The Golden Road: What William Dalrymple Made Me Notice

What do a Roman cargo record, a Chinese monk, and a Kushan coin have in common?

I found all three in William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Each leads somewhere different: to a ship’s cargo, a monk’s search for Buddhist books, or the mix of gods on a Kushan coin. I wanted to see how Dalrymple brings them into the same story.

I first met one of Dalrymple’s clues in person. In a display case at Vienna’s Austrian National Library sat the Muziris Papyrus, a small scrap covered in Greek handwriting. Its label said it recorded a loan and the cargo of a ship called the Hermapollon. I read it and moved on. The numbers didn’t make me picture the people behind them.

When I read Dalrymple, that label came back to me. The papyrus puts one cargo at nearly seven million sesterces after customs duty. I still don’t know what that means in today’s money, and a dollar conversion would make the comparison look clearer than it is. The number that caught me was smaller: sixty containers of Gangetic nard, a costly perfume made from Himalayan roots. One line took me from the papyrus to a hillside.

The cargo list has a gap: who gathered those roots and got them to the port?

The papyrus doesn’t say. That question pulled me beyond the cargo list. Dalrymple follows monks crossing Asia for books and rulers borrowing stories to defend their power.

One detail made me stop at the Kushans. Their coins could put royal titles beside gods from different traditions. I began to wonder who each coin was meant to reach, and what different people saw when they looked at one.

Then there’s Xuanzang. The Chinese monk left Chang’an in 629 to find Buddhist texts and teachers. He went west through Central Asia, then south over the mountains to India. He returned to China in 645 with hundreds of texts. I keep thinking about what that says about the hunger for books: one monk crossed a continent to find them.

Later, the book leaps to Wu Zetian using a Buddhist story to back her claim to rule, then to Indian mathematics reaching Arabic scholars. Those leaps made me curious, but they also reveal my main reservation: the book moves fast. Dalrymple often follows an Indian story or a mathematical idea into another place, then moves on before showing how people there changed it or what they sent back. I wanted more time with the people who received them.

By the last page, I wanted to know what happened after the nard reached the Red Sea, where Xuanzang’s books went, and whose hands the Kushan coins passed through. I’d recommend The Golden Road to anyone who likes history that leaves them with somewhere else to look.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, by William Dalrymple, was published by Bloomsbury in 2024. See the book at Bloomsbury.