Asian Art Museum Docent Speaker:  Peggy Mathers

Come discover the complexity of the exchanges and variety of cultures transformed as a result of goods, knowledge and techniques transmitted between East and West.

Travel the ancient routes that provided good, technologies, and ideas to countries and cultures from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.  Discover the transformations that resulted from the complex exchanges between East and West.

Before jet planes and smartphones, militia, merchants, monks and pilgrims spent months even years traveling over perilous land routes to carry luxury goods and new ideas thousands of miles across lost civilizations.

Luxury commodities such as silk, porcelain, paper, tea, jade, amber, spices, ivory, gunpowder, gold and silver were carried across the overland trade routes known as the Silk Road.

Religions and ideas, technologies and innovations spread along the trade routes in all directions.

History greats such as Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Zhang Qian, and Genghis Khan, all left their traces on the greatest roads mankind ever known.