The Silk Road

[GeneChing]

Read The Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Continued: Part 12: The Road to Ashgabat: Interview with Yazmyrat Annamyradov & a Visit to the Nation Turkmen Kurash (Traditional Wrestling) Training Center by Greg Brundage

[GeneChing]

On the Silk Road with Sam Willis
In a new BBC Four series Dr Sam Willis reveals how the Silk Road was the world's first global superhighway where people with new ideas, new cultures and new religions made exchanges that shaped humanity. Here, Willis tells BBC History Magazine’s TV editor, Jonathan Wright, about the series, about his experiences travelling to places that were once among the most connected and cosmopolitan in the world, and why we’ve got the Silk Road to thank for rhubarb crumble…

Friday 29th April 2016Submitted by: Emma Mason


Sam Willis’s three-part series The Silk Road airs on BBC Four on Sunday 1 May at 9pm. (BBC/Alastair McCormick)

According to Willis, “The Silk Road cut across borders and broke down the borders in our minds”. It’s a quote that in itself does much to explain why Willis wanted to explore the route, which once linked China’s ancient capital Xian with Venice, and its history…

Q: What was the spark for the series?

A: I have always been interested in undertaking an enormous journey – one that would be almost too difficult to fathom – and to travel as a historian rather than as a tourist. I think that the Silk Road attracted me because of the scale of the challenge: 5,000 miles, so many cultures, so many countries, so many people, so many stories. I am also fascinated by the unknown; I like visiting places and studying parts of history that are entirely new to me.

Q: You had a lot of ground to cover – how did you choose where to spend time?

A: I realised early on that there were certain major building blocks that we could start with. I wanted to emphasise certain major themes: how the Silk Road transported not just goods but ideas, religion, culture, war and peace, and those themes dictated certain locations.

I also wanted to experience the full range of climate – from the hottest desert on earth (in Iran) to the snow-covered mountains of Tajikistan. My favourite place was an extraordinary desert in central China that was like the moon. It was full of grey stones about the size of golf balls.


Dr Sam Willis in China. (BBC/Alastair McCormick)

Q: Perhaps we don’t always realise how connected our forebears were. Did making the journey give you any insights into this?

A: The one major theme that comes out of the programme and of my personal experience is one of connection – and the flip side of that is how isolated we Europeans seem to have been. The countries of central Asia were most aware of what was happening everywhere because of the constant influence of trade, and people coming from both east and west. Above all, the Iranians were and certainly still are most conscious – and proud – of this. They felt as if they were in the centre of the world.

Q: What was it like visiting Iran?

A: It is staggeringly beautiful and the people are so fascinated in their own history and place in the world. They were polite, kind, thoughtful, generous, interested, interesting, charming and funny. They found the idea of a western film crew quite bewildering. “Where are you from?” they would all ask in mild astonishment. The answer, Glasgow (the programme was commissioned out of BBC Arts in Scotland), then confused them even more. I would urge you all to go.

We were there on the day that the sanctions were lifted and there was a tangible sense of excitement and promise, and if I know one thing now it is that the Iranians are endlessly resourceful. They will now make that country even more magical than the bones of it already are.

Q: How difficult was it to get all the necessary permissions to film?

A: This was very difficult. Iran, Uzbekistan and China are three of the most difficult countries for any film crew to access but we stuck to our guns and the gamble paid off. There were one or two major hiccups, not least when we spent a week filming in Tajikistan and were waiting to receive our visas for Uzbekistan, which never arrived. We had no choice but to fly home, with a massive hole in our documentary and very low morale.

Fortunately, a number of weeks later the permissions came through and we made it to Uzbekistan, which meant that we could visit the iconic Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva – places that changed the world as we know it.

Q: Was there a favourite moment during filming?

A: An extraordinary experience was visiting a very remote valley in Tajikistan, the Yaghnob Valley, which is populated by a tribe of people who are related to the Sogdians, who once dominated the Silk Road trade of central Asia but were dominated by countless invading armies and forced to hide in the mountains. These folk – and there are very few of them indeed – still speak Sogdian. To hear them speak is to hear history at least 2,000 years old. It sent a shiver up my spine because the language is dying.


Dr Sam Willis with a Yaghnob family. (BBC/Alastair McCormick)

Q: What other themes does the shows throw up?

A: I like one of the simplest of all examples of the power of the Silk Road. In Venice, on the corner of a house overlooking a canal, is a statue of a man carrying a bag of rhubarb on his back. He is a rhubarb merchant, but rhubarb comes from China. So, although the Silk Road helped spread such world-defining ideas as algebra, paper, printing and gunpowder, it also spread rhubarb: no Silk Road, my friends, no rhubarb crumble.

Sam Willis’s three-part series The Silk Road airs on BBC Four on Sunday 1 May at 9pm.

This looks promising.

[PalmStriker]

Wow! I had missed all the posts from April that I was unaware of... have to catch up on some reading ! Ultra-Cool Thread !

[GeneChing]

To be honest, I started this for Greg's articles. He proposed The Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour, which he funded himself, in exchange for LORs to get him into the interviews he secured.

China's bold gambit to cement trade with Europe--along the ancient Silk Road


A cargo train bound for Germany waits in Zhengzhou, China. China's leadership envisions a "New Silk Road" of global economic expansion with such train routes. (New China News Agency)

Julie Makinen and Violet Law

From his office on a bend of the Rhine River, freight terminal boss Bernd Putens can see — and hear — the early stirrings of what China calls the New Silk Road.

The clang-clang of forklifts echoes through his building as 42 containers of cargo are unloaded at the Duisburg Intermodal Terminal, part of the world's largest inland port.

The containers have just arrived on a train from Changsha, China, filled with electronics and other consumer goods, and will return carrying Land Rovers and other European products.

They represent a bold effort by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to extend his country's economic and political clout.

Until four years ago, there was no regular rail service linking China and Germany, and for good reason.

The tracks existed, but at nearly 7,000 miles, the distance is longer than a round trip between Los Angeles and Boston, and trains must switch gauges — a laborious, time-consuming process — as they pass from China into Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland. Trains are twice as fast as sea shipment yet twice as expensive, so rail makes sense only for high-value products or goods with short shelf lives.

But two millenniums after traders began ferrying gems, precious metals, fabrics and spices on arduous overland routes linking the Far East with Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, China believes the time is nigh for a modern Silk Road. Leaders in Beijing envision a 21st century version of the path trod by the likes of Marco Polo, starting with locomotives but quickly expanding to encompass roads, pipelines and other infrastructure.

By physically linking itself more tightly with Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, China is aiming to create new markets as growth slows at home while deepening Beijing's influence across Asia and as far away as the Middle East and Europe.

The effort is at the center of Xi's signature political and economic policy initiative, called the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

For two years, Xi has been talking up the sweeping strategy — known collectively as One Belt, One Road, or OBOR — on his frequent trips abroad, while lining up financing plans at home and enlisting the participation of state-run and private companies.

With its expansive ambition, some observers have compared China's grand new endeavor to America's Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, a game-changing effort that revolutionized trade and recast many long-standing relationships.

It is expected to cost even more than the Marshall Plan, for which the United States spent the equivalent of slightly more than $100 billion in today's money.

"With these initiatives, Beijing, and more particularly, the Chinese Communist Party, seeks to reinforce the emerging global narrative that China is moving to the center of global economic activity, strength and influence," Christopher K. Johnson of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a recent paper analyzing One Belt, One Road.

Markus Taube, a professor of East Asian economic studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, believes the initiative "will strengthen China's economic and diplomatic leverage in Europe and provide a political and diplomatic counterweight against the U.S."

"The more I think about [the strategy], the more it makes sense," he said.

But others are more skeptical, saying China's lofty language around One Belt, One Road masks myriad questions about how much money will be spent on the project and where, and who will benefit.

"It's generated a lot of buzz, but no one is quite sure what it actually means," said Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

China's government has set up a $40-billion fund to promote private investment in One Belt, One Road initiatives and is encouraging state-run banks to make loans for projects including power plants, ports, pipelines and railways — to be built overseas, in many cases, by Chinese companies. The Bank of China has announced plans to fund $120 billion of those projects from 2015 to 2019.

In January, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank officially opened its doors, and the multinational institution is expected to finance tens of billions of dollars' worth of projects that fall under the One Belt, One Road umbrella.

Chinese firms, eager to avail themselves of government financial incentives and align themselves with a key Communist Party priority, are scrambling to get on board and show they're embracing One Belt, One Road.

Although massive ground-up infrastructure projects will take years to come to fruition, the ripple effects of the strategy are already being felt in places like Duisburg.

Xi visited the German city in 2014 to tout the rail project, and since then, interest in China-to-Germany freight has surged. Now Duisburg is receiving one train every day from China, including three to five a week from Chongqing, two a week from Wuhan and one a week from Changsha. There are also weekly trains to Hamburg from Wuhan and Zhengzhou.

"Now it seems every [Chinese] city wants to send its own train," Putens said.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

::

Germany is not the only country welcoming new rail service from the Middle Kingdom. In February, the first train to connect China with Iran arrived in Tehran after traveling 5,900 miles through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The 39-wagon train carried $600,000 worth of clothing, shoes and bags.

China has also pioneered a 16,000-mile round trip between the cities of Yiwu and Madrid. The 82-car train left China full of Christmas decorations, crafts and trinkets, arriving in Spain just before Christmas 2014. The train returned to Yiwu last year hauling olive oil.

Although the train that arrived in Iran originated from China's eastern province of Zhejiang, Chinese officials believe land-locked western Chinese cities such as Urumqi — which is closer to Iran than to Shanghai — could benefit even more substantially from rail links through Central Asia. In that sense, One Belt, One Road is intended to correct an economic imbalance within China, helping goose the development of the nation's western regions, which lag far behind their coastal cousins.

Although the arrivals of the first locomotives in places like Iran and Spain have been greeted with much fanfare, it's not clear if they can blossom into vibrant transportation links and significantly boost trade.

Homayoun Jahani, an executive of the Iranian transportation company Pers, which was involved in arranging the train, said the 14-day journey to Tehran proved the train was a "reliable vehicle" and said plans were already underway to begin monthly service to the port of Bushehr.

But Masoud Daneshmand of the Iran-UAE Chamber of Commerce, said it was "far from being a viable, hustling and bustling railroad."

In Duisburg, port spokesman Julian Boecker said operations have grown increasingly smooth since the first test train from Chongqing in 2011. One-way travel time, which took 18 days at first, now averages 11 to 13 days. Putens said customs clearance in Duisburg has been shortened from two days to two hours.

"As we gained experience in cooperation, efficiency improved," said Boecker, especially in areas such as gauge changes. (While Europe and China have the same gauge width for their tracks, all former Soviet states have wider gauges, so trains have to be adjusted at those borders.) But with the trains now running at 600 miles per day, "it's reaching the limit."

One problem in Germany is that while there are plenty of Chinese goods coming in, finding enough cargo to ship back out hasn't been easy. Empty containers from China are piling up. Port managers are planning to rent a five-acre plot to hold about 2,000 of the metal boxes while Chinese shipping firms figure out how to handle them.

Some do go back full. In addition to Land Rovers, China-bound containers have been packed with Porsches, Audis, auto parts from Ford and Volkswagen plants, steel coils, specialized machinery and milk powder. (Jaded by food safety scandals, Chinese consumers pay handsomely for imported dairy products.)

Putens said his Chinese counterparts had recently requested refrigerated transportation for European wines.

Despite the growth, China rail freight accounted for less than 1% of all cargo handled at Duisburg last year. That's small, said Boecker, but "it is an important symbolic value."

The challenge now is to find better balance between inbound and outbound cargo, and to see if the line can sustain itself without government aid.

"There's economic interest on all sides to keep this rail route alive," said Boecker.

::

Taube, the professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen, said that for China, the initial volume of trade by rail isn't as crucial as the opportunities it opens up for economic development — and greater political clout — along the route.

"The rail links are the skeletons, but the important flesh will be the industrialization zones along the tracks," he said.

The long-term vision, he believes, is for China to bring manufacturing to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries as labor in China gets more expensive; at the same time, Beijing can build up its economic and diplomatic sphere of influence.

Tom Miller, a China expert with Gavekal Dragonomics, said developing transportation links through Central Asia will give China greater access to natural resources in the region, including oil. Diversifying China's sources of energy and the transportation routes will also make China feel more secure, he said.

Just weeks before the arrival of the train in Tehran, Xi became the first Chinese leader to visit Iran in 14 years, signing treaties on judicial, commercial and civil matters and pledging to boost trade — which stood at $52 billion in 2014 — to $600 billion a year over the next 10 years.

China has announced similar headline-grabbing contract deals in countries including Pakistan and Kazakhstan.

Beyond securing more oil and other resources, Miller said China wants to use One Belt, One Road to boost trade with its western provinces and develop their local economies. And Beijing may be hoping to find new customers for some of its excess steel, cement, heavy equipment and rolling stock, among other things.

China's economy has been slowing, with growth dropping in 2015 to 6.9%, its lowest in several decades.

David Kelly, director of research at the Beijing-based consultancy China Policy, said the envisioned projects of One Belt, One Road are too big and would take too much time to provide any sudden economic benefits for China.

The strategy "is not going to yield strong returns on investment for many years," he said.

Still, unlike many of China's earlier "going out" initiatives that saw Chinese firms encounter friction as they ventured to places such as Africa and South America in search of natural resources, One Belt, One Road is being approached with a greater degree of sophistication and patience, Kelly believes.

"A lot of these ventures will be successful," he predicted. "There's already a smarter feel to a lot of the proposals."

julie.makinen@latimes.com

Times staff writer Makinen reported from Beijing and special correspondent Law from Duisburg. Special correspondent Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran contributed to this report.

I'm glad Greg brought the Silk Road to our attention as it is once again a global frontier. Quite topical in the world view.

[GeneChing]

Greg tells me he's hitting the road again. This is a little teaser in preparation for his next journey.

The Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour: Part 13: Silk Road's northeast terminal Beijing, the Niujie Masjid, China Islamic Association and Wang Zhengyi, also know as Great Broadsword Wang the Fifth by Greg Brundage

[GeneChing]

Cambridge University: Parasites hitch ride down Silk Road


2,000-year-old personal hygiene sticks with remains of cloth, excavated from the latrine at Xuanquanzhi. Photo: Hui-Yuan Yeh.

PARIS (AFP).- Merchants plying the ancient Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean moved more than gold, fabrics, spices and tea -- they also exported gut parasites, researchers said Friday.

It has long been theorised that the Silk Road helped spread bubonic plague, leprosy, anthrax and other infectious diseases between East Asia, the Middle East and Europe -- though concrete archaeological evidence has been scant.

But now analysis of the contents of an ancient latrine along the route has revealed evidence that traders 2,000 years ago did indeed spread disease.

The team from Britain and China examined faeces preserved on wood and bamboo sticks wrapped in cloth -- the toilet paper of their day -- that were excavated in 1992 at the Xuanquanzhi pit stop in north-west China.

Unearthed from a latrine dating back to 111 BC, during China's Han Dynasty, and which was still in use in 109 AD, seven samples yielded eggs from four types of parasite: roundworm, whipworm, tapeworm and Chinese liver fluke, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The fluke, a parasite that causes pain, diarrhoea, jaundice and liver cancer, needs wet, marshy areas to complete a life cycle, whereas Dunhuang is in an arid area on the edge of the desert.

"The liver fluke could not have been endemic in this dry region," said a statement from Cambridge University, whose researchers took part in the study.

"In fact, based on the current prevalence of the Chinese liver fluke, it's closest endemic area to the latrine's location in Dunhuang (in north-west China) is around 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) away, and the species is most common in Guandong Province -- some 2,000 km from Dunhuang."

Xuanquanzhi in Dunhuang was a popular stopping place for merchants, explorers, soldiers and government officials.

"Finding evidence for this species (liver fluke) in the latrine indicates that a traveller had come here from a region of China with plenty of water, where the parasite was endemic," said study co-author Piers Mitchell.

"This proves for the first time that travellers along the Silk Road really were responsible for the spread of infectious disease along this route in the past."

The Silk Road is so called for perhaps the most famous commodity that crossed its inter-connected network of trade routes criss-crossing Eurasia.

Not to be too crass, but how the heck do you wipe your ass with that?