纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 050传丝公主画版（5）（在线收听）

Coming back to our painted plank, we can see that there is a fourth figure in the story - it's a man with four arms holding a silk weaver's comb and a shuttle. He is the god of silk, who presides over the whole scene, and gives spiritual sanction, ensuring that we see the princess not as an industrial thief but as a brave benefactress. And so the fairy-tale takes on the status of myth. The silk princess may not be quite on a par with Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, but she is firmly in the tradition of great mythological gift-givers, bringing knowledge and skill to a particular people.

The written versions of our painted story tell us what happened next. The princess gave thanks to the gods, and ensured that Khotan would keep the secrets of silk forever:

"Then she founded this monastery, on the spot where the first silkworms were bred; and there are about here many old mulberry tree trunks, that they say are the remains of the trees first planted. From old time till now, this kingdom has possessed silkworms, which nobody is allowed to kill."

And silk production is still a major industry in Khotan, employing more than a thousand workers and producing around 150 million metres of silk a year as cloth, clothes and carpets. Of course, we've actually got no idea how silk in fact came to Khotan, but we do know that ideas, stories, gods and silk all moved along the Silk Road in both directions. The cellist and composer Yo-Yo Ma has long been involved in Silk Road studies, looking at how, through the centuries, ideas of all sorts, and particularly music, have moved between the Pacific and the Mediterranean: