For the past few weeks, the Royal Geographical Society has been offering visitors a trip back in time to see the Silk Road through photographs from the 20th and 21st centuries. “The Silk Road” is the popular name for the land and sea routes connecting Europe, Africa and Asia beginning in the first millenium BCE. This exhibition focuses on photographs showing the Tarim Basin in China taken by the archeologist Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943).
Stein led four expeditions between 1900 and 1930, leaving behind him an archive of over 5,000 photographs, now mostly held by the British Library in London. Between 2008 and 2011, teams from the International Dunhuang Project (IDP), the British Library and the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology (XJIA) followed in Stein’s footsteps to revisit and document the sites he photographed a century before.
The exhibition’s single showroom features a series of panels divided into three rows, with one showing the major discoveries made during Stein’s expeditions and the two others juxtaposing photographs of the sites before and after, plus a video of the films shot simultaneously with the contemporary exhibitions
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
Aurel Stein and the Silk Road: a hundred years on
Until February 14, 2014
Royal Geographical Society
Exhibition Pavilion
1 Kensington Gore
London, SW7 2AR
UK
