The Silk Road: A New History

Whenever we speak of the Silk Road, the mind’s eye conjures up a single merchant traveling on a camel laden with goods, most likely on his way to Rome. The discovery of multiple artifacts and excavated documents in northwest China allows us to revise this image. In fact, few people moving along the Silk Road were long-distance merchants. Under tight government supervision, merchants usually stayed on circuits close to home and exchanged goods for other goods, often not using coins at all. Other Silk Road travelers included missionaries, refugees, artists, and envoys, who have left the clearest document footprint of all. The most active foreign community in China were Sogdians, migrants from Samarkand and the surrounding areas. They found new homes in the small oasis-states ringing the Taklamakan Desert whose rulers encouraged religious tolerance as they welcomed newcomers to their realms.
About Dr. Valerie Hansen
Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is professor of history. Her main research goal is to draw on nontraditional sources to capture the experience of ordinary people. In particular she is interested in how sources buried in the ground, whether intentionally or unintentionally, supplement the detailed official record of China’s past. Her books include The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China, Voyages in World History (coauthor), and, just published in the summer of 2012, The Silk Road: A New History. In the past decade, she has spent three years in China: 2005-06 in Shanghai on a Fulbright grant; and 2008-09 and 2011-12, teaching at Yale’s joint undergraduate program with Peking University. She was the principal investigator, from 1995 to 1998, of The Silk Road Project: Reuniting Turfan’s Scattered Treasures. The project held three international conferences and compiled a bilingual Chinese-English finding guide to over 3,000 artifacts.

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program
The Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program makes available each year a dozen or so distinguished scholars who will visit colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. They spend two days on each campus, meeting informally with students and faculty members, taking part in classroom discussions, and giving a public lecture open to the entire academic community. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students. Now entering its 57th year, the Visiting Scholar Program has sent 600 Scholars on 4,917 two-day visits since it was established in 1956. Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honor society. It has chapters at 280 institutions and more than half a million members throughout the country. Its mission is to champion education in the liberal arts and sciences, to recognize academic excellence, and to foster freedom of thought and expression.

The History Department is co-sponsoring her talk with the campus chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, for whom she is a Visiting Scholar.

hm 2/20/13