The felt slipper in the glass case looks somewhat worn and dusty, but still serviceable. Hence the shock of its caption -- which reveals that its owner once pounded the Silk Road, the great ancient trade route, more than 1,000 years ago.
The Tibetan shoe, dating from the 8th or 9th century, is among a wealth of astonishingly well-preserved treasures from the Silk Road which have just gone on show at the British Library in central London.
PHOTO: EPA
Running from modern-day Iran to the west through central Asia and into China, with branches into Tibet and South Asia, the Silk Road -- a series of trading routes rather than a single highway -- saw commodities such as fabrics, spices and precious stones carried along its length.
More importantly for historians, with their passage came a transfer of ideas, technologies and beliefs.
Much of the route, especially that lying in what is now far-western China, is arid desert, meaning that a huge amount of usually perishable materials such as papers and fabrics have survived the centuries, often buried in sands.
The British Library's exhibition is largely drawn from items discovered by famous Hungarian-born explorer Marc Aurel Stein, who trekked along the Silk Road a number of times between 1900 and 1930.
His most astonishing discoveries came from caves in the ancient Silk Road town of Dunhuang, now in the western Chinese province of Gansu, which had been sealed in about AD 1000.
Among the thousands of documents and letters was the so-called Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text translated in Chinese from AD 868, which is the oldest definitively-dated printed book in the world.
The exhibition mixes such treasures with many objects and documents giving a taste of ordinary people's lives along the great trade route,
One letter, found in Sogdiana, in modern-day Uzbekistan, was written by an angry woman to a husband who had abandoned her, forcing the woman to work as a servant for a Chinese household.
"I would rather be a dog's or a pig's wife than yours!" reads the curt missive, a domestic dispute which happened in the early 4th century, only to be rediscovered by Stein more than 1,500 years later.
This emphasis on the everyday was central to the exhibition, said curator Susan Whitfield of the British Library, who has been working with the material for a decade.
"The accidentalness of it all is what interests me. As a historian you work a lot with official histories, the great empires, the great courts, emperors and military campaigns," she said.
"But that's deliberately preserved history, it's been through several periods of interpretation by court historians. What's so fun about what we have from the Silk Road is that it is purely accidental.
"It's a window that would normally be completely closed off."
The items preserved in the desert sands were an arbitrary snapshot of life, Whitfield explained.
"Quite a lot of what is left is what you leave behind when you move house: broken bits and pieces, things you were given by somebody that you never really liked and never got around to throwing away," she said.
"That gives such an interesting view of human life, the detritus of human life. I very much wanted to show that."
Besides the ancient artefacts are a series of photographs and documents chronicling the exploits of Stein, who became obsessed with the region after reading as a boy about the campaigns of ancient conqueror Alexander the Great.
Last month plans were even agreed to build a so-called "new Silk Road," with 23 nations signing up to a scheme to build a vast network of highways running from Japan to Turkey.
This new focus on the region was helping to draw people into the exhibition, Whitfield said.
"By happy accident it's a good time to hold it," she said. "It's worked out very well."
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had