A brightly painted, chromed commercial truck from Pakistan might not be what you would expect at the famed Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. But that’s exactly what visitors to the recent special exhibit “The Silk Road” got to see.

“The Silk Road” was this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The exhibit featured “the music, crafts, culinary and narrative traditions involved in the historical cultural interchange between the ‘East’ and the ‘West,’” from silk textiles to tea drinking, from stringed instruments to paper making, from noodle traditions to blue and white "chinaware” – and one very colorful truck.
Once roads in Pakistan and Afghanistan were full of brightly decorated wagons, ox carts, and other vehicles, along with the animals that pulled them, according to the exhibit website. Today, these decorative arts have been applied to elaborately painted trucks. In the past 50 years the decorative styles have increased dramatically, with each region of Pakistan developing its own distinctive motifs and decorations, such as landscapes, important monuments, and pithy sayings and poems.
Jamil-ud-Din and Haider Ali demonstrated the art of truck painting on the national mall during the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
William Cassidy from Traffic World was there. He compared Pakistani trucks to rolling carousels, “brightly painted and loaded with ornaments made from steel, wood, mirrors and chrome.”
Although this truck was part of a museum exhibit, trucks like these are the workhorses on the roads of Pakistan. This one, Cassidy writes, features idyllic scenes depicting the Pakistani countryside, images of ethnic sword dancers, a hero killing a lion, women working in a village and a Sufi dancer. Inside the truck is a large picture of Barak, a benevolent angelic being, part horse, part human in form, known in the lore of the region stretching from Iran to India.
Cassidy also learned that getting the truck from Karachi, Pakistan, to Washington, D.C., was a logistical dilemma. Just getting the truck on board a ship meant driving the truck through Karachi, which likely would have meant being stopped by the police and having to pay hefty bribes to get through.
But the exhibit organizers found a way around the problem, Cassidy reports. It was the day before a big referendum on Musharraf’s presidency. They put posters of Musharraf all over the truck, played loud music and shouted campaign slogans from the cab – and made it through the city without being stopped.

For more on the Pakistani truck at The Silk Road festival, visit http://www.silkroadproject.org/smithsonian/index.html.