1 Beyond the Silk Road: Toward Alternative Models of Transimperial Exchange

Abstract

I The Myth of the Silk RoadSince the Chinese government presented the Belt-and-Road Initiative or 'New Silk Road' to the world in 2013, museums and exhibitions dedicated to the ancient Silk Road have proliferated.1 One example is the Lanzhou Planning Exhibition Hall in Gansu Province, which houses a walk-around Silk Road experience as part of the Lanzhou urban development plan. 2 Another is the Silk Road Museum in Jiuquan, also Gansu Province, a city founded -as the homepage proudly states -on the Silk Road in 111 . 3 Connected to the museum is a grand Expo Park devoted to "the essence of the life and culture along the Silk Road as it existed in old times." 4 Anyone wishing to know more can read that from the first dynasties of China during the Bronze Age, the Xia and the Shang, the Chinese carried trade to the ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Babylon, Hindus, Rome and Greece.Following dynasties Zhou, Qin and Han continued in the footsteps of the Xia and Shang and spread trade throughout Eurasia, and Western Civilizations stretched their trade routes deeper into China.Multinational competition and wars between leading empires determined who controlled the Silk Route and its rich treasures that traversed the lands.5 This is an exciting glimpse into a global past, but little distinguishes it from a myth.Like a myth, its empirical foundation is no longer questioned.Chronology is suspended.It seamlessly links a very ancient past to the modern present and tells a story of age-old connectivity.Myths gain power through images in our minds: age-old trade routes through forbidding territories, caravans loaded with carpets and pearls, and pioneering merchants moving oriental luxuries from east to west.Several recent commentators have emphasized the profoundly modern agendas lying behind the invocation of the ancient Silk Road.6 This should put us on alert.As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann puts it, history becomes myth not simply as fiction but as a narrative foun-1 Winter 2022, appendix A on Silk Road exhibitions around the world since 2002, lists seven in 2019 alone, with a significant increase and novel concentration in the People's Republic of China, which hosted six of them in that year; see also Winter 2022, 114-135 for contextualization of this development.2

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