Inside Silk Roads, the British Museum's grand exhibition five years in the making

Extensive show highlights cultural exchanges across continents more than one thousand years ago

A wall painting featuring elephant riders battling real and mythical creatures created about AD 730 on display as part of Silk Roads at the British Museum in London. Getty Images

After five years in the making, the British Museum has launched its grand Silk Roads exhibition. It follows the trade routes that connected China in the east, through Central Asia, Arabia and the Levant, to sites as geographically disparate as Sweden, Ireland, Spain and Eritrea.

“Silk Roads highlights the richness, complexity and extent of cultural context and exchanges across continents over 1,000 years ago,” says Yu-Ping Luk, the curator of Chinese Paintings, Prints and Central Asian Collections at the museum and one of the show’s three curators. “It reminds us that histories are interwoven and that humanity has long been connected.”

The works on view reveal the exchange of ideas, religion and people. There's a Christian cross carved in an Islamic style in Cordoba in what is believed to have been the 900s. And there's the complexities of Gandharan art in northern Pakistan, which brought together both Grecian and Buddhist influences. The works also underline the huge wealth of the cities that emerged as key stops on the routes, such as Dunhuang in China, Bukhara in Uzbekistan, Baghdad and Damascus.

One of the most incredible works is the six-metre-long excerpt of a mural showing a procession of Sogdian figures riding on elephants and camels, with a retinue of white swans. It reveals elements from as far afield as Korea, positioning the Sogdians at the centre of these networks of exchange. It was made in present-day Samarkand for an aristocratic house – not even a royal residence – and speaks to the cultural sophistication in Central Asia and the fullness of their history. The Sogdians are today nearly all but forgotten.

The show does not shy away from the less luminous aspects of the trade routes. A section displays the paraphernalia around slaves – ankle chains and braces – which were supplied by Viking traders coming down the Volga River from Scandinavia and the Baltics. And it shows the pervasiveness of cross-cultural engagement, from high-value artefacts to styles of dress.

The idea of cross-cultural collaboration is endemic both to the material and the show, which is an organisational departure for the museum. It was put together by three curators from different departments: Chinese and Central Asian; European Early Medieval; and Byzantine. For the first time, all of the British Museum’s departments have been involved and leant objects.

That this should be a first is amazing – it’s taken 265 years for cross-departmental collaboration. The reason for this lag is the set-up of world museums such as the UK’s. Like their intellectual counterpart of the university, museums have siloed knowledge into separate geographic and medium-based departments. While this has allowed curators and scholars to look at their specialisms in depth, it has hamstrung the ability to think through the connections between periods, cultures and nations. It leaves the Middle East, for example, estranged from Rome and Greece, despite their clear overlaps through time. From a university perspective, cross-departmental collaborations often struggle to get funding or coursework greenlighted.

The five-year collaboration among departments shows how seriously the British Museum is taking the limitations of this older way of thinking, and how it is trying to move forward to emphasise connections, particularly with a subject as perfect as the Silk Roads.

“Silk Roads reminds us that humanity has a long history of making connections across all boundaries. While spans, speeds, and methods may change, the act of connecting is a fundamental part of being human,” says British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan. “It is an impulse that is in our DNA.”

Does this rhetoric sound familiar? What is perhaps most striking about the British Museum’s Silk Roads is how closely it resembles the Louvre Abu Dhabi – whether its own show about the Silk Roads, the Dragon and Phoenix exhibition in 2022, or indeed its entire theoretical framework.

“Within our DNA is this notion of diversity and exchange of culture in all forms and multidisciplinary techniques,” Louvre Abu Dhabi director Manuel Rabate told The National earlier this year, echoing comments he has made since the museum opened seven years ago.

When it opened in 2017, the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s thesis of one route through humanity was a methodological departure from typical museum displays. It reflected the Louvre Abu Dhabi's smaller collection when compared to long-established world museum.

Its goal is to show connections and exchange among cultures as they contribute to one shared human story. Instead of focusing on Egyptian mummies as a stand-alone case of extraordinary artistry, for example, Louvre Abu Dhabi looks at the similarities of humans readying themselves for the afterlife, whether in the highly decorated Egyptian sarcophagi or in the carved and painted wooden sculptures of the peoples of the South Pacific.

In terms of museum display, the visitor walks through one narrative of the museum, rather than standing in a central atrium choosing between the Egyptian Wing or the Arts of Oceania. The opening room of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s permanent collection reinforces the idea of cross-cultural exchange further by setting out a map on the floor to underline the geographic connections the museum will make.

The British Museum’s Silk Roads, arrayed in the open-plan Sainsbury Wing, similarly adopts this cartographic aesthetic, hanging signs throughout the show to map out the route through time and geography that the visitor will travel. Spanning the years 500 to 1,000, and moving roughly east to west, the exhibition allows the visitor to take stock of the connections as she or he moves – a finely carved box found in Northumbria suddenly hearkening back to carved botanic motifs of the Samanid empire. It is an experiential journey as much as a scholarly one.

The British Museum is not alone in trying to think through how connection can be foregrounded within existing museums structures. The Berlin Museums on its Museumsinsel, now closed for refurbishment, is building an underground Archeological Promenade that will link four of the five museums, though they will all stay physically separate. In universities, interdepartmental programmes are emerging, like Arab Crossroads at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Louvre Abu Dhabi was able to start from a blank slate, and to reconsider from a 21st century perspective how it will tell the story of humanity – the lofty goal to which all museums aspire. It’s not fair to say that the British Museum is mimicking the Louvre Abu Dhabi. But much as knowledge and art travelled along the Silk Roads, it seems cultural exchange is not yet finished in London – that wild and wet outpost that still borrows, sometimes, from the east.

Silk Roads runs at the British Museum, London, until February 23, 2025