Anna Ansari is an Iranian-American cook and writer focusing on the intersection of food, family, and history The following is an edited excerpt from Silk Roads – A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing (DK, 2025). It all started with a melon. The melon in question was an attempted souvenir from a three-week,…
Sean Paterson is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society living in Guangzhou A small town in Gansu is having something of a moment. Dunhuang, famous for its treasure-troves of Buddhist art and hoard of ancient manuscripts, and for the underhanded way that foreign adventurers pilfered huge quantities of both, is back in the limelight….
Christopher Wilton-Steer is a travel photographer, writer and the Global Lead for Communications at the Aga Khan Foundation There were perhaps 300 people waiting to cross at the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border. I estimated a six hour wait time. But, as elsewhere in Central Asia, as soon as I – a tourist – was spotted I was…
Christopher Wilton-Steer
19 September 2025
14.00 BST Online
David Chaffetz, 22 January 2025 19.00 GMT In Person Only
at the Army & Navy Club In collaboration with The Iran Society
Members Only
DR BIJAN OMRANI, EDITOR OFÂ ASIAN AFFAIRS, THE RSAA JOURNAL, REPORTS ON THE LATEST ONLINE EXPERT DISCUSSION On 6 January, the RSAA was addressed by Eyck Freymann, a US scholar currently at Balliol College Oxford, on the Chinese presentation and ideology behind its One Belt One Road (or Belt and Road) initiative. Freymann is the author…
A webinar with Eyck Freymann As Xi Jinping’s assertion of Chinese power grows, so Chinese narratives of their place in the world are changing. Eyck Freymann shows how history, and the history of the Silk Road in particular, are being put to the service of Xi’s vision. Eyck Freymann is currently at Balliol College, Oxford,…
Every now and then there is an RSAA lecture that stands out head and shoulders above the rest. In the case of Flora of the Silk Road, turning up at St Peter’s Church Hall on a particularly damp and windy night, Chris Gardner’s illustrated talk was an unexpected gem. A professional botanist with at least…
