‘To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost,’ writes Colin Thubron at the start of this magnificent book, ‘it flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.’ This pattern is the ‘shadow’ of his title — the marks left on the present by an ancient trade route whose infrastructure has been all but abolished by centuries of war, weather and modernisation.
The Silk Road, which ran 7,000 miles from Antioch in Turkey to Xian in China, was the first information superhighway. Along it moved not only people and goods, but also ideas, rumours, inventions, dreams, and songs. The ‘harp travelled east,’ notes Thubron, the ‘flute went west’, and the Chinese ‘horsehead fiddle became the ancestor of strings everywhere, even the European violin’. DNA also flowed along it: ‘among today’s inhabitants, haemoglobin tests have linked Western China by an indelible trail far into the Mediterranean’.
It took Thubron eight months to traverse the Silk Road from east to west: a formidable act of travel, as well as a beautifully recounted one. During his journey he was caught up in the Sars panic and the war against the Taleban, and he was quarantined, attacked, abandoned and lost. Reading of these events, one is reminded of the derivation of the word ‘travel’: from travail, meaning ‘suffering’, or ‘painful effort’; a word which is itself derived from the Latin trepalium, meaning ‘a three-pronged instrument of torture’. But Thubron never makes much of his hardships, nor of the exceptional language skills (he speaks Russian and Mandarin) that enable his journey.
He is honest as well as modest: among his many qualities, both as a traveller and a writer, is a willingness to let his journey reveal its own meanings to him. There is no easy curve of revelation described here; he does not oblige his experiences to abide to a predestined outcome. Indeed, what Thubron finds repeatedly as he travels the Road is mixture, complication, miscegenation, both ethnic and religious. ‘Trying to comprehend the medley of voices and features around me,’ he writes, ‘I was slipping into a river where nations lost their meaning.’ Yet he also encounters fierce ideological dogmatism — Islamic, nationalist — and the firm belief of people in their singularity of identity.
The Central Asia Thubron describes is a bipolar one, split between the urgently contemporary and the ancient. Early in the book, he leaves a hotel ‘slung with banners proclaiming it sterilised from Sars’, and bicycles out to ‘the First Pass under Heaven’, a Ming fortress dating from 1372. In Tehran he is invited to a prog-rock concert: deep in the desert, he finds a man sitting alone in a mud hut, who has been watchman for 15 years, ‘guarding, as it seemed, nothing’. Again and again, too, Thubron encounters the ability of old grievances and old structures of belief (the mutual distrust of Sunni and Shia primary among them) to press hard upon the present. When he reaches northern Afghan- istan, history suddenly pushes very close to the surface of the land: he passes through areas of desert where thousands of Taleban fighters have recently been burned alive or suffocated to death in shipping containers.
Thubron is a very hardy traveller, and a very fine writer. A tonally wobbly first few pages steady into a book of exceptional erudition, adventure and elegance, filled with fine instants, as when in Xinjiang by starlight he sees ‘antique oil derricks rising and dipping like prehistoric birds over their pools’. Images of layers, fragments, and weaving recur — pottery shards, geological strata, broken mosaics, silk textiles — and one realises, over time, that Thubron’s plaited patterns are themselves a version of the way the Silk Road has woven and unwoven the histories of these Central Asian countries.
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