See Daniel Waugh, “Richthofen’s ‘Silk Roads’: Towards the archaeology of a concept,” The Silk Road 5 (Summer 2007): 1–8; and Tamara Chin, “The Invention of the Silk Road, 1877,” Critical Inquiry 40 (Autumn 2013): 194–219.
See Tim Winter, Geocultural Power: China’s quest to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
See for example, Lawrence Thaw and Margaret Thaw, “Along the Old Silk Routes,” National Geographic 78, 1940.
“The Great Game,” Wikipedia Foundation, last modified Janurary 18, 2020, ➝.
See Ulf Hannerz, “Geocultural Scenarios,” in Frontiers of Sociology, ed., Peter Hedstrom and Bjorn Wittrock (Leiden: BRILL, 2009), 267–288.
In 1904, Halford Mackinder famously spoke of The Geographical Pivot of History, wherein he cited Russia’s territorial control across Asia as evidence of an historic shift away from the sea towards land-based forms of power. His theory of the “pivot” mapped out a vast area reaching down from the Arctic incorporating the Iranian plateau, Tibet, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Russian territory, beyond which lay two “crescents.” Mackinder subsequently revised his thesis, renaming the pivot as the “Heartland,” refining the argument into an aphorism that would captivate analysts and politicians for decades to come: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” See Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (1904): 421–37.
See for example, Ramakrushna Pradhan, “The Rise of China in Central Asia: The New Silk Road Diplomacy,” Fudan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 11 (2018): 9–29.
Marlene Laruelle, “The US Silk Road: Geopolitical imaginary or the repackaging of strategic interests?,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 56, no. 4 (2015): 360–75.
See Winter, Geocultural Power.
See Tim Winter, “Heritage and Nationalism: An Unbreachable Couple?,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research, ed., Steve Watson and Emma Waterton (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 331–45.
See for example, “Japan Funds-in-Trust Silk Road Project,” Events, UNESCO, ➝; “Digitising Endangered Archaeological Heritage in Central Asia,” UCL School of Archaeology, February 18, 2019, ➝; Wang Kaihao, “Archaeologists Dig Deep on Overseas Project,” China Daily, January 9, 2019, ➝; “UNESCO Partners with the European Union to Invest in Creativity for Development,” UNESCO, September 3, 2018, ➝; and “Saving Cultural Heritage in Uzbekistan,” Delegation of the European Union to Uzbekistan, December 11, 2018 ➝.
See Tracey Lie Dan Lu, Museums in China: Materialized power and objectified Identities (London: Routledge, 2014); Marzia Varutti, Museums in China: The politics of representation after Mao (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014); and Robert Shepherd, “UNESCO and the Politics of Cultural Heritage in Tibet,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 25, no. 2 (2006): 243–57.