I’m delighted to be guest editing the December issue of the Sainsbury Institute Bulletin, at the end of a busy and successful year for the Institute’s Nara to Norwich project and at the start of a collaboration with the Royal Asiatic Society and the Courtauld Institute of Art for a year-long series of lectures on Japan, announced in our October eBulletin. Read more about the lecture series here.
Originally launched in 2017, our Nara to Norwich project marked the start of my formal involvement with the Institute, working with Professor Simon Kaner and Dr Andy Hutcheson on plans for an exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre. As a historian of the Silk Roads, I was employed as consultant to provide the link between Nara and Norwich. Over the following two years, we gathered together an international group of scholars to work with us on the exhibition preparations. COVID, however, forced us to rethink how we showcased this research and we decided instead to hold a series of workshops with colleagues worldwide to inform an online exhibition. You can view a timeline of events here. The first section of the exhibition went live in June 2022 on NaratoNorwich.org and I would like to thank all these colleagues for their input as well as Naomi Hughes-White for her original design and development.
In June 2020 I joined the Sainsbury Institute more formally as Professor of Silk Road Studies, enabling me to work more closely with the department. Our project, partners and plans expanded. A poster exhibition in May 2024 at The Forum in Norwich was combined with visit of monks from Hase Temple (Hasedera) in Nara, Japan, and the display of a digital copy of the watercolour of the bodhisattva Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) held at Hasedera, created during the Edo period (1603–1867). Many thanks to the Forum staff, to Colin Edwards the designer, and to Hasedera for their loan and their enthusiastic involvement. In autumn 2024 I was also pleased to be able to contribute to the events accompanying the Silk Road exhibition at the British Museum and British Library, with a paper in the British Museum conference volume due next year.
Since then, we have completed the Nara to Norwich virtual exhibition site—and many thanks to Olivia Butler and Jonny Kaner for their help with this. Information on 142 exhibits from collections worldwide are now available, grouped by themes and stories. One major theme is Sacred Landscapes: investigating how landscapes changed and were changed by the new religions of Buddhism and Christianity as they became established in Japan and Britain respectively. In the Anthropocene, one of the enduring and universal interactions between humans and the landscape has been through pilgrimage: moving between and through spaces that humans have seen as sacred. Originally many of these places were natural features, such as mountains, springs and trees, but humans soon left their mark in the form of offerings, shrines and other buildings. Paths to these sacred places became well-trodden and infrastructure was developed to cater for the pilgrims’ needs, often having a significant effect on local resources. As part of a new research project, Pilgrimage and the Anthropocene, we will be mapping the routes and exploring their changing landscapes over time.
Pilgrimage also changed human individuals and was often more than a spiritual journey. For many, especially medieval women, it might have been one of the few opportunities to travel outside their village and engage in a wider social sphere. Others sought healing, such as the man from Switzerland found buried at Stonehenge and discussed in a recent blog post by my colleague, Andy Hutcheson. Many came back with relics which might be gifted or sold.
A key part of this research will explore well-being in the landscape, building on the work done by Andy Hutcheson and his colleagues. We are focussing on two pilgrimages—Norwich to Little Walsingham in Britain, and Hase Temple to Ise Shrine in Japan—with plans to walk these with colleagues and others to record the landscape, soundscape and human experiences. Earlier this year four of us walked the former to recce the route, and in October, Olivia Butler and myself made a test walk of the latter. You can see pictures of our walks on the Nara to Norwich Flickr account. And I am now happy to announce that we are inviting anyone who wishes to join us for all or part of the Norwich to Walsingham pilgrimage from June 9–12, 2026. Further information can be found here. The Japan pilgrimage is scheduled for November 2027.
Another collaboration and strand of exhibition research which we are now expanding, is our work on maritime routes—by river and seas—from Japan and Korea to south and southeast Asia, and from northwest Europe to central and South Asia. We will continue and expand our existing research collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age (WIVA) project at Uppsala University. One of our first activities as part of this research with be to visit ports of southern India in January 2026: look out for my blog posts on this.
Apart from this, I have been exploring and developing several other strand of my Silk Road researches over the past year, working with colleagues worldwide. These include talks and articles on architectural features which travelled between cultures; on the importance of the horse in Silk Road life; changing fashions across the Silk Roads; and the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin in eastern central Asia. Details of all these can be found on my website Silk Road Digressions.
Professor in Silk Road Studies