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of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron is so much more than simply a travel book, Thubron steeps himself in the history of each place he visits and shares this perspective with his reader, As you read, you may wonder what century you are in and visions of people marching through the ages will occupy your thoughts.
Sometimes the reading is heavy going, but you will be satisfied if you stick with it, Noted travel writer Colin Thubron undertook to travel the fabled Silk Road in, finding his transportation and lodging as he went.
This is his fascinating tale of how he did it, what he saw, and his interactions with those with whom he met or stayed.
It's reminiscent of Thoreaux's equally hazardous and itineraryless journey from Egypt to South Africa, and just as dangerous, given the political instability and even anarchy prevailing in much of the territory through which he passed.
One must respect the selfconfidence and resourcefulness of the adventurers who undertake these quests, but I for one cannot imagine actually doing it.
Sure, you can write a book when you're finished, but only if you make it back, Интересен и необичаен пътепис именно за "сенките" по пътя на коприната за нещата, които обикновено се премълчават. Авторът разказва за тези далечни места и хора, без да натрапва своята преценка, много човешки и с лека меланхолия. Допадна ми, ще търся и други негови пътеписи.
Възмутена съм, обаче, от безобразната липса на каквато и да е коректорска намеса в изданието на "Вакон". Нелепа смяна на шрифтовете, сливане на пряка и непряка реч . да не споменавам и някои недомислици в превода. Срамота е такива интересни и съвсем не евтини като цена книги да се предлагат в този вид на читателите! testo denso, a tratti un po' pesante, che mette a nudo l'abissale ignoranza della sottoscritta nei riguardi della storia di oriente e medio oriente.
E se non si conoscono le radici di genti e culture e confini che si sono succeduti nei millenni e che hanno lasciato segni indelebili,cosa voglio capire e giudicare degli sviluppi attuali
Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth.
Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months.
Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antiochin perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.
The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia.
To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions.
But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval.
One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him.
Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms, It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution, It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion.
It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment, Accidentally deleted my review, I'll have to rewrite it when I have time,
Nov.
This book begins in Xian, the original, ancient capital of China, Where is Thubron going, and why
I think of saying Turkey, the Mediterranean, but it sounds preposterous.
I hear myself answer: Along the Silk Road to the northwest, to Kashgar, And this sounds strange enough, She smiles nervously. But the unvoiced question Why are you going gathers between her eyes in a faint, perplexed fleurdelis, This Why, in China, is rarely asked, It is too intrusive, too internal, We walk in silence.
Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and hereand here.
These are the nerveends of the world
A hundred reasons clamour for your going, You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map, You have a notion that this is the worlds heart, You go to encounter the protean shapes of faith, You go because you are young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust you go because you are old and need to understand something before its too late.
You go to see what will happen,
This book revisits some of the territory covered in his earlier books The Lost Heart of Asiaand Behind the Wall.
In Shadows, Thubron has lost much of the young mans confidence that marked the earlier books the more he has learned, the less he understands.
This book spends less time on the journalistic accumulation of facts and impressions and more time trying to figure things out.
Of Xian itself:
Eighteen years earlier, I had trudged through a rundown provincial capital, But now it had shattered into life, All around now, another generation was on the move, In my memory, their parents expressions were guarded or blank, and footsteps lumberedSomething had been licensed which they called the West.
I gawped at it like a stranger, Being Western was a kind of conformity, Even as the West touched them, they might be turning it Chinese,
Old people gazed as if at some heartless pageant, Dressed in their leftover Mao caps and frayed cloth slippers, they would stare for hours as the changed world unfolded.
It was hard to look at them unmoved, Men and women born in civil war and Japanese invasion, who had eked out their lives through famine in the Great Leap Forward and survived the Cultural Revolution, had emerged at last to find themselves redundant.
Under their shocks of grey hair the faces looked strained or emptied by history, And sometimes their expressions had quietened into a kind of peace, even amusement, so that I wondered in surprise what memory can have been so sweet.
A young Chinese of the new mindset accosts him outside his hotel,
His father obsessed him, The old man had been persecuted in the Cultural Revolution for owning books, He was paraded in a dunces hat, with his arms wrenched out of their sockets, Huang let out a tremor of strained Chinese laughter, But now hes gone home, Hes retired to the village of his childhood,
The village that persecuted him
Yes, But to trees now, and flowing water, and a newspaper,
But he had left behind this son tormented by a zeal for selfimprovement, A year ago I helped a Brazilian tourist, Hes a lawyer. Hes my only foreign friend and now you, I felt a sudden misgiving, the start of a delicate interplay between debt and request, But he said: I want to go to Brazil, During the day Ill work at anything, but in the evening Ill give Chinese lessons, Free, no charge! Money is important, of course, but later, First, friends. Friends will be more important for my life, Maybe after a year Ill have five people studying Chinese all new friends, Here! here! and here! He planted them in space, like aerial seeds, Soon maybe one of my friends will tell me: Oh, Mr, Huang, I have good news my father or my uncle works in a company that needs
I felt an amazed misgiving for him.
Do you know anything about Brazil
Brazil is in South AmericaMaybe they are making this, He picks up a tiny bell from a table, So Ill send one of these to friends in China wholl find a company to make them cheaper, After that we sell them back to the Brazil company, Then he advances down other avenues, other schemes, And slowly, as he juggles with a ferment of percentages and notional deals, my fear for him dissipates, I start, with dim foreboding, to pity the Brazilians,
Xian became capital under the Tang Dynasty, the first group of leaders who created the nation of China one language, one system of measurement, one set of laws.
Thubron shares a meal with the friend of a friend, a historian specializing in the Tang,
He comes with his twentyeightyearold daughter Mingzhao, who looks like porcelain, like him, For a long time we climb over this perfect, sterile geometry, Beneath us the city moans invisibly through the smog: The drumming of a train, faint cries, Sometimes his daughter takes his arm, as if comforting him for something, As we mount the Linde hall, the pleasure palace of nineteen successive generations of Tang emperors, his daughter falls back beside me.
She is pretty and delicate, with childs hands, In the Cultural Revolution he was sent into the mines, she says, He was there eleven years, He had silicosis in his lungs long afterwards, But he kept up his studies even there, Ive seen his old notebooks, covered in Maoist slogans,
Later, in a dumpling restaurant that hangs its red lanterns near the citys bell tower, Hu Ji and his daughter are debating something.
They share the same small mouth and slim nose, She is studying the Sung dynasty, as he has studied the Tang, Sometimes she laughs, as he smiles, He is writing a book of essaysthey are complex, provocativewhich will expose old pieties to new light, '
My hand brushes his arm, I feel for his compassion surprising myself a surge of consolation, and I realize that I have never lost some misgiving at this hard land.
Hu Ji says quietly, Thats why the Tainanmen Square massacre could happen,
I hear myself ask: Could it happen again
Seconds go by before he says: I dont think so.
We have opened up too much to the world now, We are overseen.
Is that the only reason I wonder, But Hu Ji is looking at his daughter, says softly: Our culture is starting to change, its true,
He is seeing it in her and she answers my unspoken question: 'I don't know what my generation would do in revolution.
But I think mine are more selfish, They have a conscience. They must decide things for themselves, '
Her gaze stays innocent on mine, She is twentyeight, but looks a child, For a moment I do not understand her the equation of conscience with selfishness is strange, But ever since the Cultural Revolution, she implieswhen morality was vested in a nearmythic leadershipresponsibility could no longer be displaced upward, but had come to rest, with guilt, in the confines of the self.
Implicitly Mingzhao is announcing the death of the whole Confucian order, which places in an immutable hierarchy every person under heaven.
Before gloom can gather, Mingzhao asks me brightly: What period would you have liked to have lived in She enjoys these parlour games.
It depends if I were rich or poor, I laugh, And you
It depends if I were a man or a woman,
We turn to her father, Surely he would choose to live under the Tang, But he only smiles, and says uncertainly: The future,
All this brings us to page, From Xian, Thubron wanders westward, through hundreds of pages, armed with working ability in both Russian and Chinese, as he moves through Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and finally through Turkey to the Black Sea.
Throughout, he questions all he thought he had understood on earlier trips and grapples with what these very different nations can teach him about humanity.
It is a journey well worth taking, with a deeply sympathetic narrator, Признавам, че не съм достатъчно добре запозната с историята на Азия. За това и доста неща не разбирах съвсем или ми се струваха отегчителни. Твърде много религия Иначе определено завладяващо пътешествие много далеч от нашия свят. there are parts
of this book that are amazing Xian comes to mind and several of the strangers he meets on his journey but sadly the author's writing style is very much one that I don't like overly descriptive almost as if he was being paid by the word.
If you like old British travelogues where the flowery prose is more important than the tale this may be the book for you.
On the other hand, if you are looking for something more its still here but its buried,
I totally loved this book, specially the travels through China! Perhaps I shouldn't say that the travel through Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan were also fascinating.
The peoples, the faiths, the customs both over centuries passed and now today all were discussed, Little things like the facial characteristics and body forms and hats worn were so well described, Each cultural group became an identity, I have to visit China, . I don't know if I would be brave enough for the other countries! Wow do I admire Colin Thubron, and I must read more of his books.
He makes history come alive, As a child in school, history was just dates and names all of which w,