Thanks for dropping by! I started this online studio to upload my creative media about the Silk Road (and Buddhism). I also link to some of my columns, editorials, articles, and reviews. A Thousand Hands has no affiliation to the organisations employing me.
As a writer I've always walked a middle ground between academia and journalism. At its best, academia is critical, scholarly, rigorous, and unafraid to accept that popular opinion is often simplified or just plain wrong. At its best, journalism is cutting-edge, constantly and consistently relevant to people, and able to speak the common tongue with a common touch. I love the academy and I love studying history there. It's how I came to encounter the Silk Road and how I came to realize how much popular literature and media is missing out. But as someone who has enjoyed a lot of time at university, I also noticed that some of the most intelligent books about the Silk Road (and indeed Buddhism) get very little publicity or circulation outside of our little scholarly circles and bubbles.
What I hope present and future Silk Road aficionados can do is to write, express, and create with the intellectual dignity of academia and the technological and literary creativity of journalism. That's what this online studio tries to do. It doesn't shun research and scholarly integrity, but it also strives to make undeservedly obscure topics accessible, emotionally involving, and immersive. It crafts what we in the academy have sometimes been poor at - stories and worlds for a general audience to enjoy - but retains what scholars hold up as their ideal: intellectual depth, a refusal to talk down to others. And no one who picks up a book, article, essay, review, or any form of creative media likes to be talked down to if they're aware of it.
The ironic thing about my obsession with the Silk Road is that plenty of academics have written and taught about it better than I can ever do, and it's also fairly well known as a vague, general topic among many of my peers. So why am I bothering with this? Well, take any period of "popular" history - the history novels you see in the bookstores in the airports or on high streets. Many of them will be about the Crusades, or Greek or Roman history, or perhaps about Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. Thanks to the writers of those books, people in those historical periods now have fleshed out characters audiences know and love. They enjoy personalities and emotional investment, be they non-fictional or fictional, well-written or atrociously written. Why can't we do the same with people along the Silk Road? About the Sogdian dancer or the Tibetan Emperor, about the Turkic tribespeople or the Junghar kingdom?
How much stuff has already been popularized about Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, the World Wars, modern Chinese history, or the Sengoku period in Japan? Is it not time to give the Silk Road - 2000 years of wonders - the same chance?
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