The Silk Road

Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 14 May 2016 22:08.

The worship of the Silk Mother is about 4,000 years old and still continues…

Mrs Wu and Mrs Lee-il are its caretakers..

This is the story of a trade route that changed the world…

..a route that was over 5,000 miles long

It began with a single commodity - a material spun from the cocoon of a moth.

It became the clothing of emperors.

This was The Silk Road. It ran all the way from China’s ancient capital…

Through Central Asia, through mythical cities such as Samarkand and Persepolis..

Until it reached the bazaars of Istanbul and the merchants of Venice.

Comments:

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 14 May 2016 23:36 | #

As a religious artifact, reverence for the (probably mythical) figure of the Silkworm Mother is a generalised form of ancestor worship - a fixing of the historical moment of the emergence of the Han from their tribal antecedents. Folk religion is a transport of folk memory, folk myth, folk unity. Probably every people has had some form of folk religion at some point, maybe as heroic legends, maybe as creation myths. If Europeans had them, they did not much survive the imposition of the Christ cult. The Han are blessed.

Posted by Aurel Stein on Sun, 15 May 2016 22:22 | #

Aurel Stein, the embodiment of Western values according to the BBC.

The BBC’s normalization and institutionalization of Islam and the commercial source of pan mixia is also taken-for-granted.

Posted by The New Silk Road on Tue, 17 May 2016 21:26 | #

The New Silk Road: it’s significance.

Its being hailed as the signature foreign policy initiative of Chinese President Xi Jinping and could be the largest undertaking since the Marshall Plan, post World War II. In fact, many are saying that the road would be China’s answer to the Trans Pacific Partnership, which currently excludes China and Russia and seeks to streamline global trade.

This is called the one belt, one road plan..

..comprised of two routs, a land route running into Western Europe and a maritime route stretching to Southeast Asia and Africa by sea.

Along the way this will cover over 60 nations and more than half the world’s GDP.

First and foremost, the new trade routes will make it easier for China to trade with former Soviet states.

The China-Pakistan corridor alone is expected to cost 46 billion dollars.

And while the total cost for the project is unknown, analysts expect the project to bring in an additional 2 and a half trillion dollars of trade to China in the next decade. This long reach across Asia will serve to boost economic prosperity but perhaps more importantly, give China greater control over its neighbors.

Some strategists in Beijing, have suggested that the increase in economic stability may undermine the appeal of radical Islam in the region, particularly in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as violent autonomous states like Xinjiang.

With trade agreements like the TTP threatening China’s influence in the global economy, The New Silk Road is likely China’s best bet at keeping trade supremacy, as well as exerting further control over Asia.

In any case, China is about to own a huge number of infrastructure projects in a diversity of countries and regional countries. That alone puts them in a risky yet incredibly strong bargaining position with the rest of the world.

That is not to say that China is not already a world economic leader.

While there is a consensus that both (((The U.S.))) and (((Russia))) rank higher than China as far as military strength…

There is a general consensus that China has the largest active military in the world.