September 30th - A blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I'm at the British Museum in London where a blockbuster exhibition called Silk Roads has just opened – exploring the tangle of connections that linked communities as far apart as Scotland, Ireland, Ethiopia and Japan, as well as the more familiar lands of China, and central Asia. My guest is the world's foremost expert on the Silk Roads, and guiding mind for the new exhibition, Professor Peter Frankopan.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 30th of September already.
0:07.0	Autumn very much in its stride and therefore a good time to get the map out and start looking about some of the great adventures that you could be planning.
0:16.0	The Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean is rather out of the question at the moment.
0:25.6	But what about the Pan American Highway from Alaska to the deep south of South America via the Darien Gap, with a slight pause between Panama and Colombia.
0:38.9	And then there's a Silk Road, the medieval super highway, which many of us think, well,
0:45.2	that just ran from somewhere in China, let's say Xi'an, beautiful city in its own right,
0:50.8	via places in present-day Uzbekistan, Samarkand Bukhara-Hiva, eventually reaching Istanbul,
0:58.4	that great city where Europe meets Asia and continuing into continental Europe.
1:06.6	Except that there was always more than one Silk Road, as I've been hearing from the man who literally wrote the book on Silk Roads, Professor Peter Franco Pan.
1:19.6	He's also the guiding mind for an amazing new exhibition at the British Museum called Silk Roads. Here's what he had to say. People, what they
1:30.2	think about the Silk Road or Silk Roads is pretty sort of peripheral. They might know a few names of
1:35.0	towns. And then when you think about it, it's sort of a, it's a motorway that starts in China and
1:39.6	runs the whole way to Europe. And you don't think too much about those places in between.
1:43.3	The Silk Road is originally conceived as a way of trying to think about exchange networks of all kinds.
1:48.0	In the exhibition here, we have connections between Scandinavia and Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.
1:54.0	We have materials and daggers and swords that were made in probably the Black Sea area found in graves in Korea.
2:01.8	And those connections that go back 1500 years.
2:05.0	And in fact, the show could have started two or three thousand years earlier than that.
2:10.2	Remind us that these kind of, they're not highways.
2:13.0	They're not roads in the way we think about them.
2:14.6	They are about ways in which people exchange goods, ideas, knowledge and moved around in the past. It's very much focused on the years from
2:21.7	500 AD to 1,000 AD where a lot of people would just think, well, there wasn't much going on.
	...

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