Life along the Silk Road

This book explores Life Along the Silk Road through imagined biographies of various different people—a sea-going merchant, a Buddhist nun, a soldier, a princess and more—who lived between roughly the 7th and 10th centuries. Susan Whitfield fleshes out what we can securely know about them, which is generally very little, with contextualising information drawn from documentary and archaeological sources in order to create short biographies that tell us something about a particular moment in history. I can see what Whitfield was going for with this approach, in trying to produce something which might engage students more by centering characters rather than more traditional textbook approaches. I'm not sure that the book doesn't fall a show more bit between two stools as a result, because these are much more potted biographies rather than true narratives. Students may not be gripped, but it should at least be a fairly painless reading experience. show less

An interesting approach to describing life along the Silk Road via fictionalized accounts of different personages: a soldier, a merchant, a courtesan, etc. The book is interesting and filled with minutiae of life and history that the author has gleaned from various period sources. I found its coverage a bit lopsided towards the Chinese end of the road. There is discussion about Central Asia's and Tibet's role in Silk Road history as well, but mainly in the beginning, and there's not enough discussion of what occurred later in the Central Asian region as it began to be influenced more and more by Islam.

This book was published a few years after my first trip to Xinjiang province, Turfan, Urumchi and Dunhuang. I wish it had been the other way round, as I would have really enjoyed thinking about the people who lived their lives along the Silk Road whilst I was there myself. Very well worth reading.