again, I travel the Silk Road but this time as an armchair traveler. Thubron has created a literary landscape that makes my sedentary journey as colorful and captivating as my travels in 1993. Thubron's account of the Silk Road is a literary treasure. Throughout his narrative I found myself caught somewhere between being captivated by his perceptive observations, which were seldom judgemental yet always intensely personal and enthralled by his pictorial prose, laden with metaphor and similie. What makes Thubron's book different from other travel writings is the mystery that is conveyed. Other writers describe what can be seen, Thubron gives us a picture of what no longer exists; the unseen. So much of the Silk Road lays in ruins or lies buried. So many obscure civilizations were brutally leveled with few, if any remnants remaining. Thubron resurrects the conquerers who obliterated the once bustling metropolises: Qin Shi, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, and Hasan-i-Sabah. He makes them accountable, not for what remains but what they destroyed and took away. Then he explores what might have been with the rationale of an historian and geographer. The Silk Road transcends from a geographical route and is vividly portrayed as a sequence of historical occurrences that stretch for centuries across a continent. The weakness of the book is the maps. They are not always accurate: ie. Pakistan's border with China has been replaced with Afghanistan.

Colin Thubron retraces the Silk Road so you don't have to. Travel is dangerous, food is scarce, floors of trains and buses are still slicked with spittle because public spitting is still common, at least in the Chinese hinterlands. He speaks Mandarin and Russian, and the book is especially strong where it recounts discussions with the Uighars and other Muslims. It is sobering to learn that people in these regions often believe that 9/11 was staged by the Americans and Israelis.

This is one of the best travel books I read so far. I noticed some reviewer comparing him with Bill Bryson. I enjoyed Bryson's book too. Thubron is less humurous, but with more depth. I am very impressed with his knowledge of the central Asia. Being from China myself, I was shocked to read his account of lost Roman legion and the early Christian relics in the heart of China. This book keeps you wonder about the world away. I was also touched by the warmth of the people he encountered during his travel. Those people have suffered enough through history, yet they welcomed a foreign traveller like their family members. What a generous and handsome group of people---be it Afghans, Uzbeks, Tajks, or others. The book is beautifully written. It is by chance I picked up this book and I'm glad I did. I am going to check out some other books he wrote.

I traveled the same roads, and shared many of the same experiences, but I was there in search of specific historical events. The sights, sounds, smells were pushed aside and not allowed to register and interfere with my 'priorities'. I missed so much and this is why I wanted to read this book and see the journey through the eyes of another traveler. I could not speak much about personal memories. I wanted to but I have never known how I would describe a Tibetan waif in Katmandu or shepherds along the KKH (Karokarum Highway). And if I could, I could not have done so as eloquently as Colin Thubron. I had to read this book to see through his eyes what I may have missed, and he made me realize that I missed a lot. Or is it simply that he is such a masterful writer? Seeing it all again through his eyes has been a deeply beautiful experience for me, full of nostalgia. I found myself gazing wistfully off the pages and back to yesterday's horizons with an undescribable longing. He captured it all beautifully and probably just in time because it is changing at lightning speed. Kudos, my fellow traveler, kudos for the joy and understanding your picture words bring to us all. Suzanne Olsson New York

The Silk Road was the 2,000-year-old route used for trade between vastly different cultures of ancient China and ancient Rome and all points in between. It was never one simple road, more a knot of roads, with the traders taking side routes based on the markets or on the weather. Of course, it does not exist now, but in _Shadow of the Silk Road_ (Chatto and Windus), British author Colin Thubron relates his trace of the route. Thubron has written many books before of his wanderings in Russia, Siberia, and China, and this one is beautifully written, with descriptions of sites that few other tourists are going ever to see and encounters with people like Hunan traders, Uzbek prostitutes, or Buddhist monks. The significance of the Silk Road is merely historical, but many of the regions through which Thubron travels, despite their generally blighted aspects, are important within today's headlines. Thubron started his 7,000-mile travels in 2003, the year that America and Britain invaded Iraq, and indeed he had to take a break because of fighting in Afghanistan. He had to resume his journey the next year. It is impossible to say how representative his "man-on-the-street" conversations are, taking individuals from once-great societies who have been subject to wrenching change especially in the last few decades, but he is generally treated genially, often generously, even by those who object to his nation's endeavors in Iraq. The Silk Road gets its name from the most frequent and exotic of goods traded on it east-to-west, though the term comes from historians looking at the trade from the vantage of the nineteenth century. The history of the route is enticing and glamorous, perhaps more so for our viewing it from such a distant time. The route now goes among peoples who have changed completely, many of them losing heritage and status. An outbreak of SARS, which complicated Thubron's journey and even wound him up in a mockery of quarantine, makes a threatening shadow over the initial parts of the book set in China. The feeling of abandonment runs throughout the lands here. In Afghanistan, he hears among the complaints from the Hazara people, "Now we have no school, no road, no clinic... The government does nothing. We fought in the jihad against the Russians, but..." or "The Taliban killed my cows!" Thubron remarks, "They were not pleading, but angry: angry at their exclusion, as if the Taliban's branding of them as separate and inferior were being reiterated in calmer times. 'Write about us,' they said." There are conversations with a hermit-like shepherdess, an escapee from Iranian military service, an over-affectionate drunk, and more. Marco Polo brought back tales from these regions for his time, and Thubron has done so for ours. He is patient in trying to understand individuals or cultures. He is irreverent when the culture has gone amiss, but properly reverent as he visits archeological sites, mosques, or the tomb of Omar Khayyá