Silk Road Secrets

AD 848, Dunhuang. In the smoke of the liberation of Shazhou, young secretary Jiang Xian carved his name on the back of a torn volume of the Diamond Sutra. He would never have thought that this scroll would be gently held up by a pair of female hands two hundred years later. In the tenth century, the Silk Road was like walking a tightrope. Kang Shouli, a Sogdian merchant, passed secret messages between the Uighurs, Khotan and the Guiyi army. Each transaction might save a Buddhist cave; the eminent monk Zhu Fahu from Khotan spent his life trying to translate a "consensus classic" that could be understood by all tribes - he failed. At the beginning of the eleventh century, on the eve of the collapse of the Guiyi Army. Cao Miaoyin, the daughter of Jiedushi, and the elderly foreign scholar Jing Heng, led the last group of monks and scribes to seal hundreds of years of scriptures, documents, contracts, and Buddhist paintings - the entire weight of a civilization - into the secret chamber of the Mogao Grottoes. They stamped the final official seal on the sealing mud. Thousands of years later, someone opened this door. The novel weaves an epic about "preservation" through three layers of time and space. When political power gathers and disperses like sand, when the language is no longer understood, a group of people choose another kind of resistance: using the life span of paper to fight against the forgetfulness of time.