245 Entry #1: Silk Road = a route of two points or a chains of cultures?

In Chapter of the Silk Road by Francis Wood, we can read about records of both the Roman/Greek and China on the places of the Others. To the Romans or Greeks the land lies to their east were both charming and threatening, and to the Chinese the whole Xiyu (西域) was both fascinating and fearful. Not El Dorado exactly, as they sort of had some ideas what the lands were about, but the account on this “Others” inevitably was fragmented, incomplete, and opaque.

Reading this chapter, that reminds me of the 1983 NHK(Japanese Public TV) documentary series on the Silk Road. By that time, I still remember pretty well that the Japanese were suddenly immersed themselves in a fervor of the Silk Road, following economic reform of PRC allowing tourism to enter the country’s westernmost areas. Drama series were made (I still remember the theme song) and a documentary series of 40+ episodes was made in a timespan of 5 years. The portrayal of the Silk Road in the series were very like Chapter 3 of the textbook — it is a route connecting two points of cultures.

Well, of course the Silk Road is about the cultural achievement of connecting the two cultural spheres of dominance in the two end of the Eastern Hemisphere.  But I can’t help but ask: is the Silk Road a route, or is it an organic chain of cultural spheres together, one affecting each other and even sometimes a domino effect?  The dichotomy of “center” and “periphery” is very funny here: as if we can put Bactria, Sassanid Persia, Transaxonia and else on a two-axis Cartesian coordinates, X axis is East Asian culture, and Y “the West”.

Is that the periphery itself a center of its own? If we look at these “others” in relation to the two cultures, will we overlook their own invention and uniqueness? I believe the studying of the Silk Road is not about fitting clusters of cultures on a neat relational map to two big cauldrons. It has more to do with the people on the route themselves, not just their relationship with the two ends of the pole, but their own features are also something we should equally pay attention to.