In association with the British
Museum.
Supported by the Pidem Fund.
The Silk
Road is often talked of as a single route stretching east to
west - from China to the Mediterranean. In fact the Silk Road is
a simple name for a complex network. In its heyday, towns along
it were open to influences from all the major world civilisations
at the time, especially Iran to the west, India to the south, China to the east, and
the Turks to the north.
The Hungarian-born explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) fought
rivals at the turn of the last century to be the first to uncover
these long-lost civilisations. The evidence had lain buried for
up to 2,000 years in tombs, tips and temples beneath the sands of
the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts.
In 1907 Stein came to a recently discovered library cave near Dunhuang
('the blazing beacon') in north-west China, where thousands of manuscripts,
paintings and a few printed items had been stored for almost 1000
years. One of them, the Diamond
Sutra, is the earliest printed book
to bear a date (11 May, 868). It is now one of the greatest treasures
in the British Library.
Explore our Silk Road themes
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