Valerie Hansen's The Silk Road: A New History brings together both archaeological and textual analyses to reassess the history of the famous trading route during the first millennium CE. Hansen focuses primarily on a cluster of oasis towns that are today located in far northwestern China or in Uzbekistan, places where the arid climate and the relative remoteness has helped to preserve the sites and their associated sources particularly well. She argues that despite the romance which has been associated with the Silk Road since the late nineteenth century, and popular ideas about its importance, that the overland routes were actually comparatively little travelled and weren't that economically important. The Silk Road's real historical value lies in how its network of interconnected local and regional trade circuits functioned as a conduit for languages, religions, and cultures.

I can't speak to the specifics of Hansen's arguments about the individual oasis societies, not being particularly familiar with them, but on a macro level her point seemed broadly persuasive. I just wish she'd settled on a different structure. This is a somewhat meandering book, and it wasn't always clear to me how individual parts added to the whole. It did, however, reinforce my desire to someday travel along at least part of the Silk Road myself. ( )

A detailed, realistic treatment of silk road history based on archaeological evidence. Her well supported thesis is that most trade on the silk road was short distance and that its major importance was as a conduit for cultural transfer.

I gave the book three stars because I bought it as an e-book. The e-book does not contain nor have access to the color plates. They are frequently referenced in the text, so this is a major drawback. Be sure to read the book in paper format. ( )

A history of the Silk Road based mainly on the archaeological sources and textual analysis. The book is divided into seven chapters one each for the oasis towns of Niya, Loulan, Kucha, Turfan, Samarkand, Chang’an, Dunhuang, and Khotan. Six of them are in modern day north-west china and Samarkand is in modern day Uzbekistan. The author uses all the recent archaeological finds to show us the cultural, economic and social history of these Silk Road communities. The book starts from the earliest evidence available, from about second century CE and ends with the first millennium CE, at which point the advent of Islam made the once diverse communities homogenous.

This book disabuses us of the romantic notion of the Silk Road. Of long train of caravans traveling long distances carrying exotic goods from East to west. Most of the evidence rather points towards a more localised, small-scale trade made small groups of itinerant traders. The goods reached west through trickle trade rather than merchants directly travelling from China to Rome.

Rather than trade, the most important aspects of the Silk Road was the cultural exchange of ideas. The oasis towns of the Silk Road were a cultural milieu of multiple migrant communities from India, Iran and central Asia. The library cave at Dunhuang gives us a good idea of the rich linguistic and cultural diversity in the Silk Road communities. Number of texts on Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorianism, Manichaeism and even some on Judaism were found here. Through the exchange of religions, art, languages and new technologies, the Silk Road did play a very important role in shaping the modern world.

One interesting aspect for me is that the author doubts the prevailing notion of the Kushana’s that they were one of the five branches of the Tocharian speaking nomadic Yuezhi tribes who migrated from China, based on the evidence of the Gandhari prakrit speaking people who later migrated to Niya. She says that we can only be certain that the Yuezhi were in Bactria in 138 BCE and that the claims for their earlier migrations from the Tarim Basin area are only speculative.

This is a highly readable account with a narrative structure and some amusing stories and anecdotes dotted within. Some excellent illustrations and maps are also provided. The only problem comes with the author focusing only on the archaeological sources and the surviving texts. The uneven nature of the surviving evidence available makes for an uneven narrative. ( )

I found Hansen's explanation of how the Silk Road actually worked very helpful. However, as she delved into the archaeological discoveries at each site, I found her presentation meandering. There's a lot of interesting information about Central Asia in these pages, but I didn't have the patience to digest it all. ( )

Six-word review: First-millennium travel shaped world history.

Extended review:

Like so many others, including, it seems, many scholars, I'd fallen for the popular conception of the fabled Silk Road as a well-beaten thoroughfare traversing Central Asia from coastal China to the Mediterranean, with long trains of pack camels hauling goods for trade across endless reaches of mountain and desert.

In fact, according to Yale professor and researcher Valerie Hansen, caravans tended to be small, wholesale trade light, travel limited and local, and the routes inconspicuous but for the natural formations that marked them. If it weren't for the cultural cross-pollination that resulted from migrations of refugees from war and political conflict and the exchanges of gift-bearing envoys from kingdom to kingdom, there would be little of significance to say about the Silk Road.

But those cultural effects were world-changing. From about 200 CE to 1000 CE, the vast land mass extending across the whole breadth of Asia was traversed on foot and on camelback by hundreds of thousands of travelers, carrying knowledge from east to west and from west to east. Language, writing systems, technology, art, and especially religion spread along those pathways. Rulers converted, temples arose or were torn down, new customs supplanted old. Alliances formed and reformed; boundaries were drawn and redrawn. Monks and scholars traveled to study under other masters and examine original sacred documents. The resulting blends of peoples and cultures transformed some of the world's oldest civilizations.

The author cites primary sources, such as records of taxation, travel passes, correspondence, and legal documents, to establish a picture of traffic along the routes of the Silk Road and life in seven oases dotting the way, locations that became urban centers and even capitals of rulers. The well-documented view that emerges may have lost something in romance but seems to have gained in authenticity.

One fact of note: the term "Silk Road" was coined by Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 when he developed maps of the ancient routes as a basis for building a railway line; until then the expression had never been used.

I read this book because Pearl S. Buck's 1948 novel Peony made me curious about how Jews came to establish large communities in China. A search for books about the Silk Road led me to Colin Falconer's (definitely romanticized) 2011 novel Silk Road, which I read in tandem with this evidence-based account of verifiable fact. All three broadened the horizons in my mind across time and space and left me with an appetite for more. ( )

Hansen has done a great service to history by telling the story of the so-called "Silk Road" through its own documents. After traveling to Kashgar, Urumqi, Turfan and Dunhuang, I had tried to understand the subject by reading through a stack of books. While often lavishly illustrated, none of the swashbuckling popular histories really made sense. Not until Hansen's book came out just this year was I able to get a grip on the history. The passport documents reveal the small number of animals in the typical caravans from 200-1000 CE. Tax records and contracts reveal the main source of income, not independent trade but military budgets and the gifts of official emmisaries. Money was largely barter, but direct payments could be made in coins when available, grain, and bolts of plain silk. The economy was largely subsistance agriculture for most of its history. When it comes to traders, Hansen highlights the Sogdians, an ethnic group with a talent for trade over longer distances (though hardly non-stop across the region), and a habit of keeping accounting records. She quotes from the eight ancient Sogdian letters found by Aurel Stein in a mailbag that had been abandoned in about 315 CE. Written by traders rather than government officials, they form a rare window on everyday life, including an irate wife named Miwnay denouncing her husband in a letter on Chinese paper written in a language that today can only be read by a handfull of scholars. Paper only became available in Europe first in Spain and Sicily in the 11th and 12th centuries, a century later in northern Europe. Cancelled pawn tickets are another source of information about loans and everyday survival in a harsh landscape. The Buddhist texts are of course better known, particularly the Diamond Sutra, considered the oldest complete printed book, from 868 CE. Hansen does mentions the travels of the famous Buddhist scholars back and forth between India and China, but she brings out details from the records that show Buddhist monks marrying, establishing families and joining the local substitance economy, not the sterotypical image of the celebate sages of popular imagination. Where there are gaps in the archival record, there are gaps in our knowledge. No archives, no history. On Aurel Stein's looting of the Dunhuang library cave, Hansen is fairly non-judgemental. More troubling is that even today ancient manuscripts are still being looted from archeological sites and offered for sale on the antiquities market. The Chinese are faced with the old dilemma: buy the stolen documents and you are not just receiving stolen merchandise but also creating a profitable market for looting; turn down the documents offered for sale, and they are lost. ( )