The Silk Road is known as an iconic trade route between the East and West, which typically evokes clichéd images of camels crossing desert dunes and merchants trading at bazaars. But the British Museum aims to offer a more nuanced view of this vast overlapping network of communities.

Presenting objects from many regions and cultures alongside those in the British Museum collection, the exhibition will show how the silk roads extended much further than is commonly understood, reaching across Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Britain, and from Scandinavia to Madagascar.