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The rhubarb road

For travel romantics the Silk Road is one of the most evocative names in the world. It conjures up images of deserts and snow-capped mountains, of camels and dusty marketplaces, of cities such as Kashgar, Merv and Samarkand and of the caravans that for centuries carried the luxuries of China to the Western world. The Silk Road of the imagination is timeless, exotic and pungent. The Silk Road by Frances Wood brings one somewhat down to earth.

For a start, the Silk Road was not a single highway but a complex of routes that meandered throughout Central Asia. Very few people actually travelled from one end of the network to the other. Those who did, didn't call it the Silk Road -- the name "Seidenstrasse" was coined in 1877 by a German geographer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. And although a lot of silk did pass down the road(s), it was by no means the most prized commodity -- by the mid-nineteenth century the trade in rhubarb was so great that, when Britain flooded China with opium, the Emperor threatened to ban the export of the laxative, condemning Britons to eternal constipation. (He did not know that an Oxford gardener had been growing the stuff commercially since 1777.) Richthofen could, with some justification, have called it the Rhubarb Road.

Having dismantled our preconceptions, Wood reassembles them with skill. She guides us through 2,000 years of Silk Road history, examining not just the majestic landscapes of Central Asia but also the people who inhabited them. There were, for example, the Sogdians of Samarkand who, dispossessed by Alexander the Great, adopted the Silk Road as their homeland with such success that for a long while every merchant was known simply as a Sogdian. In addition, there were travellers of all nationalities, from Zhang Qian, who in ad 92 produced for the Han Emperor a "Description of the Western Regions", to Marco Polo, whose narrative of his thirteenth-century journey to the Orient is still a source of wonder. (The wonder, to some, including Wood, being whether he went where he said he had.)

Wood is good on the nature of Silk Road commerce. Silk was, of course, one item of trade -she gives nice vignettes of Chinese children tending pet silkworms on mulberry leaves -- but there were countless others. Musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, Baltic amber and jade joined the caravans, as did horses, elephants, lions and ostriches -- like their Roman counterparts, Chinese Emperors were fond of unusual fauna. Food was a prosaic bulk cargo, and medicinal plants made a tidy profit. (If the Chinese purged the West with rhubarb, they still relied on Persian spinach to cure their hangovers.) Primarily, however, the Silk Road was a conduit for culture, disseminating languages, customs and faiths across Asia. Its entrepots were among the first global melting pots, as one German professor discovered in 1903 when he excavated the Xinjiang city of Khocho. Nominally Buddhist, Khocho contained manuscripts in Chinese, Sanskrit, Uighur, Mongolian, Ancient Turkish and Tibetan, as well as Manichaean and Nestorian relics.

To this melee, infant Europe contributed little beyond the dispatch of a few hapless missionaries. In the imperial age, however, its interest was fully aroused. On the explorers, scientists and Great Game players who came at that time to Central Asia, Wood is politely withering. She quotes Nicolai Przhevalsky (Russian, 1870s): "Yakub Beg is the same feckless shit as all Asiatics. The Kashgarian Empire isn't worth a kopek". Of Sven Hedin (Swedish, 1900s) she says, "to be hired by Hedin on one of his trips meant almost certain death for man or beast". And of Peter Fleming (British, 1930s) she remarks that although he may have described his clothes as "a random collection", Christopher Isherwood (not a noted explorer) wrote that "In his khaki shirt and shorts, complete with golf stockings, strong suede shoes, waterproof wristwatch and Leica camera, he might have stepped straight from a London tailor's window, advertising Gents' Tropical Exploration Kit".

Wood is dismayed less by any particular individual than by their collective negativity. They were at best passive observers who gave nothing; at worst they were rapacious vandals who took everything, from hunting trophies to antique art. She is outspoken, for example, on the treatment of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, a Dunhuang cliff pocked by shrines, first discovered by a Westerner and subsequently despoiled by hundreds of others -- notably a regiment of White Russian POWs who were interned there in 1921.

As Head of the Chinese Section at the British Library, and someone who clearly knows the area as well as she does its history, Frances Wood is an erudite narrator. She writes in a sober tone, leavened by quirky details and dry asides. The Silk Road -- copiously illustrated, as befits its Folio Society origins -- is a fine introduction to a world about which most Westerners know only the legend.

Fergus Fleming is the author of The Sword and the Cross, published earlier this year, and Ninety Degrees North: The quest for the North Pole, 2001.