These days, the Silk Road is mostly remembered as a string of fabled places &emdash; Samarkand, Nishapur, Bukhara, Kashgar. For me, however, the Silk Road has always been fundamentally a story about people, and how their lives were enriched and transformed through meeting other people who were at first strangers. By starting a conversation and building shared trust, strangers could become allies, partners, and friends, learning from one another along the way and working creatively together.

If you accept that the Silk Road is still present in our world as an inspirational symbol of intercultural meetings, then there are many people alive today whose