Asia Overland by Bijan Omrani

Author:Bijan Omrani [OMRANI, BIJAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789622178113
Publisher: Airphoto International Ltd.
Published: 2013-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Tang Dynasty pottery of bearded Westerner with wineskin, part of the George Crofts collection in the Royal Ontario Museum.

A Northern Wei Dynasty terracotta figure of a bearded foreigner on a camel, held at Paris’s Cernuschi Museum.

It was therefore appropriate that at Anxi, amongst the decay, Cable found the traditional trade of the Silk Road had not yet been completely obliterated by the passing of time. The inns were still full of merchants and tradesmen, just as they had been for hundreds of years. Equally there were cart drivers and camel men who would use their stop in Anxi to rest and revel, joining makeshift travellers’ clubs for the purpose of carousing and feasting; there would be no time on the long stretches of the journey ahead for any relaxation from effort.

The chief export in these winter months was wool. Cable saw caravans of hundreds of camels, each laden with heavy bales for shipment from Central Asia to the east. The merchants accompanying these goods knew all there was to know about the trade. They knew the prices that the wool would fetch in every city. They showed Cable how buyers would judge the quality of the wool by the feel and smell of samples; how the experts could tell by the texture of a handful whether the sheep had grazed on mountain pastures, lowland grass or the steppe, even whether the sheep had been fed on a north- or south-facing slope. They also showed her the old trick of inconspicuously weighing down the bales with fine Gobi sand, so as to get a better price when the wool was put on the scales. This same trick, it is known, was practised by wool merchants on the Silk Road 1,000 years before Cable saw it performed.

he task of unearthing the ancient life of the Silk Road, close in spirit but far removed in time from the beginning of the 1900s, was taken up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by an intrepid and, one might say freebooting group of Western archaeologists and academics. One of the most prominent of this adventurous generation of scholars was Sir Aurel Stein (1862–1943). Hungarian by birth, he studied oriental languages at a number of European universities before gaining British citizenship and joining the Indian Civil service in 1887. In 1900, reading of the travels of Russian and other expeditions to the ancient frontiers of China, he determined to follow in their footsteps. He organised a number of his own expeditions to the region, and in 1907 came upon Dunhuang, one of the first stops on the Southern Silk Road, just four days journey out of Anxi. It was here at Dunhuang that he was to make one of his most important discoveries.

The way to Dunhuang shared the desolation of the region beyond Jiayuguan. The land was almost completely barren and bare of vegetation. The road, as Cable describes it, led over what seemed an expanse of salt that glittered brightly when illumined by starlight.

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