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Life Along the Silk Road Susan Whitfield 9780719564017 Books

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Life Along the Silk Road Susan Whitfield 9780719564017 Books

Whitfield displays impressive knowledge of and insights into the vast landscape and long, eventful history of the Silk Road in these biographical vignettes of people from disparate backgrounds and walks of life and different (sequential) times. Each vignette is based on a historical person, but the narratives, of necessity, are developed by plausible scholarly inference from what is know about places and events of the time, with translated excerpts from original sources for additional substance. Thus we obtain an authoritative and intriguing feel for the kaleidoscopic humanity of the Silk Road, bringing the history alive. The vignettes purposely are not overly fictionalized or dramatized, because the principal object rightly is to shine a credible light on historical persons, places, and epochs of Silk Road history, seen through highly plausible human experience, and not merely to entertain by unfettered literary license; those who criticize the book on this account have missed the point, I think. This is elaborated history, not fiction per se. Recommended reading!


Tags : Life Along the Silk Road [Susan Whitfield] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. In the first 1, 000 years AD, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants and military men travelled on the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Linking Europe,Susan Whitfield,Life Along the Silk Road,John Murray Pubs Ltd,0719564018,History: World

Life Along the Silk Road Susan Whitfield 9780719564017 Books Reviews

Surprisingly, I found this book to be enjoyable. Whitfield presents the characters of the silk road in a new and emotionally connecting way, while still being very informative. I even read the introduction and found it to be useful!
However, I would not call this book a quick or easy read, as it is quite dense.
Very informative. Just loved it.
Susan Whitfield lives near my neighborhood. Enjoyed meeting her and taking her to dinner with friends.
Good
_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 offers a peak into the fascinating lives of people who lived along the Silk Road during its hay day and decline. The story-telling of each character is more academic than historic-fiction. Author puts together all the archaeological and manuscript finds and weaves the facts into life events of various characters, e.g. merchant, solder, monk, nun, courtesan, high official, etc. Don't expect any "juicy drama" found in historic fictions, it's more like a documentary with rich details which one would have been proud to decipher on his/her own if she were an archaeologist or historian.
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!.
Whitfield displays impressive knowledge of and insights into the vast landscape and long, eventful history of the Silk Road in these biographical vignettes of people from disparate backgrounds and walks of life and different (sequential) times. Each vignette is based on a historical person, but the narratives, of necessity, are developed by plausible scholarly inference from what is know about places and events of the time, with translated excerpts from original sources for additional substance. Thus we obtain an authoritative and intriguing feel for the kaleidoscopic humanity of the Silk Road, bringing the history alive. The vignettes purposely are not overly fictionalized or dramatized, because the principal object rightly is to shine a credible light on historical persons, places, and epochs of Silk Road history, seen through highly plausible human experience, and not merely to entertain by unfettered literary license; those who criticize the book on this account have missed the point, I think. This is elaborated history, not fiction per se. Recommended reading!