纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 050传丝公主画版（6）（在线收听）

"I think, over the years, members of the Silken Ensemble have been all over - from Egypt to Israel, to India, to Kyrgyzstan, to China, to Korea, but there is so much to learn. What we are trying to do is constantly learn. Old traditions, we don't want them to get lost, but we need to put them in a contemporary form. Being a musician, I was particularly interested in how music may have travelled. We have recordings only from about a hundred years ago, and so to look at that you have to look at the oral traditions, and to look at other kinds of iconography, such as, you know, what's in museums, what people wrote about - stories - and to be able to get a picture of how things were traded back and forth, both in the idea realm as well as material objects.

"The Silk Road is a metaphor for looking at anything that has moved through time and geography. A lot of people talk about the purity of things. But actually the more I look at anything, and you look at the origins of where things come from, I think most of the things that actually - if you go deep enough - you find elements of the world within the local. I think that's a big thing to think about, but it actually is reduced to common objects - stories, fables, materials - and silk is also one of those stories."

It's a story that is still with us centuries on, and I think that I'm using the painted panel just as it was intended to be used, as a vehicle for story-telling, to give you my version of the tale of silk. Who used the panel originally we don't know, but we do know that Aurel Stein was surprised and moved by the shrine in which he found it: