Treasures of the Silk Roads: British Museum and British Library explore realities of East-West trade
Typical, you wait for ages and then two exhibitions about the Chinese Silk Road open in London at the same time — giving two very different looks at the famous if usually misunderstood trading link between East and West.
British Museum
This exhibition aims to show how the classic idea of the Silk Road in popular culture is wrong and that, in fact, even the name is a relatively recent invention. It was less a defined route and passage across the lands and more of a cluster of regions that traded goods and cultures and helped spread not only mamon but also god.
Opening with an image of the Buddha made in Pakistan, the exhibition demonstrates the vastness of trades between countries by pointing out that the carved figure was found in Sweden.
The difficulty with the rest of the exhibition is, however, swiftly apparent because when you’re trying to correct the incorrect idea of a Silk Road as a defined route, how do you create links between the objects on display?
They’ve sensibly picked on several regions and told a small story about how trade and cultures were affected by links elsewhere, but it’s a bit like dots on a map rather than a cohesive package.
It’s not that the dots themselves aren’t fascinating, as much that’s on display is eye-poppingly good, but I felt a bit bewildered at times trying to work out why one case of objects was followed by another from a totally different area with nothing to tie them together.
If, however, you look at the exhibition as a buffet selection of the very best of what each region offers and just like a buffet, less worrying about whether you should have sandwiches with quiche and scotch eggs, then it’s exceptionally good.
A stele from China is carved in two languages telling the story of early Christians — and is in its own way a Rosetta Stone for the region.
Imported metalwork that looks as if it came from the Vikings but was actually made in northwest China.
Fragments of painted walls, and chared doors showing the spread of Hinduism across Asia.
Books in Chinese based on Greek astronomy, Asian scholars in Baghdad, and Christian physicians in Syria.
A richly carved ivory box and an English coin from around 760AD with a design based on coins from Arabia.
It’s an excellent collection of exceptional treasures.
And while, in a way, it breaks the myth of the Silk Road as a single connecting line across countries, it does so by showing such a wide range of objects that it’s hard to knit the various objects into an exhibition about the Silk Road(s).
The exhibition Silk Roads is at the British Museum until late February 2025.
Tickets can be reserved here or on the day in the museum.
British Library
The British Library takes a very different approach, looking at just one very important location at the Chinese end, the town of Dunhuang, where trading routes would split to go north or south around the Gobi desert.
As a major trading hub, it attracted a large range of people and cultures who left their mark in the area. And fittingly for an exhibition in a library, it was the later discovery of a huge cache of Buddist texts in a nearby cave that is its greatest historic treasure today.
It’s those documents, and many richly decorated scrolls that make up this exhibition that shows the exceptional skills of the artists of the time.
Some of the scrolls on display are over a 1,000 years old.
There are also examples here of early paper stencils used to “mass produce” the decoration in the caves—such as one that could have been used to create the “thousand Buddha” motif. Painting a thousand of them by hand would, after all, have been quite the task.
Amongst the treasures on display are the Diamond Sutra (868 AD), the world’s earliest complete printed book and the Dunhuang star chart (649-700), the earliest known manuscript atlas of the night sky from any civilisation.
There’s also a confessional book of Manichaean Uyghurs, on display for the first time and a manuscript fragment dating from the 9th century about the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, nearly 400 years older than any other surviving Zoroastrian scripture.
It’s a modest sized exhibition, but packed with delights.
The exhibition A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang is at the British Library until late February 2025.
Tickets can be booked here or bought in the library.
I agree that the BM’s exhibition includes some evocative items; and also that overall it suffers from diffuseness. But I think its greatest fault is the thinness of the overall “concept”, which seems to be “The Silk Road was really Silk Roads, and lots of them”. And surely the seas and river systems were the most-used “road” of all? Additionally successive BM major exhibitions have illustrated the very long history of the inter-connectedness of culture, trade and belief across Europe, Asia and North Africa – often in greater richness of depth than Silk Roads achieves. So what’s new?