Like a real life Indiana Jones, maverick archaeologist David Childress takes the reader on an incredible adventure across some of the worlds oldest and most remote countries in search of lost cities and ancient mysteries. Discover ancient cities in the Gobi Desert. Hear fantastic tales of lost continents, vanished civilisations and secret societies bent on ruling the world. Visit forgotten monasteries in forbidding snowcapped mountains with strange tunnels to mysterious subterranean cities.
The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it travelled precious cargoes of silk, gold and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centres of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years. But legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasures and guarded by demons. In the early years of the last century foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.
The present set of studies by Professor Pulleyblank complements those gathered in Essays on Tang and pre-Tang China. The central concern here is the interaction between China and the non-Chinese peoples around it, in particular those of Central Asia. The volume opens with several articles contributing to the dating of events as far west of China as Afghanistan and India based on more accurately dated Chinese historical sources. Two studies deal with the prehistory of the Turks, while others are concerned with indigenous non-Chinese peoples that lived within the heartland of China during the formative years of Chinese civilization and the way in which they were absorbed into that civilization. The concluding series of papers, published between 1966 and 1999, addresses the controversial question of the coming of horsemen belonging to the Far Eastern Tocharian branch of Indo-European to Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) at the beginning of the second millennium BCE and their possible influence on the origins of the Chinese bronze age.