is of the best documentaries about the Silk Road, but when it comes to
travelogues there are not many for it is not easy task. British travel writer
Colin Thubron has a new book,
Shadow
of the Silk
Road
,
which is about his travel from Xian, China to Antioch along this ancient trade
route along which goods, culture and religion moved.Thubron last saw China 18 years ago, before its market economy took off. In Xian, searching for the “coal dust” and “autumnal mud” he remembers, he finds instead a “hectic procession of shopping malls, restaurants and high-tech industrial suburbs,” the invasion of Givenchy, Bally, Dior and L’Oréal. He sees “couples walking hand in hand, even kissing — a Maoist outrage.”
Yet the past, as Thubron amply demonstrates, is no haven for angels. In China, he visits an old friend , a professor of English literature. A survivor of the Cultural Revolution’s mass terror, in which more than a million people are said to have died, this man’s concerns are confined to the forwardness of college students and, ironically, the widespread teaching of English. As Thubron makes his way through the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, he finds other living contradictions — like the Uzbek grandmother who reveres Stalin, killer of her husband and father.[The Way West]