Luce Boulnois has poured a lifetime of prodigious, passionate scholarship into this seminal book. She explores the encounter between East and West across the vast continental expanse that separates the Mediterranean world from the Chinese one. She unravels in a clear and compelling way the complex threads that weave the history of great overland trade routes, which allowed the transmission of ideas and beliefs, techniques and works of art, helping to shape the civilizations that flourished along the way. She loves silk, its history, and all its paths to Europe. But the importance of Central Asia is not just a thing of the past, and the author discusses its significance in the modern world in cultural and geopolitical terms, including the implications of the most recent events taking place there. For the armchair traveler or the adventurous trail blazer, this piece de resistance of Silk Road literature is guaranteed to satisfy.
Silk Road : Monks, Warriors & Merchants
Description
Author Description
Luce Boulnois studied Chinese and Russian in Paris at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO). In 1963, she published her first Silk Road book, which has been translated into nine languages, including Chinese and Japanese. While working at National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) for nearly 30 years, Luce Boulnois continued to study trade relations and cultural exchanges. After retiring in 1992, she wrote this acclaimed book, and continued her historical research on Central Asia and Tibet until passing away in the summer of 2009. Bradley Mayhew was born in the UK in 1970 and currently lives in Montana, USA. A degree in Oriental Studies at Oxford University kickstarted 20 years of independent travel in the remoter corners of Asia and a career writing guidebooks. Bradley has lectured on Central Asia to the Royal Geographical Society and recently travelled across Asia in the footsteps of Marco Polo for a five-hour French-German TV documentary.