Journeys on the Silk Road

the long version

The Silk Road once linked China with the Mediterranean. It conveyed merchants, pilgrims and ideas; but its cultures and oases were swallowed by shifting sands. Central to the Silk Road's rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service. When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900 and uncovered scrolls undisturbed for a thousand years, Stein secured the scrolls, the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This is the story of the scrolls, and their journey to London.