Travels through five countries along the Silk Road between China and Turkey, featuring the cultures, modern traditions, and histories of the regions.

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game...

The Silk Road is a route from the edges of the European world to the central plains of China. For thousands of years, its history has been a traveller's history, of brief encounters in desert towns, snowbound passes and nameless forts. It was the conduit that first brought Buddhism, Christianity and Islam into China, and the site of much of the 'Great Game' between Victorian empires. Jonathan Clements guides the reader through the trackless wastes...

"The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. Many foods we consume today--from almonds and apples to tea and rice--have histories can be traced along the tracks of the Silk Road out of prehistoric Central Asia to European kitchens and American tables. Organized trade along the Silk Road dates to at least Han Dynasty China in the second century B.C., but the exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient trading...