纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 050传丝公主画版（3）（在线收听）

I am sitting with the painting now. 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. 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. Right in the middle is the silk princess herself, with her large and prominent headdress. 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. 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. Then we see what happens next. 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. So, the princess has obviously arrived safely in Khotan, and her trick has worked. 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.

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:

"The place of the Silk Road in history - it's almost impossible to exaggerate its importance, I think, in the movement of peoples, the movement of goods, the transport of inventions in particular, and ideas - and of course in the movement of religions. Whether it's Buddhism north from India and eastward into China, or the advance of Islam deep into Asia, all this is a Silk Road phenomenon.