Last week two magnificent exhibitions opened in London. Both have as their theme the idea of the Silk Road, an overland trade route said to stretch ever since antiquity all the way across Asia from China to Turkey and hence to Mediterranean Europe.
The show at the British Library is entitled A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang and focuses on the extraordinary haul of ancient documents found in the Mogao Buddhist cave temples by a Chinese Daoist priest and sold by him to the explorer and archaeologist Aurel Stein in 1907.
