ETERNAL LIFE, MAN-EATING ANTS, STRINGY NOODLES - HOLD THE TOMATOES

Somehow western culture has equated the word Mongol with ‘barbarian’.

There is no doubt the Golden Horde that invaded Europe during the thirteenth century was savage, but that overlooks the comparable excesses of western armies at the time; think the Albigensian Crusade and the sacking of Constantinople.

In fact in the Orient they referred to Christians as ‘barbarians’.

It’s a word that all cultures apply to anyone who thinks differently to them.

When my Dominican monk, William, and his Templar bodyguard, Josseran Sarrazini, set out from the Kingdom of Jerusalem on their great journey eastwards they, too, thought they were going to a land of savages.

“Some say that in the land of Cathay there are creatures with heads like dogs who bark and speak at the same time. Others say there are ants as big as cattle. They burrow in the earth for gold and tear anyone who comes across them to pieces with their pincers.’

William could not have been further from the truth. The civilizations of the East were remarkably well developed. It could be said that it was the West that was still living its Dark Age .

My medieval travelers were astonished at what they found in Cathay; most especially - books.

William carried with him a Bible, a rare and precious object in the Christian world.

But in Khubilai Khan’s China everyone owned at least one almanac and perhaps an edition of the Tao.

Moreover these books were not copied by hand, as they were in Christendom, but manufactured in large numbers using wood-cut plates which reproduced their calligraphy on paper. This was two hundred years before the Guttenberg printing press.

The Chinese were actually the first with many useful - and perhaps not so beneficent - inventions. They were the first to make gunpowder - ironically while looking for an elixir for eternal life.

And we’d all be lost without the compass.

The original Chinese version used South not North as the cardinal direction. The prototypes were made of lodestone, iron ore that becomes magnetized when struck by lightning.

Ancient Chinese soothsayers were the first to use them. Which is perhaps why they all pointed sooth.

And no Italy did not invent spaghetti. The Chinese had noodles two thousand years before anyone else. In 2006, archaeologists excavating a 4,000 year-old settlement at Lajia in the Qinghai Province near the Tibetan border uncovered an overturned bowl of stringy noodles buried beneath ten feet of earth.

My local take-away uses the same ones, I suspect.

The Chinese also invented the wheelbarrow - but as a military weapon.

A general named Jugo Liang, who lived during the Han Dynasty, used it in the second century for barricades as well as transportation.

Although it put China ahead in the arms race he didn’t think of handles - they were added later.

Closely guarded as a military secret the wheelbarrow did not appear in the West for another thousand years.

But perhaps the one invention that was most precious - and created the first steps towards the Global Village - was silk.

Demand for the fabric was so voracious it helped link China to the outside world by giving rise to the fabled Silk Road that eventually stretched from China to the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

A scroll describing methods of silk production was found in a tomb from the Liangzhu period, two to three thousand years before Christ.

The Chinese closely guarded their secrets; but it was a monk just like William who was first to steal some silkworm eggs and smuggle them back to Europe thus breaking China’s strangehold on the trade.

But in 1260 when my two ill-matched malcontents set out on their epic journey, China was still as mysterious to them as outer space is to us. They were still expecting to encounter man-eating ants.

What they found was much better than they expected - just before it got much, much worse …

SILK ROAD is now available in the US for the first time. (And there’s no tomatoes!)

It’s been getting fantastic reviews. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, and you live in the US and haven’t been able to get a copy until now, FIND IT HERE ON AMAZON

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