Where The Twine Met ...

Were he of a mind to do so, a citizen of Finesterre, Galicia, could leave home one fine morning and walk all the way to Shanghai. It would take some doing, but it simply involves crossing two contiguous continents from end to end. Being a purist, our man may wish to swim across the Bosporus in imitation of Lord Byron, but other than that, give or take fording a few rivers and crossing several seemingly endless deserts, it's just a question of his putting one foot before the other.

Setting out from Venice as he did, Marco Polo had a head start on our hypothetical contemporary Galician wanderer, though he must still be given his due for livening up the Silk road between Europe and Asia. And it wasn't simply a question of transporting merchandise and trade, a wealth of cultures, languages, ideas, inventions, fashions, philosophies, religions, gossips, misunderstandings and all kinds of diseases, travelled back and forth along the route that had taken Alexander the Great to India, a trail originally blazed by Indo-Europeans in prehistoric times.

1,500 years ago, at the beginning of the 6th century, two enormous statues of Buddha were carved in the rocky mountain face overlooking the valley Bamyan in Afghanistan. Buddha who was born in India but would acquire Chinese features over the centuries was decked out in a Hellenic tunic Confucius and Socrates rolled into one. It was another confluence of East and West, an opportunity for creation rather than destruction. Some of us might remember though, that in March 2001 brutal intransigence reduced the Buddhas of Bamyan to rubble. On one hand men painstakingly make, built construct ...

On the other hand, men also savagely violate, profane, sabotage, and destroy ... A century later, after Central Asia had converted to Islam, the Silk Road remained open, though no longer to all, as Marco Polo would later reach America by mistake: he was after a direct maritime route to the Indies and Cathy (China). Now only a tedious flight stands between us. So fast, so easy, and so boring.

Tags:EastWest,MarcoPolo,Buddha,SilkRoad

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