When UW history professor Dan Waugh decided to teach a course on the Silk Road, he knew his plans were ambitious. After all, the Silk Road—actually a series of overland trade routes from Asia to the Mediterranean—influenced everything from art to religion to commerce in Eurasia for nearly 2,000 years. Fortunately, Waugh loves a challenge.

Waugh began offering the course in 1999. Now he and a team of UW colleagues are reaching a broader audience through The Silk Road Seattle Project. The project combines courses, public lectures, exhibitions, teacher workshops, and a website to highlight the enormous and enduring influence of the Silk Road.

In this rubbing, a typical Central Asian caravaner is shown with one of his camels. The rubbing is of a T'ang-era tile from a tomb near Dunhuang, China. Photo by Daniel Waugh.

The story of the Silk Road begins in China, around 200 B.C. The Great Wall had been built to keep nomads—known for their military prowess—out of China. But the Chinese desperately wanted horses and camels the nomads could provide, so they began trading with the nomads for the animals. “The Chinese paid the nomads with silk,” explains Waugh. “Huge quantities of silk. The nomads, in turn, began trading the silk with the West.” Those trade routes became the Silk Road.

The Silk Road’s main route began in Xi’an, passed around the Taklamakan Desert in western China, through Uzbekistan and Northeastern Iran, and continued further west. “Chinese silk appeared as far west as Rome during the first century CE, so we know the route reached that far,” says Waugh.

The “road” was not one route but a series of routes along which a variety of goods and ideas were traded. “Lots of different products and religions were moving back and forth,” says Waugh. “These are the territories where many important religions were born and spread, including Buddhism, Islam, and ancient Persian Zoroastrianism.”

Art and architecture also found their way across the Silk Road. Blue and white porcelains produced in China during the Ming Dynasty were traded to the Middle East in huge quantities, leading artisans in the Islamic world to imitate the Chinese style. Conversely, the Chinese had a fascination with all things Persian and Iranian during the T’ang Dynasty and incorporated Iranian patterns into their textiles and paintings.

Many of the trade routes that were part of the Silk Road continued into the eighteenth century, when trading by sea became more common. Some patterns of trade established by the Silk Road continued into the early twentieth century.

Waugh has not only studied the Silk Road, he’s traveled it. Well… part of it. As an avid hiker and climber, he has traveled through Central Asia more than half a dozen times, becoming more fascinated with the region with each visit. Then he attended a month-long Silkroad Foundation seminar in western China. “It was an absolutely stupendous experience,” says Waugh. “That’s when the Silk Road became an essential part of my life. It was clear to me there was no turning back—this was something I wanted to spend more time on.”

No problem there. One could spend years studying the Silk Road and barely scratch the surface. Particularly rich sources of information are the travelogues written by thirteenth century adventurers, like Marco Polo, who traveled from the Mediterranean all the way to Asia by land.

“The routes were there before, but Marco Polo was one of relatively few people who actually traveled the whole distance,” says Waugh. “Normally, people went to the next major center of trade and then turned around.”

Marco Polo’s account, and that of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan who traveled from West Africa through India to Southeast China, provided Westerners with a lot of new geographic information about Asia. “Marco Polo’s book had a lot to do with opening Europeans’ perceptions about what was out there in Asia,” says Waugh.

	The Silk Road was not one road but a series of routes, as shown in this map by UW graduate student Justin Odum, who is creating the historical atlas for the Silk Road Seattle Project.

Waugh hopes the Silk Road Seattle Project will have a similar effect. Funded through a grant from the UW‘s Simpson Center for the Humanities, with additional funding from the Silkroad Foundation and various UW departments, the project aims to reach a broad audience through its many offerings.

The project was inspired by cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, a concert tour that is bringing together East and West musically. “Several of us on campus—Joel Walker in history, Cynthea Bogel in art history, Margit Dementi of the Simpson Center, and I— had been brainstorming about possible Silk Road projects,” recalls Waugh. “Then we learned that Yo-Yo Ma would be performing at the Seattle Symphony with his Silk Road Project, and we saw a real opportunity to collaborate and expand on that.”

Waugh and graduate student Elmira Köçümkulkïzï have been invited to speak at Soundbridge, the Symphony’s educational facility, following Yo-Yo Ma’s visit in May. Waugh is also serving on the Symphony’s Silk Road Advisory Board, along with Dementi and UW anthropology professor Stevan Harrell.

The Silk Road Seattle team is also collaborating with the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), creating a “virtual” Silk Road art exhibit that will become part of SAM’s permanent website. Through interactive maps and timelines, viewers can click on a region or period and see related art, accompanied by explanatory information. John Szostak, a UW Ph.D. student in art history, is curating the exhibit.

The virtual art exhibit is just one of Silk Road Seattle’s web projects. The website also includes layer upon layer of information about the history and geography of the Silk Road region. Want to read excerpts from the writings of Chinese pilgrim Faxian or other Silk Road travelers? They’re online. Want to view a map of the Silk Road routes and then view photos of a specific region? No problem. Curious about teaching materials available for creating a K-12 unit or a college-level course? Such guides are also included. The site is an ongoing collaborative effort, with faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates providing content and other expertise.

These offerings are just the tip of the iceberg. The Jacob Lawrence Gallery in the School of Art will present a photography exhibit, curated by K. Moles, a Ph.D. candidate in art history. The Henry Art Gallery will have a related textile exhibit on display. Waugh is teaching a Silk Road course through the Simpson Center’s Wednesday University Series (open to the public) and will offer his own Silk Road course again Spring Quarter. He and Bogel will lead a series of Silk Road seminars for K-12 teachers in May.

Asked if he is overwhelmed by the scope of the project, Waugh just grins.

“I have the passion of a new convert,” he admits, explaining his indefatigable energy for the Silk Road Seattle Project. “I want the world to understand that the Silk Road is really fascinating.”

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Undergraduate Lance Jenott, who has been designing and providing content for Silk Road Seattle's website, has seen many benefits to working with faculty on the project.

[Winter/Sping 2002 - Table of Contents]