纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 050传丝公主画版（2）（在线收听）

I am listening to the noise of the people and the goods of the whole world on the move, passing through Heathrow Airport... 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. In this, surprisingly little has changed since the eighth century. 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. The goods on that highway were rare and exotic - gold, precious stones, spices, silk. And with the goods came stories, ideas, beliefs, and - key to our story today - technologies.

In this programme we're in the oasis kingdom of Khotan in Central Asia, which is where our painting was found. 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. 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. The result was the story of the silk princess, as told in our painting.

The picture is on a wooden board, and it was found in a small abandoned Buddhist shrine in Khotan. The shrine was just one in a small city of shrines and monasteries which had vanished beneath the sand for over a thousand years. 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.