If you value a book according to how much new information you can expect per page,read this one -- especially if you also like convincingly argued and solidly researched solutions to historical mysteries like where exactly was the Silk Road (answer: it was a "non-road")and how could fabulously profitable long-distance East-West trade in luxury goods throughout ancient and medieval times have been conducted over thousands of miles of desert, 17,000 foot high mountain passes barely accessible in mid-summer, through territories controlled by a shifting cast of warlords, bandits, imperial garrisons and customs posts, and so on have left the merchants any profit margins at all, supposing that they survived the journey in the first place? Valerie Hansen's answer is that of course the silk and everything else, except for local produce and doodads traded from oasis to oasis, went by ocean freight the same as almost all international cargo does today (it wouldn't pay to ship it, otherwise).
But the ancient cities along the "Silk Road" turn out to be inherently interesting places -- this book could make you want to visit parts of Central Asia that you wouldn't previously have thought of going within 2,000 miles of -- thanks to . . . recycled waste paper, including local government archives in a bewildering number of languages and scripts, that was buried in tombs or sealed in caves as wrapping for Buddhist "libraries" or hoards of valuables whose owners had to hide them in a hurry from Muslim invaders. This is history from the dump -- unedited, unbiased, not meant for publication, retrieved by several generations of explorers and archaeologists who spent the whole 20th century finding or creating puzzles and mysteries which the latest crew of scholars have begun to solve. The extremely dry desert conditions at major Silk Road sites kept these fragments or piles of paper (and wood, leather, silk, etc.) intact and legible for centuries and millenia.
Hansen herself seems to take great pains to avoid reading anything into the evidence from the dumps, graves, and caves that isn't clearly there (or as clearly as recycled paper fragments permit it to emerge), and her selection manages to be entertaining (archaeology usually bores me but Hansen is a good writer and the story is full of surprises -- who would have expected mummies of prehistoric Irishmen, or at least that's what they look like, wrapped in plaid shrouds in desert graves in northwestern China?) as well as strung together into a narrative that is engrossing because it generates mysteries alonng the way and also manages to solve enough of them to make me feel as though I'd got somewhere by the end of this "road".
The book has a chapter for each of the major cities along the "silk" routes that yielded paper and other clues from the dumps, graves, etc. If you want to save time and enjoy the book in instalments, perhaps while traveling, read the introduction and the conclusion, then you can read a chapter at a sitting without losing the thread or falling into Central Asian multicultural confusion (if you weren't some kind of Silk Route nut to begin with -- otherwise, a lot of the information in this book could be new, including the 19th and 20th century opinions about the Silk Road and its travellers which Hansen very effectively debunks). (If you do read the book this way in instalments, I would suggest skipping chapter 2 until just before you get to the end -- unless you're really into dead languages that are so dead nobody is even sure they existed, let alone who was saying what in them.)
As other reviewers have noted, one senses that Hansen has amassed a huge amount of material that might make another book or two that could be as good as this one (high information content and entertainment value along with detective work that solves a few mysteries). What about the 19th and early 20th century discoverers and explorers, Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot in particular who seem to be great scholars but also among the greatest looters in history whose own accounts of how they did what they did and found what they found sound as though they could do with some fact checking (maybe there are more paper dumps somewhere that would bring those otherwise rather shadowy guys into focus? Aurel Stein seems to have written lots of letters to his relatives in Poland, his friends in England, and so on . . . .). And if the Silk Road was so different from what we all thought about it, what about some of the famous Silk Road travellers -- is there any real evidence that Marco Polo ever set foot on the Road (if he and his uncles even existed)? Marco is 10,000 times more famous than Pelliot or Stein, but far more shadowy and more like a just-so story than a real person, surely. I hope Prof. Hansen has another book or two on this subject up her sleeve that like this one may startle us by showing us things we thought we knew about from a very different angle in a completely new light.
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Top reviews from other countries
Kindle Customer
A clear, well considered account of what th Silk Road really was
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2018
jean-paul gravel
The lecture of the Silk Road sent me on a global reading on the whole of the Asian world so as to better understant the actual w
Reviewed in Canada on February 4, 2016
