The Silk Road to the Future Phase I, an eight-year-long joyous
event created and sponsored by Legends of China, is a
celebration of international friendship and goodwill between
college students from the most prestigious universities
across the US and China. Initiated in 2001, when hundreds
of US students first traveled to Beijing as invitees of
The Legends of China, The Silk Road to the Future will
be conducted each summer between now and 2008.
The central symbol of The Silk Road to the
Future is, naturally enough, silk. Just as this event
draws its theme from the ancient Silk Road trade route
that so greatly facilitated early cultural communication
between China and Europe during the time of Marco Polo
nearly 2000 years ago, your participation symbolizes the
weaving together of modern cultural threads into a beautiful
and pure fabric of unity that will bond our two nations
during the coming millennium. Every year (2001—2008),
students taking part in The Silk Road to the Future, Chinese
and American alike, will each produce a silk artwork focusing
upon World Peace that, sewn together, will form an ever-lengthening
banner eventually stretching over 10,000 meters.
Beginning in 2008, the Silk Road to the Future’s Silk Artwork Banner WILL GO GLOBAL! Just as the program’s first milestone was to unfurl a 10,000-piece banner symbolically matching the length of the Great Wall of China.our project will now stretch beyond China to a global level with a new banner-length goal of 40,076 silk pieces by 2020. This new banner will represent the length of the earth’s equator, that is, the distance around our entire world!
