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The importance of the Silk Road in history is almost impossible to exaggerate, in terms of the movement of peoples, the movement of goods, the transport of inventions in particular, and ideas – and of course in the movement of religions. Whether it’s Buddhism north from India and eastward into China or the advance of Islam deep into Asia – all this is a Silk Road phenomenon.

The term ‘Silk Road’ was coined by a German geographer called Ferdinand von Richthofen as late as 1887. It was never called the Silk Road before then; but that, of course, then fed into it all the romance of silk itself, its beauty, its luxury.

Mysteries often generate stories to explain them, and since silk was by far the most important product travelling along this route the mystery of making it inevitably inspired its own myth. Luxurious, beautiful and enduring, silk is almost synonymous with the land that first produced it more than 4,000 years ago and monopolized it for so long – ancient China. Long before the Roman Empire appeared, silk was already cultivated in China and exported on an industrial scale. The method of its production was a highly protected secret; but secrets as profitable as this one never last, and Khotan was one of the beneficiaries.

Coming back to our painted plank, we can see a fourth figure in the story, a man with four arms holding a silk weaver’s comb and a shuttle. He is the god of silk, who presides over the whole scene, giving spiritual sanction and making sure we see the princess not as an industrial thief but as a brave benefactress. And so the fairy tale takes on the status of myth: the Silk Princess may not be quite on a par with Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, but she is firmly in the tradition of great mythological gift-givers, bringing knowledge and skill to a particular people.

The written versions of our painted story tell us what happened next: the princess gave thanks to the gods and ensured that Khotan would keep the secrets of silk for ever:

Then she founded this monastery on the spot where the first silkworms were bred; and there are about here many old mulberry tree trunks, which they say are the remains of the trees first planted. From old time till now this kingdom has possessed silkworms, which nobody is allowed to kill.

Silk production is still a major industry in Khotan, employing more than a thousand workers and producing around 150 million metres of silk a year as cloth, clothes and carpets.

(left to right) The Silk Princess, the god of silk, and a worker weaving silk threads

Of course, we’ve no idea how silk actually came to Khotan, but we do know that ideas, stories, gods and silk all moved along the Silk Road in both directions. The cellist and composer Yo-Yo Ma has long been involved in Silk Road studies:

I am particularly interested in how music may have travelled. We have recordings only from about a hundred years ago, so you have to look at the oral traditions, and other kinds of iconography such as what’s in museums, stories, and get a picture of how things were traded back and forth, in the realm of both ideas and material objects. The more you look at anything, at the origins of where things come from, you find elements of the world within the local. That’s a big thing to think about, but it actually is reduced to common objects – stories, fables, materials – and silk is one of those stories.

I’m using the painted panel here just as it was intended to be used – as a vehicle for storytelling. Who used it originally we don’t know, but we do know that Aurel Stein was surprised and moved by the shrine in which he found it:

These painted tablets, like all the others subsequently discovered … were undoubtedly still in the same position in which they had originally been deposited as votive offerings by pious worshippers. The last days of worship at this small shrine were vividly recalled by far humbler yet equally touching relics. On the floor near the principal