Listen to a violin, and you could be anywhere. But when you hear the strains of a Chinese erhu fiddle, you know exactly where you should be: music can wonderfully convey the spirit of a place. But where are we here? A young Mongolian girl, whose voice has been trained to carry across the Gobi desert, cuts unamplified through massed trombones and timpani to create an exhilarating and unearthly sound; a Sufi praise-singer blends his sound with that of the cello; a musician from Beijing adds the ice-pure notes of his sheng mouth organ to the drumming of a tabla and the caress of Western strings.

The answer is the Silk Road Project, which is about to play a Prom in celebration of 10 years of global hot-gospelling, though the gospel in question is a strictly musical one. It’s the brainchild of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who has always been a trailblazer: after jamming with Appalachian fiddlers and Kalahari bushmen, and co-founding the West-Eastern Divan youth orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, he has hit an unexpected bull’s-eye with this project in Central Asia.

Seven centuries ago, thanks to its position as the focus of world trade, this part of the world – consisting of all the countries bounded to the north by Kazakhstan and to the south by Afghanistan – was also the focus of a major civilisation. When new sea routes made the Silk Road redundant, Central Asia became a backwater, and remained so until our recent geopolitical panics shoved it brutally back into the limelight. But for most people, apart from oil-men and CIA strategists, it’s still largely an enigma. (The date of this Prom – 11 September – has a suitably symbolic significance.)

Yo-Yo Ma regards the old Silk Road as the internet of antiquity, the global network of its day. From the Chinese capital of Chang’an to the Mediterranean city of Tyre, arts and sciences were exported alongside food and clothing: thus were transmitted the secrets of ceramics and lacquer-work, as well as gunpowder, mathematics, the magnetic compass and the printing press – not to mention musical forms and instruments. In Ma’s Silk Road Project, the trade is exclusively in music, but his musical map fits the mercantile Silk Road perfectly.