Shadow of the Silk Road » (Reprint)

An award-winning novelist and travel writer, Colin Thubron's books include Among the Russians, In Siberia, and the New York Times bestseller Shadow of the Silk Road. He lives in London.

To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.

The New York Times Book Review - Lorraine Adams

With its elegiac tone, Shadow of the Silk Road is moving in a way that s rare in travel literature, sidestepping nostalgia even as it notes its pull. Thubron goes to places most other sojourners can t—because they re not so much geographic locations as states of mind, formed from the lifelong accretion of intriguing facts, mistaken hopes, mysteries. Here, on civilization s oldest and longest road, which isn t quite a road, he has found his way into that kingdom and brought it into focus for us.

Author's note     xiii
Dawn     1
The Capital     7
Mantra     46
The Last Gate Under Heaven     68
The Southern Road     96
Kashgar     138
The Mountain Passage     154
To Samarkand     184
Over the Oxus     219
Mourning     262
The Mongol Peace     294
To Antioch     333
Timeline     346
Index     350