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\"An illustrated exploration of Byzantine culture, its past history and its relevance to design today, looking at the style and influence of woven silk textiles\"-- Provided by publisher.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one of the most talked about and little understood policy initiatives of China. This short book offers a comprehensive, balanced and policy-oriented analysis of the BRI and what it means for western businesses and polities.

Ancient mud-brick architecture along the Silk Road has been an under-studied subject in the world literature of architectural history. Employing results of the microscopic and particle size analyses, this paper seeks to characterize a few examples of mud-brick recently discovered at the Bronze Age settlement of Xichengyi in Northwest China, and demonstrate a new type of mud-brick building technique. The field observation identifies two types of mud-brick. While one type is thick and used together with mortar, which is commonly seen in the existing literature, the other is thin and bound together by ramming, which is unprecedented in the mud-brick architecture over the world. The site is located in the Hexi Corridor, a critical section of the Silk Road, and the multi-room layout of the buildings and the wheat/barley crops hint at dual directions of inspiration, but it is yet uncertain whether the Xichengyi community absorbed the mud-brick building technology from Central Asia. The microscopic and particle size analyses, however, confirm that the second type of mud-brick was ingeniously fused with the earth ramming technique from China proper. L’histoire de l’architecture s’est peu intéressée aux constructions anciennes en briques crues le long de la route de la soie. Grâce aux résultats des analyses microscopiques et granulométriques réalisées sur de telles briques récemment découvertes dans le site de l’âge du Bronze de Xichengyi, dans le Nord-Ouest de la Chine, il est désormais possible de démontrer qu’une nouvelle technique de construction avec des briques crues a été utilisée. Deux sortes de terre crue ont été identifié lors de l’observation sur le terrain. L’une est couramment décrite dans la littérature – il s’agit de briques épaisses confectionnées avec du mortier –, l’autre est fine et obtenue par le damage de la terre ; la seconde est sans précédent dans l’architecture en briques crues, pratiquée ailleurs dans le monde. Le site de Xichengyi se trouve dans le couloir de Hexi, un tronçon important de la route de la soie ; la disposition des bâtiments d’une part et la culture du blé et de l’orge d’autre part suggèrent deux sources d’influence possibles. On ne sait pas encore si la communauté à Xichengyi a adopté les techniques de construction en briques crues depuis l’Asie centrale, mais les analyses microscopiques et granulométriques confirment que la seconde sorte de briques intègre de façon ingénieuse la technique de damage de la terre pratiquée en Chine.

In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth century but also to reaffirm the stereotypes of Buddhism as a peaceful, rational philosophy and Islam as an inherently violent and irrational religion. But if Buddhist-Muslim history was simply repeated instances of Muslim militants attacking representations of the Buddha, how had the Bamiyan Buddha statues survived thirteen hundred years of Muslim rule?Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Roaddemonstrates that the history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction is much richer and more complex than many assume. This groundbreaking book covers Inner Asia from the eighth century through the Mongol empire and to the end of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century. By exploring the meetings between Buddhists and Muslims along the Silk Road from Iran to China over more than a millennium, Johan Elverskog reveals that this long encounter was actually one of profound cross-cultural exchange in which two religious traditions were not only enriched but transformed in many ways.

In 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a campaign for national rejuvenation. The One Belt One Road initiative, or OBOR, has become the largest infrastructure program in history. Nearly every Chinese province, city, major business, bank, and university have been mobilized to serve it, spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas building ports and railroads, laying fiber cables, and launching satellites. Using a trove of Chinese sources, author Eyck Freymann argues these infrastructure projects are a sideshow. OBOR is primarily a campaign to restore an ancient model in which foreign emissaries paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, offering gifts in exchange for political patronage. Xi sees himself as a sort of modern-day emperor, determined to restore China’s past greatness.Many experts assume that Xi’s nakedly neo-imperial scheme couldn’t possibly work. Freymann shows how wrong they are. China isn’t preying on victims, Freymann argues. It’s attracting willing partners—including Western allies—from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf. Even in countries where OBOR megaprojects fail, Freymann finds that political leaders still want closer ties with China.Freymann tells the monumental story of Xi’s project on the global stage. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies from Malaysia to Greece, Russia to Iran, Freymann pulls back the veil of propaganda about OBOR, giving readers a page-turning world tour of the burgeoning Chinese empire, a guide for understanding China’s motives and tactics, and clear recommendations for how the West can compete.

The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting--as revealed in this new history.

In this long-awaited second edition, Susan Whitfield broadens her exploration of the Silk Road and expands her rich and varied portrait of life along the great pre-modern trade routes of Eurasia. This new edition is comprehensively updated to support further understanding of themes relevant to global and comparative history and remains the only history of the Silk Road to reconstruct the route through the personal experiences of travelers. In the first 1, 000 years after Christ, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants, and military men traveled the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Whitfield recounts the lives of twelve individuals who lived at different times during this period, including two characters new to this edition: an African shipmaster and a Persian traveler and writer during the Arab caliphate. With these additional tales, Whitfield extends both geographical and chronological scope, bringing into view the maritime links across the Indian Ocean and depicting the network of north-south routes from the Baltic to the Gulf. Throughout the narrative, Whitfield conveys a strong sense of what life was like for ordinary men and women on the Silk Road, the individuals usually forgotten to history. A work of great scholarship, Life along the Silk Road continues to be both accessible and entertaining.