>>MARK NORELL: We've chosen a route on the Silk Road that basically connects the capital of Tong Dynasty
China, Xi'An, which was one great marketplace, one great endpoint for goods,
with another endpoint, which is back in Baghdad, which was the head,
or the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate,
which really allowed goods then to be dispersed from the Western Mediterranean. We've tried
to make the entire show very atmospheric. So, there's nothing that sort of engages people more in the
Silk Road than to see the beasts of burden on the Silk Road—the camels—actually carrying
goods, through a field of sand dunes, which could have been in the Taklamakan Desert in
Central Asia. This is a particularly sophisticated loom from the Tong Dynasty. We got this from
the National Silk Museum of China in Hangzhou. And looms like this actually have
been found and depictions of looms like this have been found. This loom would've taken
two people to operate. It's over 17 feet long and it's an incredibly complex machine,
so much so that it allows very, very intricate patterns to be woven and in a variety of different
techniques. Well, the selection of instruments we have here are reproductions, well,
not really reproductions, but they're antiques—some up to 150 years old—
of Chinese instruments that were played in the distant past. Chinese instruments didn't
change that much in the thousand or so years since Silk Road days, and we have figures,
like people playing these sorts of instruments here and here, which are representative of
the time, of the Silk Road. Many of these same things, like I said, are played today.
Even the same melodies are played today. So, you can actually, here, play these in the exhibit.
You can play them both singly or you can play them together to hear how they sound both individually
and in concert.
From Xi'an we move to Turfan, and Turfan is an oasis town in Xinjiang, in
Western China. It's the homeland of the Uyghur ethnicity, who are people who, although they're
Chinese, that they're not Han Chinese. They're more related to Persian people. They speak
their own individual language, which is called Uyghur. If you went to Turfan today, the markets
would look pretty much just like this. I mean, they're bustling places full of fruits, full of vegetables,
full of mercantile goods, and it was just the same way during Tong Dynasty times. One
of the things that made Turfan and Dunhuang and Kashgar such important marketplaces is
because they really laid at the nexus between north and south trade routes, as well.
So, you had furs, you had metal, you had things like that coming down from Siberia, from Mongolia,
from those places. One of the big problems is if you live in an oasis town in the middle
of the desert, is how do you get water there? There's a very ingenious Central Asian technique
called the Karez system, where water can be carried through an underground system of channels,
which are then aerated by vertical channels, as well, up to a hundred miles from mountains.
In Turfan, the water comes from the base of the Kunlun and Tian Shan Mountains and it
travels just underground through these culverts, like this, up to 75 or 80 miles.
This is a representation of Islamic engineering invention—it's a water clock. It works on
the same principle that a sand dial does, except that rather than sand running through, water
runs through. So as the water goes down, there's a float in the top chamber that goes down
as well, which pulls a series of counterweights, which then makes the guy up on the top turn,
and he has a pointer that then points to the particular times of the day. So, in antiquity,
someone would've had to fill it up every day. We have a pump, an electric pump underneath which does
that for us, but nevertheless, it's almost an exact copy of the kind of thing you would've
seen in Baghdad in the 9th century. This is a recreation of an astrolabe, and an astrolabe
is a celestial instrument that allows one to be able to sight on particular stars and
not only tell what time of day it is, but with the appropriate tables and mathematics
to be able to tell what your latitude is. So, there's a story which goes that these were
originally created by Islamic engineers to be able to tell what time of the day it is
to pray. That's probably not true because they're probably derivative, or we know them to be
derivative from instruments which both the Greeks and the Romans used. However, they're
much more sophisticated. Toward the end of the time period that we're looking at, but
starting even a little bit before that, the maritime sea trade started to outpace the overland sea
trade. And this was to a variety of reasons. One was some of the desertification I talked
about earlier. Another was just that it was so much cheaper and easier to transport goods
by sea down the coast of China, down through the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean
to the Persian Gulf than to take them overland. Also, political instability in Central Asia
played a big part of it, also. Arabic mariners began to use boats like this one.
This a recreation of a dhow, which was a sailing ship which was capable of very, very long
overseas voyages. What we're standing in now is the interior, the hull of what a dhow would've
looked like. This is based on a shipwreck from the Straits of Malacca, which was collected
several years ago. Instead of shipping containers like we use on ships now, we have these big
ceramic urns that were then packed with things like porcelain pots, porcelain plates, and
other kinds of luxury goods that were made in China and then moved all the way to Persia,
to what's now Iraq and then disseminated throughout the Mediterranean by the maritime
kingdoms of Venice, Genoa, and others. All of the cities that we talk about in this exhibit
still exist today. Granted, they've changed a lot, but there are still vestiges
of the old Silk Road that one can still see there. But on a more larger scale we can look at
what the Silk Road really means. And to me, what the Silk Road really means is this was
one of the very, very early attempts at globalization, at organized globalization in the sense that
at every step of the way, people wanted to get this stuff to one of the endpoints. And, if
we look at how our lives exist today, we can say that it's very much the same way. Certainly,
someone in Constantinople, certainly someone in Baghdad was unlikely ever to meet someone
from Xi'an. Nevertheless, they were quite familiar with their goods. In the same way
as when we go on the Internet and buy something from Delhi or Mumbai today, we'll probably
never meet them, many of us will probably never go there, but we're able to interact
with them and we're able to trade with them in a very organized fashion.