Life Along the Silk Road

In the first 1,000 years AD, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants and military men travelled on the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Linking Europe, India and the Far East, the route passed through many countries and many settlements, from the splendid city of Samarkand to tiny desert hamlets. This book recounts the lives of some of these people and the Central Asian towns in which they lived: a Uighur nomad from the Gobi Desert accompanying a herd of steppe ponies for sale to China, widow Ah-long wife of a prosperous merchant accustomed to dispensing largesse to the Buddhist church, yet reduced to near poverty after her husband's death; and the Chinese princess sent as part of a diplomatic deal to marry a Turkic kaghan. Based on contemporary sources and using first-hand accounts wherever possible, Life Along the Silk Road brings alive the now ruined and sand-covered desert towns and their inhabitants.