Here’s a great find that emphasizes the mixing bowl quality of the Silk Road and Asia.
An article on a Daqin Pagoda, a Nestorian Christian church near Louguantai temple, which is where legend says that Laozi composed the Dao De Jing.
That area is also heavily populated now with Daoist and Buddhist hermits and monasteries.
One challenge with multiple blogs with different areas of focus is deciding where to post things that could apply in some way to more than one blog.
Do you do a double posting, do you post to one or the other? I’m facing that question today and wanted to explicitly outline how I’m going to deal with that here.
As I mentioned in my first posting Once you go in, you never come out, I maintain a music blog, Andante where I approach my interest in music in much the same way as I approach my interest in Asia here: a personal, travel writer’s approach to my explorations.
Inevitably, me being me, there will be postings about music where Andante and this blog intersect. Today, I find myself wanting to post on a find I made in regards to Chinese music and am faced with the question of how to handle it.
I’ve decided I will do the actual post to the blog that whose audience I think is most broadly interested in the post. And then I’ll do a short referral post on the other blog (or blogs) highlighting the post, with information as to why I think the readers of that blog would want to hop over and read there.
With that in mind, let me draw your attention to two posts that I think readers of this blog would be interested in.
First, a post outlining my thoughts towards the role of music in society that compares and contrasts the classical Chinese point of view with our own.
Second, a very short posting today highlighting a blog post from the Chinese language learning site Chinese Pod about music in China.
If you’re interested in Chinese music and the role of music in Chinese culture, be sure to check these out.
Such is the popular, albeit likely wrong meaning of the name Taklamakan.
Since 2003, I have developed a burgeoning interest in Asia, particularly Central Asia and Siberia. This interest started when I picked up a copy of Peter Hopkirk’s book The Great Game.
I had studied Asian religions while a comparative religion major in college. But they were one interest among many. However, after reading that book, something clicked and a new interest, indeed passion was born.
It was another Hopkirk book that enflamed that passion: Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. This expanded my understanding of Asian, indeed Eurasian history, by helping me understand how cultures, histories, peoples, and religions of Asia don’t fit into nice, neat, self-contained boxes. They ebb and flow, influencing one another in amazing and fascinating ways. For example, Iranian speaking merchants helped bring an Indian religion into China and alter the course of history for many countries and the world.
I’ve always loved when stories are unusual, unknown, and even unexpected. And in reading about the Silk Road in that book, I found plenty of that all.
Hopkirk opens the book talking about lost cities in the heart of Central Asia that represent a lost Buddhist culture. Few have even heard of these cities or this culture. But they represented a flowering of Silk Road culture and synthesis well over a thousand years ago.
These cities are found in one of the harshest, driest places on the planet. A desert called the Taklamakan.
As I became ever more interested in the story of the Silk Road and of Asia, the Taklamakan became an axial point around which that interest revolved.
Now, nearly eight years on, I’ve built up a library of Central Asian, Siberian, and Asian history and religion. My music collection contains amazing pieces from groups like the Silk Road Ensemble and the complete collection of the Smithsonian Folkways Music of Central Asia collection. I’ve dug deep into Tibetan Buddhism, Theravadan Buddhism, Zen, Taoism and Hinduism (a revival of my comparative religion days). And I’ve recently started studying classical Chinese poetry and Japanese Haiku.
And now, as a further step in nurturing this interest, I’ve decided to launch this blog. Much like I’ve done with my blog that supports my passion for music, Andante, this blog is a sort of travel blog: a place where I write about and share my learnings, thoughts, and discoveries.
I am not an expert on any of this: I just happen to be very interested in the topics. It’s my hope that passion will make up where expertise drops off and that people reading this will learn some new things, discover new things and, most of all, understand why this part of the world is so fascinating and important as our world becomes ever more connected.
Even if it’s not really the meaning of Taklamakan: the fact is that once I went into this interest, I never came out. And so what better name for this blog than Taklamakan.
