Author Topic: Shadow of the Silk Road

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Shadow of the Silk Road
« on: July 27, 2007 »


Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

REVIEW BY JEZZA

Colin Thubron revisits Asia in his latest book, embarking upon an epic journey across the continent that traces the route of the old Silk Road from China's heartland near Xi'an to Antakya on the Mediterranean. Thubron speaks both Mandarin and Russian which gives him unparalleled access to places along the way - rather than merely being an observer passing through a landscape in which the people are two-dimensional figures, he speaks to the locals and learns of their preoccupations, getting beneath the surface of society. In his earlier books on Communist Russia and China - 'Among the Russians' and 'Behind the Wall' - he encountered individuals stifled by the regime and living in fear, and in China a society trying to come to terms with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. In his later book 'In Siberia' he catalogued the chaos and anarchy he found across Russia in the aftermath of Communism. These themes emerge again in 'Shadow of the Silk Road' in the enormous discrepancies between the young, affluent urban yuppies he meets in China's cities and the impoverished villages in the rural areas where the inhabitants seem to belong to another era, washed up on the tide of history. China's progress has come at a price, where parents have to leave their children with relatives to seek work elsewhere, or where husbands and wives have jobs in separate towns hundreds of miles apart, and Thubron laments the growing materialism and the new sense of insecurity as the old assurances have been swept away.

The book delves deep into the richness of the area's history, covering the civilizations that have spread out across these lands. It was the account of Marco Polo and his journey to the court of the Great Khan that first fired the European imagination with tales of China's wealth, and the Chinese too were fascinated by accounts of the West, of headless people who had eyes in their chests and who ate raw flesh. The trade routes are ancient - Chinese silk has been found in the tombs of Egyptian mummies, and in a village in rural China that was once said to have been a Roman garrison Thubron finds Mediterranean-looking villagers, as well as some with red hair and pale eyes who appear almost Celtic. But Shadow of the Silk Road is also a book about contemporary Asia, and it is the rise of Islam that is a consistent theme; a unifying force amongst China's oppressed Uighur minority, moderate in the mountain kingdom of Kyrgyzstan - where he gets drunk on vodka with Kyrgyz shepherds - perceived as a political threat by the regime in Uzbekistan, and so fervent in Afghanistan that in contrast his first impression of the women of Iran is that they are scandalously underdressed by having their faces unveiled.

The characters encountered unburden themselves to Thubron along the way, whether a Buddhist monk in China who dreams of escaping to become a bodyguard to the Dalai Lama, a Uighur trader who was forbidden from marrying the girl he loved because she was Han Chinese, or a young Iranian draft-dodger who had worked in a restaurant in Canada for many years and who longed to once again make pizzas in Montreal. Perhaps the most curious of these characters is one that is entirely fictitious: a Sogdian trader from the Silk Road of ancient times that Thubron periodically conducts imaginary conversations with. It's an unorthodox approach for a travel book, and offers a glimpse into his own preoccupations and doubts, beginning to question his own mortality in a land full of ruined cities, derelict tombs and the relics of former empires.

Thubron travels light, and we learn that he carries a roll of US dollars in an empty bottle of mosquito repellent which evades all the searches he undergoes along the way. He reveals more of himself than in any other of his previous books, and in many respects the pensiveness found here is a combination both of uncertain times in an unstable region, and the natural doubts of a man in his mid-60s embarking upon a 7000 mile journey. You sense always that even when an enormous cultural gulf opens up before him that he strives not to judge, but rather to observe. But there are flashes of irritability which manifest themselves when confronted with the overt prejudices of others, such as an Iranian truck driver stating blandly that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy, or when characters he romanticises fail to live up to his expectations - his driver transforms from a bold Kurdish freedom fighter to a frightened boy after a checkpoint, and one night in Bishkek, when an undercover policeman tries to take his money as a bribe, Thubron furiously slaps his hand away and shouts at him in protest. The policeman is so astonished he lets him go.

As always he holds the reader spellbound; Thubron is a highly accomplished writer and his prose is beautifully descriptive. He has an eye for the incongruous, and there are humorous asides throughout the book, delivered in a characteristically dry fashion. Nevertheless 'Shadow of the Silk Road' is suffused with melancholy. He describes a lost world and a vanishing culture, exemplified by impoverished Uzbek women selling counterfeit western goods in an ancient bazaar, or Kashgar market, once rich with the colourful silks and carpets of the orient, now jeopardised by Chinese plans depicted in a computer-generated artist's impression of a vast and soulless municipal area covered in concrete, peopled by fashionably dressed consumers and cosmopolitan visitors with blonde hair. Shadow of the Silk Road is the culmination of a lifetime of travel by one of the finest travel writers, which ultimately weaves together past and present and sets the turbulence of modern events against an ancient backdrop.