Identity, coming to us via the shroud that is the buried past, is often a murky notion or some fledgling proposition–the resulting ‘best guess’ arising only after one has carefully sifted through historical records, themselves containing as much myth and hagiography as archeologically verifiable fact.  The past comes to us in fragmented pieces–not unlike threadbare texiles requiring some skillful weaving if such work is to be sensibly mended and made whole, so as to give us a picture larger than one’s thumb.  Consciously shaping identity via the medium of story is not a new phenomenon.  Hintsch clearly notes that , by manipulating ancestral or origin myths of those bordering their territories Chinese historians were effectively able “to manipulate [the] ethnicity” of their potential foes and trading partners–creating a type of ‘manufactured identity’ which, at differing times, painted such peoples as the Xiongnu, Xianbei, or Chaoxian as both foreign ‘other’ and historical counterpart, by rendering to them a shared Chinese ancestry.  Such orientalism, looking upon one’s neighbour as a sort of ‘fantastic other’ belies the truth that, despite the considerable amount of trade and travel taking place along the historical Silk Road, for many the world was a much smaller and, in many ways, unknown place–fleshed out and given substance as much by fireside tales or myth as by empirical evidence or the observations of one well-travelled.  If the only truths one knows about a foreign land or people is that given to them via an orientalist narrative or engineered myth, such tales can do much to shape public thought.  Within historical China and along the Silk Road such narratives served to both create a sense of ethnic pride–by seeing the ‘other’ as something less than human–and in making the ‘other’ of Chinese origin and thus subject to Chinese conquest or rule.  The Xiongnu’s origins being attributed to ‘wolf’ ancestry clearly set them apart from the agricultural Chinese, to whom the wolf was more threat and bother than a symbol of totemic pride.  The second reading, by Ma, focusses on how identity was created and shared as much by political/military control and trade as by myth.  In a sense, culture is created and recreated within the very singular moments of day to day living and along the Silk Road, varied somewhat from one settlement to another.  Similarites and shared cultural aspects were, of course, present.