One of Central Asia’s most engaging new cultural projects took on a new dimension last month. The Silk Road Virtual Museum, an online collection of over 20 exhibitions of pre-16th-century Eurasian life and art, has recently opened a section for the ancient trade route’s maritime history.

An initiative by the Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the site allows visitors to move through themed rooms, just as they would wander through a physical museum. Beginning on a map of the world on the museum’s homepage, visitors click on the Silk Road locations that they wish to discover. Each pin on the map takes them to a video replicating a guided tour of art and artefacts from that place at a certain historical era. Just as in a real museum, each exhibit has an information panel explaining what the object is.

Life on the Central Asian parts of the Silk Road is shown in exhibitions to Sogdian traders in Samarkand (6th-8th centuries), with camels often featuring in their ceramic art, and a room dedicated to ancient caravanserais (inns that provided lodging for travellers), including at Tash Rabat in Kyrgyzstan.

Launched in 2024, the Silk Road Virtual Museum already displays over 1,300 objects in total. Their geographical reach mainly stretches from Venice to China, as the Silk Road is often imagined today – but there are collections from places as unexpected as Sweden and Indonesia. 

With the launch of the maritime section on 16 September, their scope now spans seas as well as deserts. Virtual visitors can travel along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, where there are already seven shipwreck exhibitions, each with its own unique story.

The project is managed by VirtualMuseum360 and supported by an international network of scholars, who aim to make the Silk Road’s many eras and strands accessible to people wherever they are in the world. The web pages have two advantages over traditional museums, in that they are free to access and open 24/7. 

Leading the Silk Road Virtual Museum (SRVM) is Professor Richard Griffiths, the director of Leiden University’s ‘New Silk Roads’ programme. A distinguished economic historian who has specialised in the history of trade, during a spell teaching in the Chinese city of Chengdu, Griffiths took an interest in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. When he began to trace the policy’s history, he realised that the origins of China’s modern trade with the West can be found in the myths and realities of the ancient Silk Roads.

The key to making SRVM work, he says, is collaboration. Griffiths tells The Times of Central Asia: “We’re not replacing real museums – we’re working alongside them. Everything we do depends on the knowledge of academics, archaeologists, and conservators. Together we can make heritage accessible to anyone, anywhere, without losing its depth or integrity.”

“Our visitors are a real mix,” he adds. “Often people tell me they use SRVM before a trip, so that when they see objects in a real museum, they recognise them and understand them better. Students come to prepare for classes, museum professionals dip in to see how we present things, and there are plenty of curious travellers who just want to explore.”

Griffiths names the museum’s tomb murals as his personal favourite exhibits. “They show life in all its variety, from grand court scenes to the everyday,” he explains. “You see children playing in a kitchen, a woman anxiously waiting behind a door for her husband, even a funeral where the deceased surrounded himself with every auspicious symbol he could think of. They bring the past to life in the most human way.”

One of the scholars involved in building the Silk Road Virtual Museum is historian Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Frankopan gave a talk at the opening ceremony for the museum’s maritime section, which, fittingly, was held online.

He later told The Times of Central Asia: “This is a terrific opportunity to engage global audiences in the histories of Central Asia and the Silk Roads. One of the things I find so fantastic is that the exhibition is interactive. Another is that it will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists, thanks to the high level of scholarship that underpins not only each individual object but also the collection as a whole. What Richard has done is fantastic.”

The new maritime section will not be the last addition to the Silk Road Virtual Museum, with new online exhibitions already in the works, from India as well as Central Asia. As Griffiths says, “the journey is only just beginning.”