A long hike from China

‘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.