Silk Route Quotes

Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

You do not want to help us,” Will said to Magnus. “You do not want to position yourself as an enemy of Mortmain’s.” “Well, can you blame him?” Woolsey rose in a whirl of yellow silk. “What could you possibly have to offer that would make the risk worth it to him?” “I will give you anything,” said Tessa in a low voice that Will felt in his bones. “Anything at all, if you can help us help Jem.” Magnus gripped a handful of his black hair. “God, the two of you. I can make inquiries. Track down some of the more unusual shipping routes. Old Molly —” “I’ve been to her,” Will said. “Something’s frightened her so badly she won’t even crawl out of her grave.” Woolsey snorted. “And that doesn’t tell you anything, little Shadowhunter? Is it really worth all this, just to stretch your friend’s life out another few months, another year? He will die anyway. And the sooner he dies, the sooner you can have his fiancée, the one you’re in love with.” He cut his amused gaze toward Tessa. “Really you ought to be counting down the days till he expires with great eagerness.

Three of her sisters became queens along the Silk Route, ruling over the grand Turkic nations of Onggud, Uighur, and Karluk.

All Romani dialects – about 60 in all - contain Armenian words, proof if you will that the Lom Bosha passed through Armenia in the early 11th century, trading spices along the Great Silk Road, that network of ancient trade routes connecting China with the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Romani traded Armenian carpets, silk, dyes, lapis lazuli and tin, and it’s no surprise that five capitals of Armenia are on The Great Silk Road.

Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Raiding followed a geographic pattern originating in the north. The southern tribes that lived closest to the trade cities of the Silk Route always had more goods than the more distant northern tribes. The southern men had the best weapons, and to succeed against them, the northern men had to move quicker, think more cleverly, and fight harder. This alternating pattern of trade and raiding supplied a slow, but steady, trickle of metal and textile goods moving northward, where the weather was always worse, the grazing more sparse, and men more rugged and violent.

Unfurl my body, wind, lift me up into the branches of a majestic beauty that guides a people through life. I would sway with you, branches, taking that journey across the ages. Tossing my own mane of leaves through the quiet, awaiting air. Silently, I choose to engage with your wisdom.

If someone skilled at studying moons, planets, stars and other celestial bodies such as galaxies, comets, asteroids and gamma-ray bursts were to analyse the Romani migration and settlement patterns, as they wandered India and Persia 1500 years ago, passing through Armenia in the early 9th century, trading spices, incense, rugs, fabrics, colouring agents and jewellery along the Great Silk Road, and then beginning to establish themselves in Europe, arriving in Transylvania in the 13th century, and then onto Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and England in the 14th century they may very well discover that their routes mirrored that of the stars

The Romans knew about India, but were unaware of the Far East until the first century BC when silk began to reach the Mediterranean through the Parthian Empire which ruled in ancient Iran.

John has a narrow mind. For him, neither the beauty nor the prosperity of the city of Ephesus is worth a second glance. Ephesus was situated at the end of the Silk Road from China and the caravan route from India which used to pass through the Parthian Empire en route to the West. But the prophet is quite unaware that this particular world exists at all. Even culture means absolutely nothing to him; for example, in 18:22 he rejoices that not only song but also the sound of the flute have disappeared. The world which he knows is limited to the seven churches whose Christianity corresponded with his own; and that in but a single province of the Roman Empire, namely Asia. As to the rest, he is only familiar with the mother church in Jerusalem and the sister church in Rome. John is utterly obsessed by Rome. The fact that this particular metropolis had bestowed both law and peace upon no less than one-half of the world never got through to him at all. He is also quite oblivious of the fact that Rome oppresses nations and exploits slaves. He could not care less about national or social considerations. He abominates the "whore on the seven hills" simply because Rome is persecuting Christians. This is precisely what the Apocalypse is all about: innocent suffering.

He suggested that silk fashions were indecent and harmful to society and denounced transparent dresses, arguing that these ‘see-through materials barely cover the shame of the body with more than a slender veil.’ He believed that tightly-fitting opaque silk garments were as objectionable because these heavier and more luxurious dresses would cling to the female figure. Although the woman’s nakedness was hidden from view, ‘these dresses fit close to the body and easily take its form, following the curves of the woman to reveal her distinctive female shape.’ Therefore ‘her whole form is still visible to onlookers, even though they do not see her actual flesh beneath.

Arab merchants with their long caravans of camels traded Indian spices, hemp, opium and Chinese silk along the Incense Route which linked the Mediterranean world with Egypt, Arabia, India and Java. Although the merchants risked robbery and slavery along the way, the rich women of the Roman Empire could enjoy the perfumes of frankincense and myrrh, the flavours of Eastern spices, and the juices of exotic fruits such as guava, muskmelon and pomegranate

Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery. The

executives at America’s largest energy companies began late in 1995 to imagine the future by studying historical maps. Across Afghanistan travelers along the Silk Road had created fortunes for centuries by moving spice, jewels, and textiles to new markets. The profitable game now—created by the Soviet Union’s collapse—was oil and natural gas. The key trade routes were the same as they had been for centuries. Many led through Afghanistan. Robin Raphel and others at the State Department and the White House believed that for American oil companies, too, the Taliban could be an important part of a new Afghan solution.

The Middle Ages in Europe are traditionally seen as the time of Crusades, chivalry and the growing power of the papacy, but all this was little more than a sideshow to the titanic struggles taking place further east. The tribal system had led the Mongols to the brink of global domination, having conquered almost the whole continent of Asia. Europe and North Africa yawned open; it was striking then that the Mongol leadership focused not on the former but on the latter. Put simply, Europe was not the best prize on offer. All that stood in the way of Mongol control of the Nile, of Egypt’s rich agricultural output and its crucial position as a junction on the trade routes in all directions was an army commanded by men who were drawn from the very same steppes: this was not just a struggle for supremacy, it was the triumph of a political, cultural and social system. The battle for the medieval world was being fought between nomads from Central and eastern Asia.

Nor could I fail to recall my friendship with Howard K. Beale, professor of American History at the University of North Carolina. There he was, one day in 1940, standing just outside my room in the men’s dormitory at St. Augustine’s, in his chesterfield topcoat, white silk scarf, and bowler hat, with his calling card in hand, perhaps looking for a silver tray in which to drop it. Paul Buck, whom he knew at Harvard, had told him to look me up. He wanted to invite me to his home in Chapel Hill to have lunch or dinner and to meet his family. From that point on we saw each other regularly. After I moved to Durham, he invited me each year to give a lecture on “The Negro in American Social Thought” in one of his classes. One day when I was en route to Beale’s class, I encountered one of his colleagues, who greeted me and inquired where I was going. I returned the greeting and told him that I was going to Howard Beale’s class to give a lecture. After I began the lecture I noticed that Howard was called out of the class. He returned shortly, and I did not give it another thought. Some years later, after we both had left North Carolina, Howard told me that he had been called out to answer a long-distance phone call from a trustee of the university who had heard that a Negro was lecturing in his class. The trustee ordered Beale to remove me immediately. In recounting this story, Beale told me that he had said that he was not in the habit of letting trustees plan his courses, and he promptly hung up. Within a few years Howard accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin. A favorite comment from Chapel Hill was that upon his departure from North Carolina, blood pressures went down all over the state.

That spring everyone in Judy Chicago’s class collaborated on a 24 hour performance called Route 126. The curator Moira Roth recalls: “the group created a sequence of events throughout the day along the highway. The day began with Suzanne Lacy’s Car Renovation in which the group decorated an abandoned car…and ended with the women standing on a beach watching Nancy Youdelman, wrapped in yards of gossamer silk, slowly wade out to sea until she drowned, apparently…” There’s a fabulous photo taken by Faith Wilding of the car—a Kotex-pink jalopy washed up on desert rocks. The trunk’s flung open and underneath it’s painted cuntblood red. Strands of desert grass spill from the crumpled hood like Rapunzel’s fucked-up hair. According to Performance Anthology—Source Book For A Decade Of California Art, this remarkable event received no critical coverage at the time though contemporaneous work by Baldessari, Burden, Terry Fox boasts bibliographies several pages long. Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the ’70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.” The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.

Teddy Roosevelt?" I suggested. Sadie and I had been trying to figure out the second mathlete's costume for a few minutes. He was wearing a 1930's-style suit,had his hair slicked down carefully, and was sporting a fake mustache. "No glasses. And I can't even begin to imagine the connection between Davy Jone's Locker and Teddy Roosevelt." Sadie pulled a long gold hair from her pumpkin-orange punch and sighed. Maybe her mother hadn't topped her Sleepy Hollow triumph, but it wasn't from lack of determination. What Mrs. Winslow hadn't achieved in creativity (she'd gone the mermaid route), she'd made up in the details. The tailed skirt was intricately beaded and embroidered in a dozen shades of blue and green. It was pretty amazing.The problem was the bodice: not a bikini, but not much better as far as Sadie was concerned. It was green, plunging, and edged with itchy-looking scallops. She was managing to stay covered by the wig, but that was an issue in itself. It was massive,made up of hundreds of trailing corkscrew curls in a metallic blonde. To top it all off, the costume included a glittering, three point crown, and a six-foot trident, complete with jewels and trailing silk seaweed. "Sadie," I'd asked quietly when she'd appeared at my house, shivering and tangled in her wig, "why don't you..." Just tell her where she can shove her trident? But that would just have been mean. Sadie gives in and wears the costumes because it's infinitely easier than fighting. "...come next door and we'll see if Sienna has a shawl you can borrow?

The Umayyad and Abbasid empires were in effect large free-trade areas in which old borders and barriers had been swept away, especially along the Euphrates River, since remotest antiquity the traditional frontier between the East and West. No longer were the three great routes to Asia—the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Silk Road— competing alternatives; rather, they were an integrated global logistic system available to all parties who recognized the suzerainty of the caliphate.

For China, the economic corridor has two aims, to open up an alternative route for oil imports from the Middle East, and to persuade Pakistan to do more to combat violent extremism seeping over its border. The vision is driven by strategic factors, not commercial logic.

a network that fans out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined. They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster. In the late nineteenth century, this sprawling web of connections was given a name by an eminent German geologist, Ferdinand von Richthofen (uncle of the First World War flying ace the “Red Baron”) that has stuck ever since: “Seidenstraßen”—the Silk Roads.

Ferdinand von Richthofen, a German geographer, traveller, and scientist, was the one who coined the concept of “Silk Road” or “Silk Route(s)

Silver nevertheless became the commodity of the Manila galleon trade, a situation continually agonised over and sometimes regretted in the decades and centuries to come. But whether measured in the many tens of tons or several millions of pesos, a staggering amount of silver passed annually from the Americas into the Chinese money supply. Silver was so central to the developments of this period that the trans-Pacific trade route that we have calle it La ruta de la plata - a silver, rather than silk, road that changed the global economy forever.

The most precious item travelling the route was silk, which was generated in Serica and packed on caravans in ever-increasing amounts destined for settlements far away—including the capital of the Romans. The silk-laden caravans were nothing new to the old guide; they had been journeying for hundreds of years across watersheds and snow-clad mountain passes of the Zagros and down past his residence. The caravans transporting silk into the Parthian regions in the form of annual tributes or trade were considered “untouchable,” and the repercussions would be murderous due to silk being one of Parthia’s main currencies. Silk was a commodity that knew no recession and held a value high enough that it could be traded for nearly anything. Crassus’s motivation to conquer Parthia was accordingly revealed: he wanted a monopoly on the Road of Silk!

East-West trade routes also occurred, which connected Petra with the Spice Routes and Silk Road between the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Far East.

About Tough as Silk, Escape from Beijing Uta Christensen did it again! With Tough as Fine Silk, Escape from Beijing, she wrote a most fascinating novel, so different from her other books. What impressed me first is her incredible knowledge of China. I learned so much about that part of the world—the historical, cultural and political aspects—through her wonderful and detailed expositions during that long train ride. I wondered whether she followed that route herself when she visited China. The intriguing love story that Ms. Christensen has so masterfully interwoven is a delightful contrast. It brings the reader back to reality, even though it does not feel quite real at times with all the premonitions hinting at a different outcome than desired. The betrayal was a shock, of course, but thinking about the planned future of the couple in California, it becomes clear that that kind of life would not have suited lovely Juan. She yearns for freedom, success, and independence—for a life that she can control herself. The intricate ideas Ms. Christensen brought together in this book and the easy-flowing style make the reading of the novel a true pleasure. I am happy she wrote this fine book, and I hope she will find a lot of excited readers. The finished product should make her very happy and proud.

Trains half a mile long have started carrying millions of laptops, shoes, clothes and other non-perishable items in one direction and electronics, car parts and medical equipment in the other on a journey that takes sixteen days – considerably faster than the sea route from China’s Pacific ports. With

Coming onstage for her first entrance, Diana felt transported to some ancient scene. They could have been any group of itinerant actors out making their way along the Silk Road, the famous Earth trade route that ran across the mountains and deserts and steppes of Asia, stopping in this medieval oriental city made glorious by its marble colonnades and gentle silk banners. Even

Opening European Trade with Asia Marco Polo was an Italian merchant whose travels introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. In the 13th century the traditional trade route leading to China was overland, traveling through the Middle East from the countries of Europe. Marco Polo established this trade route but it required ships to carry the heavy loads of silks and spices. Returning to Italy after 24 he found Venice at war with Genoa. In 1299, after having been imprisoned, his cell-mate recorded his experiences in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Upon his release he became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Henry the Navigator charted the course from Portugal to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa and is given credit for having started the Age of Discoveries. During the first half of the 15th century he explored the coast of West Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, in search of better routes to Asia. Five years after Columbus discovered the West Indies, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and discovered a sea route to India. In 1497, on his first voyage he opened European trade with Asia by an ocean route. Because of the immense distance around Africa, this passage became the longest sea voyage made at the time.

Kushan coins bore Greek or Kharoshthi script along with images of their kings, Greek, Persian, and Hindu gods, and of the Buddha. Reliable coinage helped Kushan broker commercial exchanges between China, India, Persia, and, ultimately, Rome. Kushan became a great patron of Buddhism and promoted the dissemination of the faith through Central Asia, en route to East Asia.

Displaced from the Chinese frontier, the Yuezhi and confederated tribes evolved by the first century CE into the Kushan Empire, a state that combined Central Asian nomadic with Persian, Indian, and Hellenic influences, at the hub of the Old World land-and-sea trade routes.

The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!

The change to the Arctic has been so rapid and sudden that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared “the Arctic as we’ve known it is now a thing of the past,” even coining the phrase the “New Arctic” to describe this fundamental shift.* There are currently more than nine hundred infrastructure projects in development, totaling over a trillion dollars in investment. A majority of which is being undertaken by Russia. They’ve reopened abandoned Soviet-era military installations and established a slew of new seaports across their northern coast. Even China—which has no territorial claim to the Arctic—has expanded its global infrastructure initiative, known as Belt and Road, to include projects across the Arctic Circle. China envisions creating a northern sea route that could cut travel time between Asia and Europe by a third. To this end, China is building a fleet of hardened ice-capable cargo ships and fuel carriers to traverse this future “Polar Silk Road.”* With each passing year, the stakes in the Arctic continue to climb—as does the tension. It’s estimated that a quarter of the planet’s oil and gas remains hidden there.* It is also a treasure chest of rare earth minerals (neodymium, praseodymium, terbium, and dysprosium) that are vital to the world’s renewable energy projects, including the surging production of electric vehicles. In the Russian Arctic alone, the mineral value is estimated to be upwards of two trillion U.S. dollars.* Then there are the vast new seas open to fishing, where conflicts are already arising.

The Silk Roads advanced science, mathematics, literature, art, languages, and religions, and became a singular force that shaped the diversity of societies and cultures across the continent and beyond. And all of this came about because of Bombyx mori, the little, blind, flightless moth, whose thin strand of salivary secretion—moth spit—led to a creation of a web of routes that knitted together East and West, passing thousands of kilometers east of the prime meridian and creating some of the richest chapters in human history.

Inter-ethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to over 200 deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of ‘One Belt, One Road’. The road is, oddly enough, a sea route – the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. In late 2015 China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which ‘the belt and the road’ will be connected.

Many of these caravanserais survive to the present day and have become tourist attractions in otherwise remote areas. Without the safe haven and supplies provided by these inns, the Silk Road could not have flourished as a main trade route.

This route became known as the Persian Royal Road, and it is the true progenitor of the routes which became known as the Silk Road.

The mantle of progress shifted, however, in the early modern period as a result of two great maritime expeditions that took place at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of six years in the 1490s, the foundations were laid for a major disruption to the rhythm of long-established systems of exchange. First Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, paving the way for two great land masses that were hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond; then, just a few years later, Vasco da Gama successfully navigated the southern tip of Africa, sailing on to India, opening new sea routes in the process. The discoveries changed patterns of interaction and trade, and effected a remarkable change in the world’s political and economic centre of gravity. Suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system: at a stroke, it became the new mid-point between east and west.

The problem for Rome was that its gold and silver reserves were finite; while the products that the Romans sought in eastern markets were renewable resources for the regimes that controlled production.

Most important to Genghis, the Silk Road, the famed trading route between east and west, ran through Khwarezm.

At one time we used to wear leather military breastplates, but fashions have become so bizarre that even the toga is considered to be unnecessarily heavy.

The sailors said to Gan Ying: ‘The ocean is huge. Those making the round trip can do it in three months if the winds are favourable. However, if you encounter winds that delay you, it can take two years.’ Gan Ying was also told that he would have to pay for large-scale provisions since ‘all the men who go by sea take stores for three years.’ When he heard this, Gan Ying abandoned his plans to reach Rome by sea and began the long journey back to the Chinese held Tarim protectorates. He did not realise that Parthia and Rome shared a common land border and the city of Characene was only forty days distant from the Roman frontier in Syria.

use trade exports to cause foreign powers to be economically reliant on Chinese products and manufactured items. Then, if the foreign regime did not comply with Chinese authority, the Han could impose trade sanctions that would cause economic damage.13

the NSR—the Northern Sea Route. This fulfills a major Russian objective, the opening up of a transit route between Europe and Asia through the Arctic Ocean. It has been facilitated by the retreat of the Arctic ice, although with more variability than sometimes recognized. For instance, in September 2014, the ice extent was 50 percent greater than it had been in September 2012. The route cuts the distance between Shanghai and Rotterdam by about 30 percent, and in the process avoids both the narrow Malacca Strait and the Suez Canal. This opening has been welcomed by Japan, South Korea, and especially by China, which, describing itself as a “Near Arctic State,” applies its own distinctive name to the route—the Polar Silk Road.

Several clandestine Christian groups and others operated a number of secret escape routes. Organizations called the routes “rat lines” or “rat routes.” ODESSA and other groups provided the SS and other Nazi escapees with false papers, a supply of cash and fully paid travel tickets. They successfully planned and funded the escape and resettlement of countless Nazi murderers and their sympathizers into many different countries.

By the summer of 1940, Britain and its empire were hanging on for dear life. The stroke of a pen in the small hours in Moscow the previous summer sealing an agreement between Nazi Germany and Communist Soviet Union had made the world look very different, very quickly. The future lay with a new series of connections that would link Berlin through the Soviet Union deep into Asia and the Indian subcontinent, one that would re-route trade and resources away from western Europe to its centre.

Yours is coming soon enough. You’re so impatient!” She winked at him with a flirtatious grin. The cook scowled at Talis as if contemplating whether he should serve him or not. Finally, with begrudging eyes, he slopped the soup into a smaller bowl (skimpy on the dumplings and meat) and plopped it down in front of Talis. What was wrong with him? “I’ve got news for you.” Mara held up her spoon like a professor giving a lecture. “Though you’re probably not going to like it.” Talis slurped the soup, wincing at how hot it was. He grunted for her to continue. “Mother wants me to marry Baron Delar’s son—” What the hell? Talis spewed the soup onto the ground and coughed. Him? Baron Delar’s son was twenty-eight. How in the name of Nyx could she marry him? It was ridiculous! “The soup is hot, you should be more careful.” Mara smirked at the look of horror that must have been on his face. “Don’t you approve of the engagement?” How could anyone approve? But Talis wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of being jealous. “I don’t know… I guess it’s good news. Congratulations?” “You idiot! Are you kidding me?” Mara’s eyes raged with righteous vexation. “I’m not marrying that pig-faced, smelly old warthog. He wears frilly silk blouses. Why would a man dress like a pampered child?” “But all the lands he owns and the trading routes, titles…” Talis forced himself to look serious, despite laughing

For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of ‘One Belt, One Road’. The road is, oddly enough, a sea route – the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. In late 2015 China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which ‘the belt and the road’ will be connected.

These initiatives established the first direct contacts between Chinese civilization and the urbanized kingdoms of ancient Transoxiana, Afghanistan, India and Iran. This was the origin of the Central Asian Silk Routes which created an unprecedented growth in international commerce that enhanced and enriched distant regimes, including Rome.

The overland route he travelled on was not given a name until a German geographer coined a term for it in 1877. This was die Seidenstraßen. It is more familiar today under its English name, the ‘Silk Roads’.