We are delighted to announce the relaunch of our Nara to Norwich website to reflect our next phase with new activities and research under the auspices of this project.
Activities from the Project’s inception in 2016 have taken the team to both Nara and Norwich, as well as many places in between including Scandinavia, Korea, and Turkey. Through workshops, research and field trips, conferences, and international collaborations with individuals and institutions, the project team has successfully curated and mounted two major exhibitions.
From right to left: Juhyung Rhi, Arzu Ozturkmen, Christopher Scull, Simon Kaner, Susan Whitfield, Katy Cubitt, Selçuk Esenbel, Isenbike Togan, Hale Eroğlu Sağer, Erdal Kucukyaclin and Kiraz Perincek.
The online exhibition explores the Silk Roads through a series of thematic stories and 142 individual exhibits that illustrate the arrival of Christianity in western Europe and Buddhism in eastern Asia.
A physical exhibition shown at The Forum in Norwich included the hanging of a 12m replica scroll of the Kannon Bosatsu and live performances of o-shomyo (liturgical Buddhist chanting) by the Karyōbinga Shōmyō Kenkyūkai.
The Forum exhibition is now also available as downloadable PDFs and as a virtual reality (VR) exhibition, allowing users to explore the displays from any location, following maps that trace the movement of people, objects and ideas across the Silk Roads. In addition, those with immersive headsets will be able to move around the displays in the VR space.
From 2025
Over the coming years Nara to Norwich will be exploring further two broad themes arising from the research for the exhibitions: Sacred Landscapes and Maritime Routes and will be producing more online resources and publications.
For the next three months we will be releasing a series of weekly blog posts here about our activities and regularly adding albums to our Flickr account.
Follow the project on social media to see the latest updates.
Sacred Landscapes
Landscapes of Conversion was a theme of the first stage of the Project, exploring the effects on the landscapes of the introduction of Christianity and Buddhism. To understand further how the introduction of religions shaped landscape and space, we are now investigating the routes that people took between between sacred sites: Pilgrimage.
The project will focus on two comparative routes, one in the UK between Norwich and Little Walsingham and one in Japan between Hasedera and Ise Grand Shrine. By researching, mapping and walking these routes, the project will investigate how people of the past experienced pilgrimage, its impact on the landscape, and how this can be understood by people today. Broadening the focus of this research to encompass themes such as logistics, transport, commerce, industry, ecology, navigation, history and archaeology, will allow us to understand more fully the range of the experience of pilgrimage in these spaces. The project will also undertake research into the termini of each route as well as the stopping points along the way.
We will be making further announcements relating to the details of this project and how to get involved in the near future. In the meantime, you can view some of the images from our initial survey of the UK route in June 2025 here.
Maritime Routes
Okinoshima, also known as the Shōsō-in of the Sea, and its deposits of votive objects by sea travellers during the Silk Road, were part of the online exhibition. This maritime theme is now being expanded in the new stage of the project, with an initial focus on the Indian Ocean and the interactions between Japan, Korea, south and southeast Asia.
Alongside this, as part of the World in the Viking Age (WIVA) project, we will also be exploring Viking river routes and their role in a network of links across Eurasia – you can visit the WIVA website for more information here.
As we develop the website, we welcome any feedback – you can contact us using the Contact Form link at the bottom of this page.
We are grateful to the Toshiba International Foundation for their continued support of the new phase of this project and look forward to sharing more news of project activities over the coming years.
Header image: Performance by the Karyōbinga Shōmyō Kenkyūkai at the Forum exhibition, May 2024. Photograph: Andi Sapey