Like the fibers inside silk itself, the networks of human encounters built by the Silk Road for twenty-two hundred years are lavish, intricate and full of exotic secrets. Children of Kings have been sold for small plots of land that controlled a route as vital as an artery to dictate the fashion styles of an unseen metropolis four thousand miles away, while wayward traders were robbed and murdered after wrong turns without anyone knowing when or where. Countless times a man of no name bets everything on a new route, load up, heads out, and months later is taken in by awestruck strangers for a night who are baffled by his language, unbalanced by his features, and mesmerized by his silk. A gift for your hospitality. Run your finger over it. Study it. Wear it. Incorporate it into your culture. “Silk Road” is the mirage of a young Chinese woman in a mirror that belongs to old family pieces of furniture. Like fifty generations before her, she loses herself to the texture of silk on her face, its comfort, its luxury, mirroring the observer who approaches to admire her own self in the same plane of glass. [Pete Bradt]