The geocultural heritage of the Silk Roads

ABSTRACT

Today the Silk Road is proclaimed to be a history and heritage shared by more than four-billion people, incorporating oceans and continents. Governments, museums, authors, filmmakers and heritage agencies have become adept at telling a story of pre-modern globalisation that weaves together a multitude of locations and events stretched across dozens of countries. As one of the most compelling geocultural imaginaries of the modern era, the Silk Road has become a remarkably elastic and seductive concept for heritage making; a paradigm to which a plethora of landscapes and cultural forms are being recovered and preserved, displayed and curated to tell stories of trade, exchange, friendship and cosmopolitan cultures. Through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, media projects and festivals now celebrate Silk Road cuisine, dress, craft, music, dance, or loftier ambitions of civilisational dialogue. Little attention has been paid to how this fast proliferating narrative of history is emerging as a vast platform for heritage making, museology and cultural policy. This paper takes up such themes, tracing how the concept has evolved since its invention in the late nineteenth century. This provides the foundations for more critical readings of the Silk Road as a unifying concept of heritage and history.

KEYWORDS:

• Silk Road
• Belt and Road
• heritage diplomacy
• world history
• geopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a detailed account of Richthofen’s construction of the Silk Road see Chin (2013) and Waugh (2007).

2. In St Petersburg, for example, the arrival of manuscripts, mural fragments and other artefacts to the city’s universities and museums led to additional expeditions, with the Russian Academy of Sciences funding a trip to Eastern Turkestan in 1898.

3. For example, collaboration between state broadcasters NHK and CCTV for a television documentary series on the Silk Road was conceived to revive Sino-Japanese relations. Broadcast around the world to great acclaim in the early 1980s, the series was first proposed during Prime Minister Tanaka’s trip to Peking in 1972, which took place several months after Nixon’s landmark meeting with Mao.

4. In 1996 for example, the WTO cohosted a conference in Xi’an on tourism development in the region, including visa reforms for Silk Road itineraries (Churchill 1996, 20).

5. David Airey and Myra Shackley cite cultural heritage projects funded by the European Union, Arab League and German development agency GTZ (Airey and Shackley 1997; Gillen 1997, 67).

6. This was followed by the Khiva Declaration on Tourism and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (1999); The Bukhara Declaration on Silk Road Tourism (2002); Astana Declaration (2009); and Shiraz Declaration (2010). For further details on each see; ‘Technical Cooperation and Silk Road Declarations’ (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [FT170100084].

Notes on contributors

Tim Winter

Tim Winter is an Australian Research Council Professorial Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century (University of Chicago Press 2019). His forthcoming book is on the Silk Road as a geocultural, geostrategic concept. See silkroadfutures.net