Dr Susan Whitfield is a writer, scholar, lecturer and traveller of the Silk Roads. She has been curating collections of manuscripts from Silk Road sites at the British Library for twenty-five years and helped to found and develop the International Dunhuang Project working on the art and artefacts of the route. At the start of the Silk Road, the complex technologies required for the production of cultivated silk were only known in China. This lecture tells the stories of the diffusion of silk along the route across Afro- Eurasia, discussing examples of silks surviving from this period and how we can identify their origins from their weaves and designs.