It’s been a while since we talked about the Silk Road, and I sort of miss my old obsession. So here’s a snippet from Frances Wood’s beautiful book, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia.

This was almost a decade before Lady Macartney turned the Kashgar Residency into what Peter Fleming affectionately called Kashgar-le-Bains, but that did not mean you could not enjoy a Christmas dinner, evidently… and what’s Christmas without the Christmas Pudding?