Village Green Shopping Centre | Vernon's Premier Shopping Destination
Choice Made Simple!
Too many options?Click below to purchase an online gift card that can be used at participating retailers in Village Green Shopping Centre and continue your shopping IN CENTRE!Purchase Here
Coles The Silk Road at Village Green Shopping Centre in Vernon, BC
*Product information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, shipping and return information please contact Coles
For two thousand years a web of roads and sea-lanes ran from the heart of China to the shores of the Mediterranean, and along it moved almost everything that would make the modern world: silk and horses, glass and paper, gunpowder and porcelain, Buddhism and Islam, and - in the end - the plague that killed half of Europe. We call it the Silk Road. No one who traveled it ever did. E.B Cohen tells the whole story from the ground up, beginning with an uncomfortable admission: "the Silk Road" is a name a German geographer invented in 1877, and almost everything popular memory attaches to it is half wrong. There was never a single road. Silk was only one cargo among many, and often not the most important. Almost no one traveled the full length; goods and gods were passed hand to hand across a chain of middlemen - above all the Sogdians, a brilliant merchant people history has nearly forgotten. From the envoy Zhang Qian, sent west by a Han emperor in search of an alliance and heavenly horses, to the buried Sogdian mail found in the sand, to the cave at Dunhuang where a Daoist monk stumbled on a sealed library a thousand years old, to Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, to the Black Death riding the caravans, to China's twenty-first-century attempt to build the road all over again in steel and concrete - this is the Silk Road as it actually was: a highway for horses and disease as much as for luxury, and the first machine for connecting the world. Rigorous, vivid, and honest about how thin and strange the evidence can be, it corrects the myths in both directions and follows the road all the way to the present.
For two thousand years a web of roads and sea-lanes ran from the heart of China to the shores of the Mediterranean, and along it moved almost everything that would make the modern world: silk and horses, glass and paper, gunpowder and porcelain, Buddhism and Islam, and - in the end - the plague that killed half of Europe. We call it the Silk Road. No one who traveled it ever did. E.B Cohen tells the whole story from the ground up, beginning with an uncomfortable admission: "the Silk Road" is a name a German geographer invented in 1877, and almost everything popular memory attaches to it is half wrong. There was never a single road. Silk was only one cargo among many, and often not the most important. Almost no one traveled the full length; goods and gods were passed hand to hand across a chain of middlemen - above all the Sogdians, a brilliant merchant people history has nearly forgotten. From the envoy Zhang Qian, sent west by a Han emperor in search of an alliance and heavenly horses, to the buried Sogdian mail found in the sand, to the cave at Dunhuang where a Daoist monk stumbled on a sealed library a thousand years old, to Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, to the Black Death riding the caravans, to China's twenty-first-century attempt to build the road all over again in steel and concrete - this is the Silk Road as it actually was: a highway for horses and disease as much as for luxury, and the first machine for connecting the world. Rigorous, vivid, and honest about how thin and strange the evidence can be, it corrects the myths in both directions and follows the road all the way to the present.
Find everything in-store including new, used and children’s books, music, movies, games and toys. Visit Coles today to find the perfect gift, or a novel for yourself. COVID-19 UPDATE: Open | Regular Centre Hours
