The Silk Road

(CHN 150)

The “Silk Road,” which stretched from China to Europe, conjures up remote and exotic images, scenes of camel caravans moving across endless deserts beneath towering snow-capped ranges, rich oasis towns, cave art, Buddhism, Nestorianism, Islam, and eventual Chinese domination. Like grains of Gobi sand, there are grains of truth here. But the Silk Road also stands for much more—for varied regions and many routes, which one scholar calls the Eurasian crossroads. Here peoples and cultures and religions have come into contact and intermingled, sometimes in peace but just as often in conflict. In some ways, this is the Asian counterpart of the Mediterranean—one land, one sea—an arena within which major world civilizations were shaped.

In this survey, Lyman P. Van Slyke and Vincent Yip will demystify this vast, dry heartland of Asia and the peoples who then and now inhabit it. We will attend mostly but not exclusively to those areas claimed today by China, a vast northwestern expanse inhabited by peoples called by names like Hui, Kazakh, Uygur, and Tibetan; and increasingly, and problematically, by Han Chinese as well. Our emphasis will be historical and cultural, but we will also illuminate the ethnic, political, and strategic dynamics in play along the Silk Road today.

Lyman Van Slyke, Professor of History, Emeritus

Lyman Van Slyke received a PhD from UC Berkeley with a specialization in Chinese history. From 1963 to 1998, he taught Chinese history at Stanford, receiving two teaching awards. He first visited China in 1975 and has led more than twenty-five tours there as well as in other regions of Asia for Stanford and other organizations. Several of these tours have been to areas traversed by the Silk Road. Van Slyke served three terms as Director of the Center for East Asian Studies and helped establish the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei, Taiwan. His research focused particularly on China’s revolutionary history from 1900 to 1950. In 2005, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Carleton College, his alma mater.

Vincent F. Yip, Lecturer in Continuing Studies

Vincent Yip has consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, and has taught executive MBA courses in the US and China. An accomplished photojournalist, he has traveled to various parts of China’s Silk Road dozens of times, and is currently the Program Director of The Friends of Dunhuang, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Dunhuang art treasures. A native of Singapore, he has written three books on China, including co-authoring the landmark book, Ethnic Groups of China, with Du Ruofu of The Institute of Genetics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yip received a PhD from USC.