The British Museum's epic new exhibition on the ancient Silk Roads is a hit according to (most) critics. Many reviews praise it, and some even think it worthy of the treasured five-stars.
Silk Roads — which runs at the British Museum until February 2025 — tells the story of a vibrant network of trade routes that stretched from East Asia through to the Roman Empire, and where goods, ideas and even religion flowed across vast lands.
The message behind it all is that Asia, Europe and north Africa shared their cultures more than 1,000 years ago, and these continents developed alongside each other, connected by these epic trade routes across the then-known world.
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If that sounds like an ambitious subject matter, it's because it is. As one national newspaper reviewer put it, "not many exhibitions turn the history of the world upside down. The British Museum’s mesmerising Silk Roads does."
But the show doesn't receive universal praise. Some reviews criticise how the museum has tried to grapple with such a big subject, and some found the sheer size of the show a challenge.
Silk Roads exhibition reviews
The Times, however, loved it, with a full five-star verdict from Laura Freeman. "The British Museum has pulled off an astonishing feat" headlines this review.
"There is such a caravan of beautiful, unusual, intricate objects here, turning up in the most surprising of places, that it’s a pleasure to be taken along for the...ride" Laura writes.
She praises the logistical feat of putting together an exhibition of this scale, and she highlights the "exemplary" wall texts that are "clear, illuminating, rich in material and historical detail."
She admits the "demanding, ambitious subject" of Silk Roads sometimes overwhelmed her, but ultimately she thinks it's "wonderful that in our attention-battered age, curators have such faith in the intelligence and sticking power of their (somewhat footsore) audience?" Although she would have liked more benches to sit down on, she notes.
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Jonathan Jones in the Guardian was also fully blown away, and was another reviewer to give it the full five-star treatment.
The exhibition offers visitors "a fairytale of magic and beauty" he says, and the vast collection of objects on show is "mesmerising."
Jones offers particular praise for the central part of the display. "The most arresting moments of Silk Roads come in the middle — of the show and of the Old World — where Eurasian peoples long forgotten, or dismissed as barbaric, emerge here as artistic show-stoppers."
For example, while "the Sogdians are not exactly history’s most renowned civilisation" their "treasures here, from their capital Samarkand, are dazzling."
But the show's exhibited objects weren't as well received by Time Out's Andrzej Lukowski. "There aren’t really a lot of show stopping items on display" he writes. "Millennia-old silk is basically hard and brown."
Lukowski also thinks there's a hint of "fudging" from the curators when it comes to the timelines. "With different civilisations represented by quite different centuries, [they're] a tiny bit too eager to counteract Dark Ages clichés."
But ultimately, Lukowski has given the exhibition four stars, concluding that Silk Roads "does briefly shine an intoxicating light on this vast, unfamiliar and endlessly vibrant world."
Four stars was also the assessment of the Evening Standard's Melanie McDonagh, who like other critics, did have reservations on the sheer size of the gallery. "The sprawling scale and scope of the show is almost too ambitious" she says.
The most notable dissenting voice however was Alastair Sooke in the Daily Telegraph. "Exhausting" and "disappointing" was his verdict.
"This is an exhibition in a rush" he writes. "Every place is a pit stop in the race to link disparate cultures...Amid the historical mush, there’s no proper narrative to get your teeth into."
But beyond being critical of just Silk Roads, Sooke thinks the exhibition is the symptom of a wider, enduring problem of how the British Museum mounts its shows.
"[The museum's] multiculturalist mantra is becoming boring – and risks seeming like a narcissistic obsession to regard the past as a reflection of our own globalised self-image. Time for a reset."
Silk Roads runs at the British Museum in London until 23 February 2025.