John Freeman

It sometimes seems that the speed of globalization has made a twenty-first-century travel writer’s job akin to that of a preservationist: only now he or she is racing against the onrushing tide of capital and Western influence to capture what remains of cultures suddenly opened to the wider world.

Legendary travel writer Colin Thubron’s latest book, "Shadow of the Silk Road," confirms this notion, while placing it into a much wider concept. While central Asia enters its biggest changes in what might be a millennium, he decided to re-travel the pathway by which silk once moved, from China, across Afghanistan, across Iran and into Turkey, and from there the wider world.

Along this route—so faded it is a ghost by now—Thubron witnesses the tumult of a society racing to catch up with the future. Ancient villagers who survived the Cultural Revolution in China watch dazed as their grandchildren turn relics of their hard-fought years to kitschy Maoist ring tones. In Tehran, he meets up with a poet and prince who also designs Web sites. "For him these screens assembled a universe more real than the repressive world around him," Thubron writes.

And yet, the shock of the new never erases the past. Everywhere he goes on this trip—at great risk in some cases, which is a story unto itself—Thubron notes the way that one society or dynasty begat the next. "Chinese inventions which percolated along the ancient road—printing and gunpowder, lock-gates and drive-belts—flourished behind the Great Wall before emerging Phoenix like in the west," he writes. "The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the East." This wonderful book chronicles a telling moment then: it would appear change is traveling westward along the path, at least for now.

"Shadow of the Silk Road"

by Colin Thubron

HarperCollins, $25.95, 363 pages

(2007-08-07)

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