SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD
by Colin Thubron

Chatto £20 pp363

The starting point for the Silk Road was the western gate of Changan in eastern China, where, for centuries, thousand-strong camel trains would set off laden with goods to dazzle the West. Changan is now the city of Xian, and the line of sandstone-sculpted camels that once marked the spot has been shifted to a traffic island to make way for a supermarket plastered with adverts for credit cards. The supremacy of shopping centres over historic sites epitomises the frenzy of construction engulfing today’s China and a melancholic air hangs over the book as Colin Thubron travels along one of the world’s oldest trade routes. His 7,000-mile journey by bus, truck, donkey cart and train goes through places (such as China and the former Soviet central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan) that have undergone seismic changes in the past 20 years, leaving many of their people unable to keep up.

From the very first page, where we join the author climbing at dawn through cypress woods in Huangling to the shrine of the Yellow Emperor, his blend of poetic writing, quirky encounters and social observations is captivating. By the second page, he is meeting a Chinese girl, who giggles through her fingers at the rare sight of a foreigner and tells him earnestly that the Yellow Emperor invented boots.

The Silk Road has long been a great romantic destination for travellers. At university, I remember poring over maps with a friend, considering retracing it through evocatively named places such as Tashkent and Samarkand. What we soon discovered was that the Silk Road was never a road, but a shifting network of routes starting in China and crossing central Asia. Until I read Thubron’s book, however, I did not know that the route (which dates from Roman times) has been called the Silk Road only since the 19th century when the term was coined by a German. Nor was it used just for transporting silk. The camel trains that left Changan were often laden with iron, bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and they would come back with Indian spices, glass, golden and silver artefacts, woollens and the western marvel of chairs. Later, they would transport fruit and flowers, including the first roses to arrive in the West. The road was also a conduit for ideas, religion and scientific knowledge. Among the revolutionary inventions that it took west from China were printing, gunpowder and the compass.

The northern route chosen by Thubron traverses some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, skirting the Gobi desert through asbestos mountains and “expanses of alarming yellow nothingness” to Kashgar and on to the ancient Mediterranean port of Antioch. But Thubron is the kind of English gentlemen traveller who barely mentions his own discomfort, apart from one horrific episode. In the backstreets of Azeri Iran he has an abscess literally dug out from his tooth with no anaesthetic by a dentist who cannot speak English. But the greatest threat to his journey turns out not to be the harsh terrain, but the Sars virus, or, rather, the clipboard-carrying officialdom trying to stop its spread. On buses and trains he finds himself surrounded by people in masks, sprayed with disinfectant and persecuted by Sars officials. Eventually, he is quarantined in an empty municipal building in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, travel writers thrive on such adversity. But Thubron also finds plenty of material in the enormous changes since the classic travel books on the Soviet Union and China he wrote during the 1970s and 1980s. It is 18 years since his previous travels to China, when he found a nation terrorised by decades of political oppression. He describes the change in Xian as “hallucinatory”, with building work everywhere, while observing that “little silver phones glittered at every ear”. Typical of the young people he meets is Huang, who wants to conquer the world through business, and he is astonished to find Mao’s Little Red Book for sale among souvenirs in the newly created “Old Culture Street”. But it is a generational difference. Old people now seem lost. He memorably describes them “dressed in their leftover Mao caps and frayed cloth slippers” gazing on at all the development “as if at some heartless pageant”.

At other times — when, for example, he disconnects his hotel phone because of all the prostitutes calling him — Thubron, too, seems nostalgic for the past. He looks up an old friend at the university where, 20 years earlier, he had found staff still reeling from the Cultural revolution, when teachers were persecuted for owning an English novel or having a letter from a foreigner. Now his friend is worried that English is taking over.

One of Thubron's great strengths is his compassion. You can somehow tell he is always polite and see why people would want to talk to him, whether it's the young Chinese monk in a cautiously reopened Buddhist monastery wanting to escape to the Dalai Lama in India or the young doctor in Herat confessing his problems with premature ejaculation. And he has an eye for hilarious detail. My favourite was the Chinese hotel room that came with a list of costs for damage that was so meticulous that it “turned vandalism into recreation”. The prices started with wallpaper stains at $5 per square foot to hanging on the luggage rack ($80) and smashing the lavatory at $200.

After managing to navigate the Sars officials and the forbidding mountains and desert, Thubron is finally thwarted by the fighting in northern Afghanistan. There is frustratingly little detail at this point, just a line explaining that he had to break off his journey and restart the same time the following year. I would also have liked to know more about how he found changes in attitudes to the British from his previous travels. Everywhere he goes, people ask why Britain invaded Iraq. He does not find a single person supporting the war until he reaches the Kurds of Turkey. But these are niggling complaints. The earliest silk was so sheer that the Indians called it “woven wind”; Thubron’s shimmering prose creates a wonderful book, so multilayered that, when I reached the end, I wanted to read it all over again.

THE SANDS OF TIME

One of the Silk Road’s most extraordinary secrets is the 3,000-year-old mummies, right, preserved in the salt sands of the Taklamakan desert in western China. Clad in tartan, they are tall and red-haired or blond: pioneer Caucasian migrants, perhaps, 1,000 years before silk was traded.

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