The Silk Road: Searching for the Source in the East

The Silk Road was never a road at all. Even when regularly traversed by merchants, the most famous of trade routes was an East-West network rather than a single, definitive highway. The myriad legacies of the fabled road left to the modern world, and the many images of splendor and hinterland, are likely to leave today's traveler wondering where to begin. The easiest answer is in the East.

And so Colin Thubron, whose previous writings have also examined the expanses of Eurasia, begins his account Shadow of the Silk Road in Xian. This city in the Wei and Yellow River valleys, once a capital of ancient China, now serves as poster-child for the overdrive tendencies of China's current modernization. Here the award-winning travel writer begins a quest that will carry him 7,000 miles through northern China and across the Tian Shan mountains; into the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to the legendary Timurid trophies of Bukhara and Samarkand; over the Afghan frontier into lands fraught with battle, and further west, across the northern plains of Iran full of Shiite mourning and across Turkey's southeastern Kurdistan, before ending at Antioch, where Hellenic remnants recommend themselves as relatively recent history.

Parallel to the geographic progress of Thubron's eight-month journey (interrupted for a full year by fighting in Afghanistan) runs a physical one. His travels across China (in April 2003), are marked by the government's obsession with the SARS virus that has waylaid tourism and travel generally. The threat of contamination is an effective roadblock in any age, and the author describes peculiar limbos in the Gobi desert as officials collect the names and temperatures of passengers on a westbound bus. It's an interesting predicament for a traveler who, days earlier, had noted passing from the "mouth" of China at the gate of the Great Wall – once considered the receptacle of civilization - into the unquarantined expanse that constituted the realm of "forgotten graves." Add to this organic transit the Chinese tradition that considers the foot a microcosm of the body, and the reader can extrapolate this ambitious trek across Asia as a symbol of aging and maturation. By the time Thubron arrives at his destination in Antioch having suffered an abscessed tooth and other rigors of the road, he mistakes his reflection in the mirror for that of his father. Startled by his shabby and exhausted appearance, he writes "I feel surprised that anyone ever talked to me, belatedly grateful."

These people who did talk, Thubron's interlocutors, wrest his story from the introspection of time and travel, and it is to his credit that he doesn't cede it easily. There are characters crossing these pages that are foolish, tiresome and at times, dull. "I had giving up disliking him," he writes of a rather perverse Islamic student in Orumiyeh. Instead he listens to him in fascination, asking once, "You believe this stuff?" Confronted by anti-Chinese bias among a Uigher youth he writes, "It is not true, of course, but I know why he says it." Thubron as a guest in an unfamiliar country never stands on ceremony. He is respectful when not cordial; his observations are full of the conviction of a man who is not afraid to record the clichés he witnesses: in the bazaar of Kashgar a "resurgence of a once-nomadic world reached a crescendo;" The chador-attired women of Meshed, after the burkhas of Afghanistan "seemed scandalously exposed;" Often, strangers met are evidence of Thubron's eventual realization that he has been "reaching countries hundreds of miles before their official frontiers, or long after." Humanity, just like the geographic contours of the Silk Road, does not abide by frontiers and regularly defy their parameters.

As a contrast to these transient companions, Thubron laces his narrative with regular self-deprecating discourses with an imaginary traveler – a Sogdian merchant from millennia past on his way to trade lapis in Khorastan. Posing as the naìf, a modern-day pilgrim with nothing material to gain from his journey, Thubron invokes the skepticism of a veteran Silk Road runner, a "grizzled entrepreneur." It is this hallucinatory voice that checks Thubron when his prose becomes purple; when he ventures that the purpose of his trip is "to encounter the protean shape of faith." Only this figment, wise in his practicality, can call the author "idiot." It is not true, of course, but we know why he says it -- to prompt Thubron to concede that the purpose of the trip is equally "to see what will happen."