New Age Marco Polos get ready to romance the Silk Route

MUMBAI: When India and China signed a memorandum last week, the media was quick to hail the ‘historic step’. But for once this formulaic phrase wasn’t a mere bureaucratic catchphrase. The opening of the Nathu La pass renewed more than border-trade ties—it reinforced links with a 2,000-year-old past.
The muddy Himalayan road— which weaves past cloud-kissed monasteries and smoking butter lamps to eventually cross from Tibet into Sikkim—was one of the many filaments that bound together the great civilisations of the old world.In an age when riding a horse was equivalent to travelling business class, this tangled skein of caravan trails and mule paths served as the arterial highway between the Occident and the Orient.
Despite deserts and masked desperadoes, the 5,000-mile-long Silk Route stretched all the way from Rome to Changan. Atlas-buffs today can only locate imperial Changan in its new avatar as Xian, a Chinese city of neon signs and voracious bulldozers. But the fresh-from-the-wrapper constructions have not entirely displaced vendors hawking strangely Middle Eastern sweets, an ancient mosque and other clues to a time foreign traders and tongues thronged this city.
Other junctions along the Silk Road exude whiffs of the past, too. So although touristy hotels with names like ‘Marco Polo’ have replaced caravanserais, the bazaars are still crammed with the sheep guts and ancient traditions. “There’s a sense of timelessness in places like Kazakhstan and Turkemenistan,’’ said Prema Paranthaman of the Craft Council of India who retraced a segment of the route last year.
“Khiva in Uzbekistan has not closed its gates in 2,500 years because of the tradition that a caravan might arrive at any time of day or night. In Bokhara, the carpet dome (market), cap dome, money-changers’ dome and silk dome still serve hot tea before discussing business—a custom from the days when merchants would arrive straight out of the cold desert winds.’’
Indeed, the rutted paths that wandered through teapot-territory, through samovar-lands and into amphora-country saw a ceaseless procession of merchants. Bundles of silk would begin their journey in Xian, skirting the Taklamakan Desert (which in Uyghur means ‘enter and you shall not exit alive’), halting at oases towns like Samarkhand, sometimes looping through India or Egypt, and then heading past Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Greece to wealthy Rome.
“The first official reference to this conglomeration of trade routes was made in 110 BC in ‘The Annals of the Han Dynasty’,’’ said Rajeshwari Ghose, a scholar with Hong Kong University. “In the 3rd century AD, a pound of silk was sold for a pound of gold in Rome. But other lucrative products were also traded. For the Chinese, the most important was the horse from Central Asia.’’
Besides cotton, indigo dyes, glass, fruits and nuts, the Silk Route also enabled the flow of diseases and ideas. “The cultural exchange was even more important that the material aspect,’’ said Michael Farmer, an American historian.
“Religions like Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, Nestorian Christianity all moved east across the Silk Roads to avoid persecution in their homelands. Buddhism was carried from India to Central Asia and eventually China.’’
It was to master the tenets of Buddhism that Xuanzang, one of the great travel-writers of all times, traversed “rivers of sand’’ and mountain passes to reach India in 630 AD. The heap of sacred texts he carried back to China —bulkier than any backpacker’s load—are now housed in the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian. But it is his lively travelogue that has ensured his place in history.
“There are gods of the mountains and impish sprites which in their anger send forth monstrous apparitions,’’ reads his account of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which then proceeds to describe the exquisite stone Buddha “of a brilliant golden colour’’ that stood in its rocky alcove till just two years ago.
Unlike the Bamiyan Buddhas, which were destroyed by dynamite and fanaticism, many other landmarks of the Silk Route—which declined after the fall of Constantinople and emergence of convenient sea routes in the 15th century have been obliterated by the desert. Today sensors embedded in satellites are scanning the Taklamakan to locate cities submerged beneath the sands. But even if these found, their tales of adventure multiculturalism are gone forever.
“The Silk Route challenges stereotype that early world civilisations developed in isolation from each other, waiting to be ‘discovered’ by Europeans,’’ said Farmer. Added Ms Ghose, “Till 13th century the trade was carried on like a relay—the Chinese passed the goods to the Soghdians, then Parthians, Nabateans and Mediterranean sailors took over. The desert routes were perilous and few who set out ever returned.’’
These elements have fuelled a romance that everybody, from American magazinesto Bikaner hoteliers and Chor Bazaar dealers, is determined to tap. That’s why it makes sense to sneer like a suspicious Soghdian if a Mumbai antiquedealer, while justifying the the price of a Chinese funerary urn, employs his silkiest tones to urge, “ madam, it’s very old. It’s from Silk Route.’’