The Silk Road
Melvyn Bragg and guests Tim Barrett, Naomi Standen and Frances Wood discuss the Silk Road, the trade routes which spanned Asia for over a thousand years, carrying Buddhism to China and paper-making and gunpowder westwards.In 1900, a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuang. Inside, he found thousands of ancient manuscripts. They revealed a vast amount of evidence about the so-called Silk Road: the great trade routes which had stretched from Central Asia, through desert oases, to China, throughout the first millennium.Besides silk, the Silk Road helped the dispersion of writing and paper-making, coinage and gunpowder, and it was along these trade routes that Buddhism reached China from India. The history of these transcontinental links reveals a dazzlingly complex meeting and mingling of civilisations, which lasted for well over a thousand years.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
- Tim Barrett
8 episodes
Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies - Naomi Standen
3 episodes
Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Newcastle University - Frances Wood
10 episodes
Head of the Chinese Section at the British Library
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Programme ID: b00p315t
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p315t
Auto-category: 950 (Asian history)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, in 1900 a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuang.