What to Read

The Silk Road:Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia and Did Marco Polo Go to China

The books highlighted in this issue were written by Dr. Frances Wood, the China Librarian at the British Library, who was the "Asia in the Curriculum" Symposium's featured speaker.

The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia
Frances Wood ( University of California Press, 2002)

The Silk Road is a colorful tour through Central Asian history, archaeology and art history from pre-historic jade crafting up to the recent destruction of artifacts by the Taliban regime. The chapters are topically focused, and organized in chronological order, giving a sense of movement through various areas of concern through the course of Central Asian history. The topics include: jade and silk production; Xiongnu and Han trade; Central Asian fashions in the Tang court; the Dunhuang caves; Marco Polo; and multiple chapters about later European explorers. While each of the early chapters is located in a particular time-frame, Wood is not limited by them, referring to data from other periods as necessary. Each chapter mixes historical and geographical detail with poetry, travelers’ impressions and lively anecdotes, making the book an entertaining introductory survey of the area now known as the Silk Road. The pages are populated with famous characters: from Xi Ling, the legendary creator of silk, to Yang Guei Fei and Xiang Fei, popular concubines in the imperial Chinese court; from Buddhist missionaries Fa Xian and Xuan Zang to Nestorians and Jesuits like William of Rubruck and Bento de Goes; from Alexander the Great to Marco Polo to Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Pelliot. Not only human characters, but also animal characters roam there too. Wood describes in detail the varieties of game and wildlife sought after by Han Officials, British trophy hunters and Moghals alike. Two explorers during the Great Game, a period characterized by Russian and English competition for influence in Central Asia, are characterized through their relationship to animals: the affection Aurel Stein shows toward his dogs, serves as a humane counterpoint to the behavior of his contemporary, Sven Hedin, who carelessly abandons both animals and porters alike to die from cold and disease.

The text is peppered with sumptuous color prints of fine art from the many periods and cultures in the region’s history, black and white photos by European explorers during the Great Game and the early 20th Century, and modern color scenic and ethnographic prints. These are strategically placed alongside the vignettes which populate Wood’s narrative, bringing to life excerpts from the tales of travelers past. To assist the reader are two maps inside the front and back covers, one focusing on trade routes and major oases in the Taklamakan basin and its surrounds, down to Gandhara and Nepal, and the other showing the larger trade route stretching from Luoyang to Tyre and Antioch. Also included is an altitude chart which shows the elevation and distance between major stops on the trade route.

Curiously, although Wood packs some 1500 years of history into the first half of the book, she devotes almost the entire second half of the book to only the last two hundred years. In telling an adventure-story of the events and characters who found and made public the majority of archeological finds on which modern Silk Road scholarship is based, she does not hold back her judgement on these characters. The French Paul Pelliot’s brilliance is tempered against his "frightening" severity; the Swedish Sven Hedin’s extensive explorations are contrasted against his ruthless grave-robbing; and the American Langdon Warner’s moralizing about saving cave frescoes from the desecrated state he finds them in is set against his premeditated purchase of fixatives and chemicals in Beijing for the very purpose. However, little criticism is applied to Aurel Stein, the Englishman to whom the Dunhuang cave 17 was first opened, and who is portrayed as a congenial, sociable lover of good company and animals as are later English travelers like Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart.

This should all show that Wood’s book serves as a delightful introduction for the novitiate. As a critical scholar, Wood is at her most rigorous when writing about Marco Polo, and gives a good picture of the many versions of his Divisament dou Monde, and the problems of Polo’s unreliable data therein. She also draws interestingly on a variety of English and Italian literary sources, showing some elements of the European picturing of Central Asia. Although footnotes point the way towards serious Western scholarship for those who would like to pursue it, Wood also cites more popular works without differentiating between them. It is also unfortunate that none of the extensive and detailed Silk Road scholarship in Chinese or Japanese is included as Wood’s intent is to reveal the ongoing imagination of Central Asia from within and without. Such inclusion seems important, as even the English language translations (and concomitant framings) of Chinese texts that she cites may be influenced by the Eurocentric imagination she describes. This being said, I heartily recommend The Silk Road for its vivid tales, insightful anecdotes and fascinating prints. As James Elroy Flecker’s poem indicates in the conclusion, the historical fascination with the sands of Taklamakan may have been as much with imagination as hard goods:

"We travel not for trafficking alone,
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned,
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand"

Reviewed by Michael Stanley-Baker, M.A. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Cultures Department

Did Marco Polo go to China?
Frances Wood (Secker &Warburg, 1995)

It is not unusual for people to be stunned when they first hear the title of this book since the majority of the readers of Marco Polo’s Description of the World took it for granted that he did indeed go to China. There are, however, some critics who have doubted the authenticity of Description of the World ever since its publication. Frances Wood’s book, therefore, seeks to answer a question posed by many of her readers. Dr. Wood argues that Marco Polo himself probably never traveled much further than the family’s trading posts on the Black Sea and in Constantinople, and was not responsible for Italian ice-cream or Chinese dumplings, this does not mean that the Description of the World does not remain a valuable source of information on China and the Near East, in particular. His usefulness as a recorder of information otherwise lost is similar to the case of Herodotus (c.484 BC to c.425 BC), who did not travel to all the places he described and who mixed fact with fantastic tales, but whose work is nevertheless not to be discarded lightly.

Dr. Wood points out that Description of the World is not a travelogue of Polo’s trip to China. It is much more of a geographical or historical work than a personal account of things seen, and beyond the prologue, it contains remarkably few references to the Polos themselves. Wood claims, in accordance with the thoughts of many contemporary Chinese scholars, that Marco Polo’s book, however full of wonderful descriptions, is also filled with inaccuracies and discrepancies. She looks at the omission of discussions of foot-binding and a visit to the Great Wall as significant, for example. While consistent inaccuracies and omissions may indicate this is an imagined journey, the fact that Wood assumes that the lack of an orderly itinerary outlined in the travelogue reflects that Polo did not reach China weakens her argument somewhat.

But even as she uses discussions of these omissions to bolster her argument, Wood is contradicting herself. She writes, "It could be argued that during the Mongol period, when the Polos were supposed to have been in China, [foot-binding] was not so widespread and, since women whose feet had been bound could not move far, possibly invisible to foreign travelers" (p. 72) or "It could also be argued that the enclosure of women meant that Marco Polo would have seen few upper-class Chinese women" (p. 73). Similarly, Wood spends a whole chapter on the omission of the Great Wall, surprised that Polo fails to mention it but also aware of the fact that it was not until the Ming (1368-1644), some decades after the Polos’ visit, that parts of the wall, including the sections nearest the capital, were faced with brick (p. 97). Indeed, without a careful study of construction and reconstruction of the Great Wall before or during the Yuan dynasty, which has already been done by some Chinese scholars, it would be a stretch to take the omission of the Great Wall as proof that the author had not been to China. On one hand, Dr. Wood’s work thoroughly embodies her academic honesty; on the other hand, the evidence she provides seems to indicate that she is still torn on the issue. It is true that scholars could not find evidence about Marco Polo in the historical records, but until Dr. Wood has more evidence, she is left with an unfinished argument.

Reviewed by Ling Jiang, M.A. student of Chinese, East Asian Languages and Cultures Department

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