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.

→ Play 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)