AW: Colin, perhaps I should start by saying that this is a truly monumental work; and I’d just like to know how the seeds of this journey were sown. You’d just come off another huge, epic journey, which was described when your book on Siberia came out as the culmination of a life’s work. I’m interested to know what drove you to seek an even bigger challenge.

THUBRON: The genesis of my books always seems to be not very intellectual. It’s not very thought through – it’s a kind of gut reaction. It’s almost as if I’m looking, when I’m wondering where to write about, for the power to write, like a water diviner – ‘Is it here? Is it here?’ And often the hazel twig starts vibrating on some very unpromising material, and I think, ‘Oh no, not there – please not there!’ But in this case it was a gut desire to return to the countries that had obsessed me for 40 years – the heart of Asia. The book included an old fascination with Islam, with the Middle East, with the fragments of the Soviet Union and with China; I wondered what linked all those countries, all those regions – and the Silk Road was the obvious thing.

AW: Of course ,the Silk Road isn’t just a road. Ignorant lay people like me just assume that there’s one path going through China and through Asia and arriving at Antioch – but it’s actually a very tortuous route.

THUBRON: It’s best seen as an entire network of arteries and veins which diverge and converge across the length of Asia for a quarter of the length of the equator. My journey started in Xi’an, which was the first capital of a unified China over 2,000 years ago, where the terracotta warriors are; it was also the capital of the great T’ang dynasty in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the greatest city in the world of its time – a city of over two million enclosed by 22 miles of walls. Then I went up to the Taklamakan Desert, which is probably the deadest desert on earth – nothing grows there at all, unlike the Sahara; and finally in China to Kashgar. But while you’re a good thousand miles within China here, the people change and you’re among Uighur Muslim people – and this happened all the way through my journey: all the boundaries that appear to be politically right are not. Different ethnicities overlap, and different cultures, so the actual map can be terribly deceptive.
 
Next was Kyrgyzstan, which dropped off the bottom of the Soviet Union when it split up in 1991, and for a long time was a little democratic republic in the heart of Asia; and then Uzbekistan, Samarkand, Bukhara. From there I wanted to go south into Northern Afghanistan, but I was prevented by fighting between warlords. This was 2003, and I went back rather pedantically at the same season the following year – so the journey, although it was eight months, was split up into two four-month periods. I eventually got down to Mzar-e-Sharif and across to Herat – a rather foolhardy journey I have to say – and across to Meshed, the great shrine city of Iran; and across Korasan, a very desolate part of Iran which scarcely seems to have recovered from the Mongol depredations of the thirteenth century, to Tehran; and finally to Lake Orumiyeh and over the Turkish-Iranian border, which is in fact Kurdish on either side – it’s not a real national border at all – to Antioch on the corner of the Mediterranean. Antioch’s the modern town of Antakya, and after the end of this mighty route you come to a little silted harbour and a ruined acropolis – absolutely nobody there – called Seleucia Pieria, from where St Paul went on his first missionary journey and the silk eventually departed westward over the Mediterranean.

AW: It’s an intricate and fascinating journey, but in fact you’d been to a lot of these countries before. You saw a lot of change, didn’t you? You mentioned Herat and Mazar, and you said in this book that you saw nothing in Herat that you remembered before. Was that disconcerting?

THUBRON: Yes, it was, because of course you don’t know whether to trust your memory or whether things have in fact radically changed. I think it was a mixture of both in this case. It’s a very strange feeling: you lose confidence in what you once saw. That place that you remembered from twenty years ago has existed as a place that was real in your mind all that time, and going back you’re seeing a completely different one.

AW: What feelings do modern Herat and modern Afghanistan evoke in you?

THUBRON: I think the first thing was how extraordinary it is that these people retain their pride and their vigour. Many travellers have remarked that once you’re into Afghanistan, something changes: this is a people that has never been colonised. And I felt that in spite of four million of them displaced and a million dead, these are people that you pity at your peril.

AW: I’ve just been reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, and he actually decided to walk from Herat to Mazar, which is not something you can do any more.

THUBRON: No. I think in the end he didn’t either. In a place called Maimana, when I was going through north Afghanistan, a man who had a Land-Rover refused to take me any further. He said, ‘There’s one area at least where we’ll just be killed.’ It was where the Médécins Sans Frontières people had been killed a few months before, and I had to take a strange little aeroplane instead – an old Antonov which was full of returning Afghan refugees. It looked like a planeload of terrorists.

AW: When you summarise your journey in the book, you quite modestly say that it would be occasionally dangerous. In fact there were many, many such moments. I felt myself in great physical danger just reading it – in particular, the bit about the Castle of Assassins.

THUBRON: The Assassins were supposedly the ancestors of the modern Islamic suicide bombers. In fact they were a heretical sect of the Shia who were exterminated eventually by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. I wanted to get into the castle where they had last held out, which had been burnt by the Mongols.

AW: There was rather a spectacular end to their resistance.

THUBRON: Yes, they were virtually eliminated – massacred. The castle was immured in a cliff, and the outer bulwarks had disappeared, and I was told the only way to get in was with climbing equipment. There was one man in the village who had some, but he had gone somewhere else, and the only other candidate said he wouldn’t take me. But I saw that about 60 feet up in the cliff there was this sort of opening, and I started climbing, thinking that I would obviously not get there – that I was going to stop at some stage.
 
I was about 30 feet up, and I looked down and I looked up, and it was sheer, and I was in a kind of cleft, and I thought, ‘I’m being an idiot – I’m an old man. I’m going to go down again.’ But then when I looked up I just saw the curve of this embrasure above me, and it was smeared with the Mongol fires that had burnt there 700 years before, and it was absolutely irresistible to go on climbing up – which I eventually did. I was shaking when I arrived: it was pretty stupid.

AW: There is this unforgettable passage in the book where you give us what you wrote lying in that little cave, and one can feel the exhilaration rising off the page. But you must have been scared. Fear is something which is mentioned a lot in this book: one of your reasons, for example, when you ask yourself why you’re doing this is the need to challenge fear, to face it.

THUBRON: Yes. There’s quite a lot of romanticisation, of course, of travel writers, but basically what we’re going for is copy. You’re going for experience rather than literal knowledge – physical and sensuous experience of a country – and I guess that you push yourself, at least I do, in a way that I would never do normally: you do that extra thing. You feel that if you haven’t pushed yourself, you’ve in a way betrayed the country: you’ve ignored some facet of it that you should have experienced. There’s this strange, endless sense that you haven’t done enough. And it’s almost as if two of you are going: for me there’s the one who’s doing the travelling, and there’s the one who’s going to write about it, sitting on his shoulder; and just as the one who’s travelling is having a frightful time being mugged and so on, the one who’s going to write about it is jumping up and down saying, ‘This is good copy – we can use this!’

AW: I’m very glad to say that I know which one won. Speaking of two people, there’s something which I found stylistically very exciting, slightly risky in the book – the conversations you have with a Sogdian trader. Perhaps you could say what he represented to you.

THUBRON: He’s an imaginary trader with whom I have a dialogue at certain times – usually stressful times. There are about five passages in the book, quite short.

AW: Normally you’re alone and one feels that you’re physically tired and at a low ebb, and this trader pops into the room.

THUBRON: It’s a curious thing. I didn’t plan it – it just happened – and I wrote these passages like poetry really, thinking all the time, ‘I’m not going to use these – these are too stupid, they’re pretentious, they’re going to mar the book.’ It was something I’d never tried before, and I didn’t have any model of someone else having tried it: after all, in the middle of a travel book to be suddenly having conversations with a silk trader from a thousand years before – I thought, ‘This is too silly.’ But I was also excited by it, and I guess it was in fact a dialogue with myself: two selves talking, one a little hard-headed and cynical, the other quite hopelessly obsessive about what he’s doing. It became a kind of musing, and I left them in, for better or worse.

AW: Personally, I loved them, and I grew rather fond of him. Every time he popped up I found I was quite cheered by his presence, because he represents completely the opposite of the modern you: he’s a man whose values are very, very different – and for me that represented your very obvious need to understand countries and cultures which are so different from the Western ones in which we live. To me this book feels even more profoundly open and honest than the ones you’ve written before; but I know the writing of this was more complicated. Why was that?

THUBRON: I think because it passed through so many cultures. Usually I’ve written about a discrete area, such as China or Siberia. But this one included north-west China, which is complicated in itself; Central Asia; Uzbekistan; Kyrgyzstan; Afghanistan, about which I knew very little; Iran, which I’d never written about before; even south-east Turkey. There were so many cultures to be understood at some level, or at least empathised with, and that took a lot more out of me – as well as the languages. I’ve learnt, very badly, Mandarin and Russian over 25 years, but for this journey I had to speak both.

AW: There’s a point in the novel which I found incredibly unnerving, where you pass from China into Central Asia. You begin to lose all the points of reference: you describe the Taklamakan desert as this hole in the heart of Asia where you lose all sense of identity. Do you think that’s something you’ve been drawn to as a traveller, looking back over all your works – places where the boundaries become slightly meaningless, where the distinction between race and nationality becomes not so important?

THUBRON: I like those in-between areas, yes: areas which aren’t stamped absolutely with a certain kind of nation or culture – and so many on the Silk Road are not. One’s aware that they’re the leftovers of a very fluid world. The Taklamakan Desert is ethnically so weird: here you are a thousand miles within China, but some of the people you’re meeting have blue eyes and reddish hair. And I like that: I like the feeling of placelessness, as if nationhood is not necessarily that important – or maybe false. Because one of the things I think this journey tells me is that nationalities are in many cases artificial constructs.

AW: When you travel, do you like to be identified as English? You once told me that when you went travelling in Russia you were quite often mistaken for Lithuanian because of your slightly accented Russian – is that something you liked?

THUBRON: I’d much rather not be identified as English. People were almost unfailingly polite to me, even though there was nobody short of the Kurds in the far western part of my journey who approved the American invasion of Iraq, but I didn’t want to be identified as Western: I prefer to be anonymous really. In these lands, though, it’s ridiculous to suppose that you can be – you stick out a mile. I thought that I didn’t look so different when I arrived in Iran, for instance: among an Indo-European people, I thought I would probably get away with entering a shrine which was forbidden to Westerners, because surely by now I looked like other people – I was sunburned, I looked pretty ragged. But I realised, looking in the mirror before I left to try this, that I just didn’t look like any Iranian that I’d ever seen.

AW: Tell me a little bit about Iran. Unlike Central Asia or Russia, it’s not somewhere you’d written about in depth. What did you make of it? It’s a land of huge contrasts: you write about the rather heretically named Zamzam Cola and pirate DVDs from Malaysia filtering through into the market.

THUBRON: What struck me was that there’s this enormous intelligentsia who are not secular exactly, but certainly anti-clerical. An enormous percentage of the Iranian population is under 25, and you get this burgeoning mass of educated urban young who are straining – pining – to be part of another world. But then you go to somewhere like Meshed, that shrine, and there are these vast numbers of profoundly religious Shia pilgrims – and it’s two worlds in absolute conflict. You can’t imagine that it can hold for very much longer, and if President Bush is not so stupid as to invade them, you feel that within a few years that society’s got to change – the pressure of the educated young is so vast and so ubiquitous.
 
The other thing I felt was that as they were very mild people in many ways, the Iranians – it’s a deep and old culture, full of politesse, very subtle, and they see themselves as much less harsh, as they put it, than the Arabs. They said, ‘We are your natural allies’; in a way they were saying that their Islam even is a different kind, a more malleable kind than the Sunni.

AW: I found that a lot of the book concerned cultures that were just poised on the brink of modernity, though some much more so than others. In the case of China, for example, you found the change very, very disconcerting, didn’t you?

THUBRON: Yes: it’s extraordinary. We’re all used to thinking of the Chinese economic miracle on the eastern seaboard, but one finds quite deep inland as well that it’s beginning to change things. What we don’t hear about is the casualties: I suppose that’s what I documented more, because I was in villages and in remote parts of north-west China, and this economic miracle has produced – because of the speed of it – millions of casualties, in the sense that people are left behind. Old people in particular, people who had a vested interest in Communism – they are more divided from their children than they ever were, and many are stranded in villages without the sort of expertise to get out. And I think it is these people who are the voiceless ones, who interested me particularly.

AW: These people, who are described several times in your book, reminded me of an unforgettable character you met twenty years ago in Lanzhou in western China who was a bricklayer. He represented for me one of the great characteristics of your writing, which is your incredible ability to locate and tap into lonely individuals and to want to form a bridge with them; because in that passage you felt this huge urge to reach out and touch him, to reassure him. He’d just lost his wife, and had a racking cough, and was probably dying. Is that something you’re aware of when you’re writing or travelling?

THUBRON: That I’m drawn to loneliness? I think these are often the people who interest me, and in many ways I think everybody is a little lonely, everyone is an exception: the more you know people in any culture, the more you discover they have a sense of not really being part of a body – of being isolated. And this I found time and again, even among the Chinese, who seem to us so homogeneous. One finds their private lives, their situations, their aspirations make each one exceptional. I’m drawn to that.

AW: Because you grapple quite a lot with the issue of Chinese inscrutability – or what we see in the West as Chinese inscrutability. People say the Chinese are incapable of loving, yet you found many, many instances of them doing so. There’s also the incredible capacity of mainland Chinese to erase or to forget the most terrible things that have happened – and, indeed, of the Russians too.

THUBRON: Yes. I think it must be cultural – that we in the West are conditioned to suppose that for the psychic health of a society we should remember. It’s very Freudian, the idea that if you suppress something that happened you will pay for it later. This idea – this national duty, if you like, of remembrance – is not there in China, and I found that many Russians repudiated it too. They felt that if we want to live, it is better to forget: we can’t regurgitate these memories. In the case of the Russians, they say, ‘It’s too damaging to our society: we will put it behind us.’ And although that’s not my instinct at all – it seems, because I’m a Westerner, tremendously unhealthy – I wanted to give it voice, because they said, ‘To live into the future must be to forget the past.’

AW: Tell me a little bit about your meeting with the living Buddha – the Tibetan who was tortured by the Chinese, and yet extraordinarily is just able to put it all behind him. Because it seems to me in that passage that you weren’t necessarily condoning that, but you had reached some level of understanding.

THUBRON: He was a man who had been tortured in the Revolution for being a Tibetan Buddhist, and talking to him there was something I had noticed previously in talking to a lot of Chinese who had suffered in the Cultural Revolution, that there wasn’t that anger against their persecutors. And in that way it reminded me of the victims of the Russian gulag, who almost treated what had happened to them like the weather – that’s just how life is. They would vaguely maybe point the finger at somebody, but not at the Communist Party, not at Stalin. And this living Buddha was like that – he accepted what had been done to him. He said that he understood those who had beaten him up, almost to death, even though many of them were neighbours and people he knew. I wanted him to be angry, I wanted him to be blaming, to be accusatory of somebody or something, but he wasn’t – he said again that he felt he understood it and it was better to lay it to rest and forget it. In the writing I seem almost to endorse it, you’re right; but that was a kind of effort to understand what he was saying and feeling.

AW: I’d like to ask you a couple of more general questions about your work. Picking up on what you said earlier about people being drawn back to certain countries, certain cultures, you once said in an interview with Bruce Chatwin that travel writers’ choices of destination often betray them. What do you think your choice of countries betrays?

THUBRON: It’s a hard one. They betray an interest in belief, I think. All the countries I’ve travelled to have been in some way prominent for what they believe or don’t believe, and that’s fascinated me more than material conditions or politics – it’s where people’s values lie: what, in other words, makes them what they are. I originally had a romantic fascination with the Middle East, because it was something I simply didn’t understand.

AW: I think you said in that interview that the first time you found yourself there, you had a sense of place and history that you imagined was so much more important than yours. Do you still feel like that?

THUBRON: Yes. I think that I didn’t have the confidence in my twenties to write about somewhere as remote as China. But the Middle East still had a hold, as it were, on Western history – whether it was the Crusades or the Graeco-Roman world – and I felt it was something I half understood. But still it was mysterious, and I suppose all my books have been efforts to understand for myself as well as for the reader. They’re not books that say, ‘It is like this’ – they’re more books in which I’m moving through a landscape, discovering (or not) what a culture is like. And that was from the beginning – I felt that I didn’t understand that Arab urban culture. Unlike many people at the time in the West, I didn’t fall in love with the Bedouin world, I fell in love with the mystery of Syrian cities – inland cities where you go down a mud alley and there’s a door left open and you look inside and there’s a marble and basalt paved courtyard and somebody’s doing something out of sight; and I just felt I’d got to try and understand this.
 But as for my choice of countries, I think latterly my choice has been partly what you say about fear. I’ve chosen the countries that we have been brought up to fear. Just as my parents’ generation was brought up to fear Germany, mine was brought up to fear the Soviet Union, and behind it the great yellow peril of China – and there’s an element in my work that has wanted to confront those, and as it were to domesticate them: to people the map with individuals instead of clichés. It’s a way of maybe allaying my own unease and trying to understand something that has been withheld by hostility, by politics.

AW: You had quite a peripatetic childhood. Do you think that that gave birth to the desire to travel?

THUBRON: Yes, I think it had an influence all right. My father was a military attaché in Canada and so on, and I spent a lot of my childhood between the age of eight and twelve crossing the Atlantic back and forth on those old Stratocruisers, because in those days no self-respecting Englishman of my father’s type would allow his son to be educated in Canada. And so I was exiled back to England, to school, and it gave me an initial excitement about the world, although most of the time I was just being airsick in Prestwick and Reykjavik and Gander and Goose Bay – I was sick in all of them. But for a postwar child who had never seen a neon light in his life, to be in New York was just extraordinary; and again, in Canada we had a little cottage on the Gatineau River, and this river was like an enormous lake to me. All that was terribly exciting to a young child...
 
I’d say that it’s rather a myth that there’s nowhere left to explore, or that’s really dangerous. I remember that in the Seventies I took an old car and went through Syria, Lebanon, eastern Turkey, Afghanistan and Iran, into Kashmir and north Pakistan – a journey you couldn’t do now. Yet at that period both the Soviet Union and China were virtually excluded from us – so as countries fall open, others close up.

People have been predicting the death of travel writing since Conrad or Lévi-Strauss and Evelyn Waugh, like they’ve been predicting the death of the novel – but travel writing’s a very flexible genre, and I think it will simply adapt itself to circumstance. After all, travel writing is really one culture looking at another: it’s not just that things are changing out there, it’s that things are changing in here among us; and for instance, the younger generation of travel writers have different priorities, different aesthetic sensibilities, and different interests than mine, so they are travelling for different reasons, and the world goes on needing to be interpreted – not just because, say, the Parthenon is decaying, or Tehran is getting overcrowded, but because the culture that is looking at it is changing too. Just as you have to retranslate the Iliad, so you have to retranslate the world again and again.