Silk princess painting

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Throughout this week, Neil MacGregor has been exploring the world of the late 7th century, with objects from South America, Britain, Syria and Korea. Today's object is from the 4000 mile tangle of routes that has become known as the Silk Road - that great conduit of ideas, technologies, goods and beliefs that effectively linked the Pacific with the Mediterranean. His chosen object which lets him travel the ancient Silk Route is a fragile painting telling a story of "industrial espionage". It comes from the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, now in Western China, and tells a powerful story about how the secrets of silk manufacture were passed along the fabled route. The cellist and composer Yo Yo Ma, who has long been fascinated by the Silk Road and who thinks of it as "the internet of antiquity", and the writer Colin Thubron consider the impact of the Silk Road - in reality and on the imagination. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. Once upon a time in the high and far off days of long ago, there was a beautiful
0:19.4	princess who lived in the land of silk. One day her father, the emperor, told her that she must
0:25.0	marry the king of the distant land of Jade. The Jade king could not make silk because the emperor
0:30.9	had kept the secret to himself and so the princess decided
0:34.0	that she would bring the gift of silk to her new people.
0:37.0	She thought of a trick. She hid everything that was needed,
0:41.0	the silkworms, the mulberry seeds, everything in her royal headdress.
0:45.6	She knew that her father's guards would not dare to search her as she left for her new home.
0:50.7	And that, my best beloved, is the story of how K the greatest technology thefts of history
1:11.0	is one that's presented to us in paint on a plank of wood that's around
1:14.4	1400 years old. It's known as the Legend of the Silk Princess and it's now in the
1:20.4	British Museum but it was found in a long deserted city on the fabled Silk Road.
1:27.0	I think the Silk Road, in terms of the movement of goods and ideas is the internet of antiquity.
1:35.8	Because it wasn't just silk that travelled in Frankincense and rhinoceros horn and all these
1:40.4	wonderful products which we associate with it, but a much more humble but
1:44.8	continuous trade of people locally trading to people with rather different
1:50.4	needs and situations. A history of the world in a hundred objects. the Silk Princess painting. from 8th century Chinese Central Asia. This is the noise of the people and the goods of the whole world on the move, passing through Heathrow Airport.
2:37.6	We all spend part of our lives now on highways or airways, some real, some virtual, and as well as travelling them ourselves, we know that the fuel
2:45.3	not just the economy, but our imagination. In this, surprisingly little has changed since the
2:50.8	eighth century. In the world we've been looking at this week, a world of
2:54.8	enormous movement of people and of goods, one of the busiest highways of all, then as now, ran from China,
	...

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