Silken prose

By Stephen Fidler, FT.com site
Published: Sep 22, 2006

SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD
by Colin Thubron
Chatto & Windus ₤20, 384 pages

Colin Thubron must be one of the best of British travel writers still embarking on epic journeys. In Shadow of the Silk Road, as he journeys through central Asia to the Mediterranean, he effortlessly interweaves the present with the fast-disappearing past, and reminds even the well-travelled how much we still have to learn about our planet.

This book is the story of silk, a material of extraordinary resilience and strength, still found in 2,000-year-old graves when all other organic matter has rotted. It is a narrative about silk's spread from China westwards, and the more gradual transmission of the techniques to produce it. And it describes the historical significance of the routes by which it was distributed.

These routes, and the cities that grew up around them, began their decline more than 500 years ago when the Ming dynasty abandoned its trade contacts by land and by sea, almost at the moment that European explorers began their worldwide voyages. The consequences of this would dominate the economic history of the world for the next five centuries.

In some places the Silk Road exists only, as the book's title suggests, in shadow, like a vanishing vapour trail left by an aircraft no longer in view. With elegant prose, Thubron explains the historical significance of what is left, through architecture, some of which is disappearing at an alarming rate, and through the faces of the people he meets, including those of apparent European ancestry now living among the Chinese.

He starts in the world of the Chinese, which the government in Beijing is pushing deeper and deeper inland. As it imposes its own town planning and the Chinese population is encouraged to migrate westwards, the indigenous people quietly complain and history fades. As he moves into the southern territories of the former Soviet Union, he encounters different emotions, of nostalgia for and hatred of the departed Russians and of an Islam that is worlds apart from that represented by the likes of Osama bin Laden.

He goes through Afghanistan, where there is still some optimism that the ousting of the Taliban can improve the lives of the people, and into Iran, with its extraordinary culture that seems to emphasise mourning and loss. His journey ends in Antioch, now Antakya in Turkey, where the Romans once clothed themselves in silk that they thought grew in mysterious eastern forests, and from where St Paul and St Barnabas began their conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity.

Apart from the quality of his writing, one reason for enjoying Thubron lies in the way he engages with people. He exudes neither the cheerfulness of an Eric Newby, nor the misanthropy of a Wilfred Thesiger, but he is above all humane, a cool but sympathetic observer.

Thubron takes us on a fascinating journey that shows that travel writing at its best can still approach literature and can still educate. He has illustrated a lost world that is vanishing so fast, by both accident and design, that one is left with the sense that archaeologists, historians and scientists should hasten to document what remains.