A voice from the Silk Roads: ‘I would rather be a pig’s wife than yours’
Photo: Scroll in Sanskrit and Khotanese embellished with an opulent silk painting 943 CE (c) British Library
Daniel Nelson
An unhappy woman’s words ring down the ages: “I would rather be a dog’s or pig’s wife than yours.”
Miwnay’s husband, Nanai-dhat, never received her letter. It lay unread for more than 1,000 years in a lost mailbag – until it was discovered in a cave near the town of Dunhuang in what is today China’s Gansu province.
Miwnay was angry because she hadn’t seen her husband for three years and she and her daughter had become destitute, forced to serve a local Chinese household while desperately trying to leave the town
A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang is largely based on about 50 documents and pictorial works from the treasure trove of tens of thousands of documents and objects uncovered in the walled-up “Library Cave” in 1900.
The exhibition is as small and specific as the British Museum’s parallel blockbuster, Silk Roads, is extensive and all-encompassing.
The British Museum show gives an awesome sense of centuries of exchanges in goods and ideas between three continents; the Library peers through the other end of the telescope, at a single town.
Small turns out to be beautiful, too: one of the Buddha’s last sermons recorded in gold ink on indigo-dyed paper; an accordion-shaped book with red Tibetan text alongside a Chinese commentary in black that can be rotated 90 degrees to accommodate the reading direction of both languages; a 21-metre scroll; a book made up of loose rectangular paper leaves, threaded together with two central holes (a format developed in India using palm leaves); the oldest complete printed book with a date; the oldest known manuscript atlas of the night sky; the earliest surviving Tibetan document.
But it’s the personal touches that linger, like Miwnay’s letter, or the phrasebook to help Silk Routes travellers communicate with those from other parts of the world: “It transcribes the sounds of certain words, including body parts like ‘mouth’, ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ and sentences like ‘where are you going?’, ‘please enter’ and ‘bring us wine’.”
+ A soundscape recreating the sounds of the ancient Silk Road based on recordings from the British Library’s sound archive and the China Database for Traditional Music. It blends contemporary material from artists across historic Silk Road nations, such as Iran and Kazakhstan, and includes newly commissioned works by Tibetan folk artist Ngawang Lodup, Uyghur virtuoso Shorhet Nur and Chinese musician Wu Fei.
* A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang, £8/£6, is at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB until 23 February. Info: Silk Road Oasis
30 September, The Golden Road with William Dalrymple, 7pm £8-£16
4 October, Dunhuang: The Story of the Caves, Sam Willis, Luk Yu-Ping, Susan Whitfield and Mélodie Doumy, £5-£10
7 November, Echoes of the Silk Road, Bettany Hughes, Colin Thubron, 7pm, £7-£14
29 November, Silk and the Silk Road, Aarathi Prasad, 7pm, £5-£10
7 December, Silk Road Bazaar, 11am-5pm