The Silk Road: A Living History

Through his captivating and evocative photographs, Christopher Wilton-Steer invites you on a journey from Venice to Beijing, offering a fresh adventure that unveils the diverse people and cultures along this legendary route, where history comes alive.

The Silk Road: A Living History invites you to take a journey from London to Beijing, encountering some of the people, places and cultures in-between. This unique collection celebrates the diversity found along this route, explores how historical customs live on today, and reveals connections between what appear at first glance to be very different cultures. Ultimately, the book aims to help build bridges of interest and understanding between distant places and challenge perceptions of les well-known or understood parts of the world. Of course it reflects only a fraction of the realities of these places. It is one of an infinite number of stories that could be told.

Christopher Wilton-Steer dreamed of experiencing the transitions between the diff erent cultures that lie along the historic Silk Road in order to gain a deeper understanding of what connects them.
His photographs tell a fascinating story about the relationships between diverse cultures, how their living histories continue to shape and infl uence the present, and the enduring legacy of interconnectivity forged by trade routes that have spanned Eurasia for over 2,000 years.

Born in London and based in Kenya, Christopher Wilton-Steer spent part of his life, between the ages of 20 and 30, in Beijing. “During my many trips back and forth, I often wondered about the cultures located between the two ends of Eurasia. The idea of an overland journey gradually took root.” 12 years later, he set off from King's Cross Station on an terrestrial odyssey that has now culminated in the creation of this book. Christopher's work regularly appears in the international press, including National Geographic, The Guardian, CNN, Financial Times and Der Spiegel.
His previous exhibition - The Artisans of al-Darb al-Ahmar: Life and Work in Historic Cairo - was presented at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 2018, in Brussels in 2019 and in Austria in 2021.