Life Along the Silk Road

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Susan Whitfield writes Life along the Silk Road based on character stories occurring between the eight and tenth century, all living at different times. She offers ten well-balanced biographies in this work. It is the stories of these characters that bring this work to life. The biographies deal with four women and six men, each from a distinctive social class and profession, who lived from the 9th through the 10th centuries. Five are Han Chinese and the others are Sogdian, Tibetan, Uighur, Kashmiri and Kuchean. The men are a merchant, a soldier, a monk, a horseman, an official and an artist. The women are a princess, a courtesan, a nun and a widow. They also lived in different cities along the Silk Road and some, such as the merchant, whom travelled from Samarkand in the west to Changan in the east. The balanced mix of people, profession and social status allowed Whitfield to infuse each biography with ancillary information pertaining to religion, flora and fauna, medicine, housing, food, scenery, and so forth. She also was quite faithful to report major historical events for each "tale." I believe there are several reasons for her writing of this history. First, I think she writes it to change the negative perception of the history of Central Asia that we know through the annals of its neighbors. By explaining the history of the region through the eyes of its own occupants, it rids the history of any distorted views from neighboring civilizations. Her historical references made me want to do some investigative research of my own. She uses the comparison of trying to examine the life of the Atlantic Ocean by studying the ecology of Europe. Another perception Whitfield attempts to overcome is that of the present day Silk Road. Today, it is largely Islam, and it is occupied by Chinese colonists. During the time of the book, it is occupied by Indo-European people who

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