Museums are regularly looking for historic counterparts to modern phenomena, and the British Museum’s new present Silk Roads seems to be simply that: an exploration of the traditional transnational commerce route, bringing luxurious materials from China to Central Asia, the Center East and Western Europe—and loads of merchandise going the opposite approach. The Silk Highway, which endured from the second century BC till the fifteenth century, was a precursor to our present conception of the globalised society, with its change of concepts and other people in addition to materials items.
Sue Brunning, the curator of European Early Medieval collections on the British Museum, cites Peter Frankopan’s ebook The Silk Roads (2015) as crystallising curiosity within the topic, with the Covid-19 pandemic as one other issue. “It was prompted with lots of discussions and thought and reflections upon being a part of a world neighborhood; all of us skilled points of that, significantly in recent times with Covid and what it’s wish to be a part of that neighborhood,” Brunning says.
Romantic adventures
“The concept of romantic adventures in ‘unique lands’ and cross-cultural interactions is already very alluring,” she continues. “However what we are attempting to do within the present is to incorporate the much less tangible issues which you can’t see and contact. Concepts and religions and applied sciences and information and languages are spreading in all instructions.”
Brunning is certainly one of three lead curators of the present, reflecting the massive geographical expanse: it reaches from Helgö in Sweden, the place a sixth-century carved Buddha, more likely to have originated in what’s now Pakistan, was present in 1956, to Dunhuang in western China, a settlement the place an enormous cache of historic manuscripts was uncovered firstly of the twentieth century (which is the topic of a companion present, A Silk Highway Oasis: Life in Historic Dunhuang, on the British Library, see p61). Whereas Brunning is caring for Europe, Luk Yu-ping (the museum’s curator for Chinese language work, prints and Central Asia) and Elisabeth R. O’Connell (Byzantine world curator) are taking care of complementary areas.
Cross-cultural collaboration
“We needed to get a wider view of our subject material and get out of our mental and educational silos to look throughout cultures,” Brunning says. “The scope that we’re making an attempt right here is the kind of factor that may solely be achieved with a collaboration throughout completely different areas of experience. Having three [lead] curators is fairly unprecedented.”
Maybe inevitably there are questions over the ethics of the acquisition of a lot of the British Museum’s holdings within the space, significantly gadgets from Dunhuang that got here by way of the gathering of the archaeologist Aurel Stein. Fairly how Stein got here to accumulate the fabric within the first place remains to be controversial, with claims of looting and calls for for repatriation—though new analysis means that switch was no less than partly authentic.
Stein’s artefacts are “thought of to be vital witnesses to the historical past of the Silk Roads and that’s why they [are] a key a part of the exhibition”, Brunning says. “In fact, these are discussions which might be very wide-ranging and that attain all of us within the museum.”
• Silk Roads, British Museum, London, 26 September-23 February 2025
