We've known for a long time that the Silk Road was vitally important in the developing world of the eighth century, but it is only relatively recently that it has secured its romantic reputation, as the travel-writer and novelist Colin Thubron knows well: This story, simply set out in three scenes, is a key document of what was in fact a transforming shift of knowledge and skill from the east to the west. So, the princess has obviously arrived safely in Khotan, and her trick has worked. In front of the princess, the silk cocoons are piled up in a basket, and on the far right there is a man hard at work weaving the silk threads into cloth. The story-teller would then have told us that inside it there is everything you need to produce silk: worms of the silk moth, and the silk cocoons that they produce, and mulberry seeds - because mulberry leaves are what silk worms need to eat. And to make absolutely sure that we don't miss it, and that we don't fail to recognise that this is the focal point of the story, on the left a servant woman is melodramatically pointing at the headdress. Right in the middle is the silk princess herself, with her large and prominent headdress. It's pretty unprepossessing as a work of art, but then it was never intended to be a work of art, because this painting was made entirely to help a story-teller tell their story. It's painted on a rough plank that is almost exactly the size of a computer keyboard - and the figures are quite simply drawn in black and white, with here and there touches of red and blue. They were rediscovered in about 1900 by the brilliant polymath Sir Aurel Stein, one of the pioneering archaeologists of the Silk Road, and it was Stein who revealed Khotan's importance as a pivotal trading and cultural centre. The shrine was just one in a small city of shrines and monasteries which had vanished beneath the sand for over a thousand years. The picture is on a wooden board, and it was found in a small abandoned Buddhist shrine in Khotan. The result was the story of the silk princess, as told in our painting. Khotanese story-tellers created a legend to explain how the secrets of silk production - for thousands of years a Chinese monopoly - had came to Khotan. Khotan is now in western China, but it was then a separate kingdom and the beating heart of the Silk Road, vital for water and refreshment, and a major manufacturer of silk. In this programme we're in the oasis kingdom of Khotan in Central Asia, which is where our painting was found. And with the goods came stories, ideas, beliefs, and - key to our story today - technologies. The goods on that highway were rare and exotic - gold, precious stones, spices, silk. In the world we've been looking at this week, a world of enormous movement of people and of goods, one of the busiest highways of all, then as now, ran from China: the Silk Road - not in fact one single road, but a network of routes that spanned 4,000 miles (6,500 km) and effectively linked the Pacific to the Mediterranean. In this, surprisingly little has changed since the eighth century. we all spend part of our lives now on highways or airways - some real, some virtual - and as well as travelling them ourselves, we know that they fuel not just the economy but our imagination. I am listening to the noise of the people and the goods of the whole world on the move, passing through Heathrow Airport. because it wasn't just silk that travelled, and frankincense, and rhinoceros horn, and all these wonderful products which we associate with it, but a much more humble but continuous trade - of people locally, trading to people with rather different needs and situations." (Colin Thubron) "I think the Silk Road, in terms of the movement of goods and ideas, is the 'internet of antiquity'." (Yo Yo Ma) But it was found in a long-deserted city on the fabled Silk Road. It's known as the 'Legend of the Silk Princess' and it is now in the British Museum. The tale I have just told you - a 'Just So' story of one of the greatest technology thefts of history - is one that is presented to us in paint on a plank of wood that's around 1,400 years old.
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