magine walking among Uzbek weavers, Kazakh nomads, and Chinese storytellers; watching martial artists and hearing the unique sounds of singers and musicians from Mongolia and Beijing; discovering an ancient Xi'an Bell Tower; and wandering through a bazaar that overflows with Turkmen carpets, Japanese paper, Uyghur calligraphy, and Turkish ceramics.

Amazingly enough, this vision of the fabled Silk Road came to life on the National Mall in Washington, DC, in June and July 2002, when a 10-day folklife festival showcased the talents of artists and performers from more than 20 Asian and European countries. At a time when US cultural institutions had yet to recover from the events of September 11, 2001, the Smithsonian Institution's multimedia extravaganza broke attendance records, bringing more than 1.3 million people face to face with a world they knew little about. West met East, the privileged met the disenfranchised, the famous met the obscure, and because everyone ate, played, laughed, and philosophized together, minds opened and lives changed. Subtitled "Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust," the Silk Road folklife festival defined the term "cultural exchange" and explained why such exchanges are crucial to the world's continued well-being. The story of the Silk Road festival—a story almost as fascinating as the Silk Road itself—begins with one man, the world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Born in Paris to Chinese parents, Ma emigrated to New York City where, as a child prodigy, he began exploring his artistic roots. Touring as a performer, he noticed resemblances among instruments from distant countries and often wondered why a specific Chinese folk song sounded so much like a Hungarian one. Because of his own multicultural heritage, he was excited by the similarities between Eastern and Western music, tracing them back to the exchange of ideas along the Silk Road.

Ma launched the Silk Road Project in 1998 to study the musical connections among diverse people. He formed strategic alliances with Dartmouth College Professor Ted Levin and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The trust underwrites the preservation and promotion of Central Asian music by funding concerts, recordings, and research. When Levin, an expert in such music, introduced Ma to a number of Central Asian musicians, the Silk Road Ensemble was born. The ensemble travels around the world, playing classical and modern compositions—among them 20 new works by nine Silk Road composers—that blend Eastern and Western instruments.

On his journey along the Silk Road, Yo-Yo Ma found that he had much in common with its ancient travelers and that the more people he met, the more possibilities he saw. Vishakha Desai, director of the Asia Society in New York, recalled one of Ma's visits to the museum, where he is a frequent patron and performer. To complement "Monks and Merchants," its own Silk Road exhibit, the society produced—with funding from the Ford Motor Co.—an imaginative teacher's guide that was, in itself, a work of art. After seeing the guide, Ma told Desai that it would be wonderful to add a visual component to the ensemble's music. The ensemble was soon distributing the guides wherever it played. The Silk Road Project was growing. Before long, it was producing lectures and exhibitions, films and folk festivals. Ma's message, stated in the Silk Road festival's program guide, was clear: "By starting a conversation and building shared trust, strangers could become allies, partners, and friends, learning from one another along the way and working creatively together."

A similar philosophy infuses the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and its annual folklife festival. Perhaps it was inevitable that the two organizations join forces, but their initial meetings were inconclusive. Ma's group was proposing a recreation of the Silk Road in all its multicultural splendor—its sights, sounds, and people. "The conception was fantastic," says Richard Kennedy, the festival's co-curator. "But we didn't think it could be done." Smithsonian festivals normally focus on only two or three countries or regions within countries. The Silk Road stretched from Japan to Italy, traversing mountains, deserts, and plateaus as its trade routes wound through China, India, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Smithsonian organizers asked, Could we represent more than 20 countries? Where can we find practitioners of all the ancient arts? And once found, how do we get them to Washington? The numbers were daunting. "A logistical nightmare," according to Kennedy. But the idea was too intriguing to give up, and the brainstorming began.

Organizing
The first step was to locate the potters, weavers, cooks, porcelain- and paper-makers, gymnasts, musicians, and storytellers who would demonstrate their arts at the festival. The Smithsonian works with institutions around the globe for its projects. A network of 40-50 people—researchers, university professors, and museum staff—seeks out the best available talent. Then comes the weeding and sifting. What are the stories and who will tell them? Does one presenter have an advantage over another? The selection of martial arts groups for the Silk Road Project was a case in point. The multitude of disciplines in China made choosing a definitive group impossible so the Smithsonian opted for a group from the San Francisco Bay area whose work combines elements of several ancient arts and tells the story of those arts through movement. It was a plus that the group was American—what better way to show how one country absorbs and reinvents the traditions of another?

The Smithsonian talent search eventually yielded 350 to 400 people. "That was when we thought the project might just work," Kennedy remarked. But substantial problems remained. Most major international shows come about through high-level, government-to-government negotiations. Had the Smithsonian negotiated on that level with 20 countries, its Silk Road festival might never have gotten off the ground. Kennedy and co-curator Levin simplified matters by keeping a low profile. They relied on their good relationships with provincial governments, rather than central-government officials.

Working only with these provincial governments, Kennedy and Levin managed to secure passports and visas for almost all of the presenters. It was not an easy task. Post-September 11 security measures placed travelers from many Silk Road countries under intense scrutiny, particularly males between the ages of 18 and 45. All were interviewed, and many were asked to substantiate their identities by demonstrating their skills. Some were from obscure villages and lacked the documents needed even to begin the visa process. Others were from young nations carved out of the former Soviet Union whose rules and regulations had yet to be hammered out. Because of diplomatic complications, Iranian participants were forced to seek their visas in Turkey—and Tajiks in Kazakhstan. For months, phone calls, faxes, and e-mails flowed around the world as the Smithsonian's Office of International Relations struggled to get its invitees cleared and into Washington, DC, on time and in good shape. Two esteemed Chinese potters never made it. Chinese officials would not grant them permission to leave the country. The Smithsonian, however, was lucky. In the months since the festival, the United States has cracked down on visas for visitors from many countries, making another show of its size and scope a virtual impossibility.

Funding
The Silk Road Folklife Festival cost $3-4 million to plan, produce, and mount. With its government funding cut back after September 11, the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage—the festival's producers—worried about where the money would come from. Normally the center works with a region or country that provides financial backing as part of an anniversary or some other special occasion. The fundraising process generally follows a pattern: the state finds money, the Smithsonian finds money, then both go out to seek corporate and individual support. Smithsonian officials did not believe that any country would or could fund its Silk Road project. There were too many countries involved, and many of them were less-developed countries with poor economies. The organizers also doubted the project could secure corporate sponsors. Fortunately they were mistaken. Inspired by Yo-Yo Ma, the Aga Khan Trust put up roughly 40 percent of the money, the Smithsonian put up another 40 percent, and the final 20 percent came from a host of donors, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford, the Wolfensohn Family Foundation, Sony Classical, Siemens AG, and Henry Kravis.

If you build it...
On June 26, 2002, a weekday in the midst of one of Washington's famous summer heat waves, the Silk Road festival opened on the National Mall. More than 1,000 people, including cultural coordinators fluent in two dozen languages, had worked for two years to bring it there. Still, worries remained. Like New York City, Washington, DC, relies on tourists to fill its great museums and historic buildings. Since September 11, 2001 those tourists had been noticeably absent and, despite a multimedia publicity blitz, no one really knew if they would show up at the festival. As it turned out, they did not. But Washingtonians did—in record numbers. They jammed the tents to hear Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble riff with a Kazakh folk-rock group, to admire Mongolian wrestlers, Persian bodybuilders, Japanese dance theatre, puppeteers from Italy, Beijing Opera, and fashion shows staged by designers from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. On the 20-acre Mall, they mingled with Buddhist monks, Tuvan throat singers, dervishes from Turkey, and Silk Road cooks; and they ogled yurts and camels, and brilliantly painted trucks from Pakistan. In the Freer Gallery of Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of Natural History, they listened to storytellers, watched movies, and studied paintings and photographs. Crowds came for the dazzling sights and sounds and smells, but they also came to learn.

Commenting on the festival's success, press reports suggested that after September 11, many Americans sought to understand unfamiliar places and cultures. At the festival they were able to do just that.

The Silk Road festival ran in more than one direction, however. While Americans were soaking up diverse cultures, so were the festival's artists and performers. Many came from remote villages, had never seen the capital cities of their own countries, had never been away from home before, and had never met a foreign person. Several expressed shock that other people would be interested in what they did. Most felt that their visit enlarged their art and, in only 10 days, changed their outlook from local to global.

Indrani DeSilva, one of the event's cultural coordinators, recalls a transforming moment, "the kind of thing you hope will happen, but can never plan." Every night from 9:00 pm to 2:00 am, the Smithsonian held socials to break the ice among festival participants and organizers. At first, people were friendly, but restrained. But one night a young Mongolian rock group—throat singers, percussionists, zither players—took the stage set up in the meeting areas and began to jam. Suddenly classical Indian singers with hand instruments joined in. Soon 12 other instrumentalists were onstage improvising, learning how to meld their wildly disparate sounds into incredible music.