Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel. The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval. One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

Long before China promulgated the official One Belt One Road initiatives, vast networks of cross-border exchanges already existed across Asia and Eurasia. The dynamics of such trade and resource flows have largely been outside state control, and are pushed to the realm of the shadow economy. The official initiative is a state-driven attempt to enhance the orderly flow of resources across countries along the Belt and Road, hence extending the reach of the states to the shadow economies. This volume offers a bottom-up view of the transborder informal exchanges across Asia and Eurasia, and analyses its clash and mesh with the state-orchestrated Belt and Road cooperation. By undertaking a comparative study of country cases along the new silk roads, the book underlines the intended and unintended consequences of such competing routes of connectivity on the socio-economic conditions of local communities.

When a blight threatens Byzantium's silk industry, Alexandra, the sister of the Emperor, journeys across Tibet to the Empire of Ch'in, in hopes of smuggling live silkworms back to Byzantium

Norman “Doc” Rodgers is in a world of pain. A young combat medic in Afghanistan, he’s eager to avenge his father’s death in the World Trade Center and make sense of a new world that feels like it’s fallen to pieces. Haunted by hallucinatory encounters his only solace is a barely concealed addiction to the precious opiates he’s supposed to dole out sparingly to those beyond help. Old Silk Road weaves a striking tale of permanent terror, hazy objectives, shadowy contractors and the toll of modern warfare on soldiers and civilians alike. In this tautly-plotted debut novel Caro, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, tells the story of a soldier’s undoing in raw, incendiary and hypnotic prose. It’s an extraordinary portrait one soldier’s frustration, confusion and ambivalence, written by someone who’s been there.

Discover Colin Thubron's journey through central asia in the wake of the fall of the iron curtain. Thubron travelled throughout Central Asia in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and documented the widespread social upheaval in a region reeling from political change. Thubron is an inspirational writer, intrepid traveller and insightful observer and his The Lost Heart of Asia is an outstanding guide to the history, people and culture of a vast region resonating with history and politics. 'Thubron's journey takes him through a spectacular, talismanic geography of desert and mountain... and he weaves its mysteries with modern images into a dazzling embroidery' The Times

As mysterious as its beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Syberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train, boat, car, and on foot, Colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him—despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongoloia to the Artic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.

Nebenzahl documents the mapping and discovery of West Asia and the trade routes of the Silk Road. The book includes rare maps spanning 2,000 years of cartographic history.