Shadow of the Silk Road, by Colin Thubron

Swap your stirrup for my harp

Over the past 40 years, Colin Thubron has become a valuable eyewitness - an important person to have around. He becomes ever-increasingly so. We live in an era of all-too-easy access to "facts'; we drive carelessly along on our global information highway, expecting to be able to Google any queries away. Thubron, though, is a creature of the long search; before ever taking up his backpack, he prepares the intellectual ground ahead. In his London pad he swots up on his Russian and Mandarin, steeping himself in historical and social know-how, and when he does set out it's with a fistful of promising contacts; it's never long before he's rigorously pursuing his first lead. His solo wanderings are lengthy (In Siberia described a 15,000-mile schlep) and they become a lyrical assemblage of telling local humanity - the over-affectionate drunk, the indefatigable shepherdess; the forgotten conscript on the isolated pass.

The subject he tackles here is, in narrative terms, easier than those of his four important travel books - Among the Russians, Behind the Wall, The Lost Heart of Asia and In Siberia. With this Asian quartet safely tucked under his belt, following an ancient land route 7,000 miles right across the heart of so much familiar territory was always going to be satisfactory for the reader; Shadow of the Silk Road would do the job of neatly tying the vast region's often discordant cultures together. Although the "Silk Road" - the over-simplistic name given to a network of trade routes by the 19th-century geographer von Richthofen - is today defunct, and Thubron was never likely to be rubbing shoulders with purposeful traders on mule or camel, we find him at ease here, tracing the 2,000-year-old route as a seasoned explorer might confidently follow a dry river course.

The author's starting point is the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic character who is - as the Chinese have it - the progenitor of their nation, of wisdom and of civilisation itself. It was out along the Silk Road that the benefits of this civilisation gradually percolated: innovations streamed westward to the empires of Central Asia, as the fortunes of Aryans, Persians, Greeks, Huns, Arabs and others ebbed and flowed. Silk, paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the bridle and so on travelled west, while the other way came dates, figs and olives, the chariots of Mesopotamia, the harp.

But Thubron's interest lies in the today - the once-great peoples still to be found existing unhappily beside each other along the Silk Road, each relict community heavy with historical resonance. Each new face - Han, Turkic, Azeri - is, for him, a faint but persistent echo of an earlier argument. Thubron becomes a latter-day Aurel Stein, not so much because of his delightful tendency to scurry away though the sands just to handle a last shard of archaeological evidence, but because he is inclined to read the individuals he meets like a historical document. You get the idea he is translating a parchment from the original, faded script - be it Chinese, Uighur (the written form adopted by Genghis Khan for his new nation of illiterate Mongols), Cyrillic, Arabic, or Roman. Thubron wends his way west from the China heartlands through the once-feared "empty lands" of Central Asia, from Kyrgyzstan (in a state of "startled independence" from the Soviet Union) through Afghanistan and Iran to arrive, eight months on, in Turkey at the old Mediterranean city of Antioch.

Thubron makes his way with an appealing blend of self-doubt and erudition; he is willing, he is patient; he knows he cannot resolve but he can attempt to decipher. It's no surprise that he's made so readily welcome. One by one they open up to him - in China, whether the broken and disillusioned of the Cultural Revolution or the wandering Buddhist monk with his pitiful dream of becoming a bodyguard to the Dalai Lama; in Kashgar, the quiet, beleaguered nomads whose market - a decade ago a great wonder of the world - is concreted over by a newly resurgent and soulless China advancing again westward on the world.

The author's tendency to read a land through its people put him at a disadvantage in his last travel book, In Siberia, where I felt he neglected the region's huge physical environment, evading the bitter taiga and tundra that frames its people's experience. Here on the ancient highway, Thubron is complete; his trading commodity is not the silk which so bewitched the merchants of Europe, but information; he is the reliable storyteller we needed in place of Marco Polo. His stock in trade makes him invaluable to us, and useful - yet harmless - to those he meets. The kerbside dust is inhabited by the many lost along the way, and here is someone you could trust to tell your tale.