Written by: Mahnoor Fatima
Posted on: July 27, 2020 | 
| 中文
The Exhibition Poster
China’s historic Silk Route has long captured imaginations as large trade networks that connected ancient China to empires of Central Asia across hundreds of years. The Silk Route, which started in Guangzhou in the 2nd Century BC and remained in use till the 18th Century, is no longer seen as exclusive to China’s history. It is now seen as a key network for understanding how global politics and cooperation have evolved since ancient times. To celebrate not only the Road but also the history of its discovery and excavation, the China National Silk Museum has inaugurated the exhibition “The Silk Roads: Before and After Richthofen.”
Terracotta Warriors
The China National Silk Museum (CNSM) was founded in February 1992 near the West Lake of Hangzhou as one of China’s first state museums. Its purpose was to research, conserve and display Chinese textiles, such as silk. Since most of the silk indigenous to China has been found along the Silk Route, in multiple parts of the Xinjiang province, and Dunhuang of the Gansu province, the museum has devoted a considerable amount of its resources to studying and preserving relics from the Silk Road.
Its main focus is how the road has been shaped by people, and the connections they make, whether as merchants along the actual trade Route or groups of archaeologists from various countries who came together for excavation. The exhibition pays tribute to Ferdinand von Richthofen, a German geographer who first coined the term in 1877, and his student Sven Hardin who launched the first of the expeditions. It traces the road’s beginnings from Zhang Qian’s mission in 138BC and Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty’s official establishment of trade routes, to its official recognition as a UNESCO heritage site in 2014.
A Portrait of Ferdinand von Richthofen
The first half of the exhibition focuses on the various networks and transactions which took place on the Silk Road, as reconstructed by the evidence found. Prior to the Silk Road, there was small scale trade happening due to the expansion of the Macedonians, Persians and Mauryans. But the Silk Road established official networks for trade and commerce which extended into these other empires mentioned earlier. Extensive documentation on bamboo slips provide a plethora of material, whether they were rates of products, receipts of transactions, or written accounts of interactions with new civilizations and cultures.
A Buddhist Stone Slab (Credits to Wu Huixin)
This part of the exhibition also includes the journeys of missionaries and famed explorers like Buddhist monks and missionaries, Suleiman the Magnificent, Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci, among others. It was on the Silk Road that the first instances of modern-day diplomacy emerged, in the form of political marriages, exchanges of goods and signing of treaties for the sake of prolonged political cooperation and trade relations.
The second half of the exhibition looks to the circumstances that led historians of the 19th and 20th Centuries to excavate and research the Silk Road. It emphasizes how the period of global exploration created a desire to map and uncover the unchartered routes of China. When the Bower Manuscript was located in Kuqa, Xinjiang by accident, it set a wave of archaeological expeditions around the Tarim Basin to uncover evidence of a vast network of trade routes through which products of various civilizations were being bought from and sold to Chine. The Chinese also joined excavation efforts around the 1920s and 1930s.
A Dresser With Traditional Chinese Motifs (Credits to Wu Huixin)
By the 1950s and 60s, the term ‘Silk Road’ became synonymous with friendly and cooperative relationships between countries. From then onwards, the term ‘Silk Road’ was popularized in everyday imaginations, with books, films, movies and songs being written about it. For example, in 1998, the famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma launched the ‘Silk Route Project’ inspired by the trade route, and what he understood to be “a modern metaphor for sharing and learning across cultures, art forms and disciplines.”
CNSM’s newest exhibit features a collection of over a hundred pieces excavated from the Silk Road, including 20 rare artefacts never seen before. Highlights include gold plates celebrating ancient Greek deities, crafts with both Chinese and Western motifs, and finally Silk clothes. Through these pieces, one can understand how, with the sophistication of trade and proliferation of maritime routes, the kind of materials traded along the Silk Route changed to more luxurious and exclusive material.
(L) Ancient Greek Gold Plate (Credits to Wu Huixin) and Stone from a Nestorian Tomb (R)
With the help of UNESCO, CNSM also recently launched a digital archive of the Silk Road to mark the 30th anniversary of the first Silk Road expedition, which took place in China between 1990 and 1995. UNESCO finally declared the Silk Road as a world heritage site, after a 26-year-old bid for the title. A scholar from Nanjing University who also participated in many of these expeditions, Liu Yingsheng, noted that the Silk Road put Chinese history into a global context, strengthening the relationship between China and the world.
The Digitisation Inauguration
The Silk Road has shown how cooperation, inclusiveness, learning and trade between ancient empires have been deeply embedded in our world’s history. The more we learn about the road, the better we can understand how broad and encompassing relations between countries can be, from commerce to people-to-people connectivity. With collaborative exhibitions and the digitizing of artefacts, CNSM and UNESCO have added new technological dimensions to how the Silk Road can reach and impact different parts of the world. The exhibition will continue until August 23rd, and those interested can see their digital archives here.
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