An English boy in the Japanese expedition along the Silk Road

Abstract

The history of the exploration of the Silk Road is pieced together into a coherent narrative from the stories of great explorers and scholars whose magnificent collections are now housed in museums and libraries around the world. These great men, however, never travelled alone but had many assistants and employees who worked under their supervision, traversing the same distances and seeing the same things as their more distinguished employers. This paper is about an English boy called A. O. Hobbs who was hired to accompany the young Buddhist priest Zuichō Tachibana on his expedition to Chinese Central Asia in 1910. The pivotal question is what role Hobbs played in the expedition from the point of view of its organizers, that is, why was he
there in the first place.