In my presentation, I would like to discuss the impact and the legacy of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles (1997). In the 1990s, there were several publications that accompanied exhibitions. Whitfield, Roderick Whitfield’s Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Chinese Art from the Silk Route (British Museum Publications, 1990) also included a number of banners and textiles. In the context of history of collecting, I will summarize important exhibitions of Central Asian Textiles held in Europe and North America since 1997
and discuss their limits on a wider dissemination of the scholarship of textiles. A few databases for the study of textiles or collective studies of textiles will be introduced as case studies for the future direction for the Silk Road Textiles to stimulate more interdisciplinary research projects.
In the past 20 years, we have books such as Silk: Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity (2016) by Berit Hildenbrant based on a symposium held at Harvard in 2012 or Chinese Silk: A Cultural History (2004) by Shelagh Vainker. For more contemporary projects, we have Central Asian Ikats from the Rau Collection in London or Silk Roads, Other Roads, a symposium organized by the Textile Society of America in 2002. What is lacking in these endeavors is the balance between the tangible and intangible heritage traditions. While ancient specimen in museum collections are valuable or studied, the practitioners of the heritage textiles are often oversighted if not neglected. This presentation will raise issues to assess the efficacy of the tangible and intangible cultural heritage policies in countries such as Korea or Japan and to introduce emerging strategies in other countries.

In conclusion, I argue that interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary approaches to the Silk Road Textiles are most beneficial to those outside the circle of textile history in order to increase visibility and recognition of cultural heritages involving textile productions in Central and East Asia.