July 26, 2025
Athens, GR 14 C
Expand search form
Blog

Ruth Leon recommends… Silk Roads – British Museum smuggling secrets

Ruth Leon recommends… Silk Roads – British Museum smuggling secrets

Silk Roads – British Museum smuggling secrets

Camel caravans crossing desert dunes, merchants trading silks and spices at bazaars – these are the images that come to mind when we think of the Silk Road. But the reality goes far beyond this.

Rather than a single trade route from East to West, the Silk Roads were made up of overlapping networks linking communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, from East Asia to Britain, and from Scandinavia to Madagascar.

The British Museum currently has a major exhibition which unravels how the journeys of people, objects and ideas that formed the Silk Roads shaped cultures and histories between about AD 500 to 1000.

It highlights objects from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that have never before been seen in the UK in this continent-spanning story.

Crossing deserts, mountains, rivers and seas, the Silk Roads tell a story of connection between cultures and continents, centuries before the formation of the globalised world we know today.

  Luk Yu-ping, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells one of these stories, this one about a legendary princess who brought the secrets of silk-making to her new kingdom.

At some point around AD 600-700, there was a princess who sneaked mulberry tree seeds and silkworm eggs into the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan (present-day northwest China) in her headdress. She crossed the border, married the king, introduced sericulture to her new kingdom, guaranteed that her wardrobe was continually updated with fresh silk robes and eventually became a venerated figure of near-saintly status – not bad for a single day’s smuggling?

Join curator Luk Yu-ping for a  journey along the legendary Silk Roads.

Read more

The post Ruth Leon recommends… Silk Roads – British Museum smuggling secrets appeared first on Slippedisc.

Previous Article

This singer became a conductor… on a train

Next Article

Brazil mourns foremost pianist

You might be interested in …

Paris ensemble gets German boss

Paris ensemble gets German boss

The Ensemble Intercontemporain is to be run by a German broadcasting executive called Patrick Hahn (not to be confused with the young Austrian conductor of the same name). Hahn has programmed a “Musik der Zeit” […]

Sudden death of Australian pianist

Sudden death of Australian pianist

Australian musicians are mourning the death of the Melbourne pianist, harpsichordist and teacher Dean Sky-Lucas. He was apparently in hospital, recovering from surgery, when an advanced cancer was discovered. The Melbourne conductor Benjamin Northey writes: […]