Diane Wolff

Diane Wolff is the author of the Silk Road Series, the heirs of Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan). The Mongol Empire changed the world. The roads across the world opened. It was an exciting era with mobility and trade making the world richer. People, ideas, technology, science, music, food and the arts moved in two directions. Because the Supreme Khan was considered a "barbarian", these stories have been lost to the West.

The newest scholarship shows the Mongol Empire was about trade, as much as it was about conquest. The new scholarship explains the breaking up of the monopoly of banking and financed headquartered in Baghdad. The work of decades explains the idea that The Horde had institutions based on mobility. The Horde defined themselves as an aristocratic horse culture.

The series is the product of twenty-five years of research and writing, based on the exciting new work of the past two decades.

The first book in the series "Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde: The Mongol Khans Conquer Russia" tells the story of Batu Khan, a grandson of Chinggis Khan, who commanded the army that invaded Europe and set the rulers of Europe quaking, for Europe was divided. The European armies were no match for the greatest fighting force of the age.

The second book in the series, "Taifun: Khubilai Khan Invades Japan by Sea" is under consideration for publication by an important publisher. Diane writes about the little known story of Emperor Khubilai Khan, that of the Mongol Empire taking to the sea, for war and for trade. This tells the story of Khubilai Khan realizing that the cavalry warfare of the Mongol Empire is not enough to defeat the Southern Song dynasty. With the help of a defector, Khubilai builds a navy and unifies China proper to the borders it has today. Through the least known of the Mongol campaigns, the Mongols conquer Korea and through Korea's navy and merchant fleet, enter the seagoing trade in Southeast Asia. This is the extension of the overland Silk Road into the little known maritime Silk Road.

The thirteenth century was an epoch-making period in global history. The other four books in the series deliver the portraits of the successor generations of the imperial family and the earth-shattering events of their time. The period after the death of Chinggis Khan changed global history, the way we live today.

Diane is an independent scholar, and a widely published journalist. book reviewer and blogger on her author website. She is a candidate for the Public Scholar Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the fifth book in the Silk Road Series, "Ilkhan: Hulegu Khan in the Middle East." Hulegu Khan was the khan who destroyed the caliphate at Baghdad, an event lamented in the Muslim world to the present day. Why did Hulegu Khan receive orders to destroy the caliphate? It was not religious persecution. It was because the caliph defied the Code of Chinggis Khan. Hulegu also destroyed the Shia heretics, the Order of the Assassins headquartered in Alamut, men recruited from the bazaars of the Middle East and offered hashish and visions of virgins to commit political murders for hire all over the region. Even the caliph asked Chinggis Khan to rid him of the Assassins. It was too much when the Old Man of the Mountain sent 400 ninja to assassinate a new Supreme Khan on the day of his enthronement.

The scholarly audience has heard of the Mongol Peace, the hundred year period in which the Muslim monopoly of trade and banking systems was broken, and Europeans could enter into the China trade. Europe was still recovering from the fall of the Roman Empire. It was poor and regional markets had collapsed. With the opening of the roads and the protection of trade by the Code of Chinggis Khan, capital flowed into Europe. The merchant princes built the fortunes that financed the Renaissance. The West developed precision instruments for navigation, bigger vessels and big cannon. Thus began the Western dominance of the oceans and the rise of the West.

She has done virtual talks for the Mongolian Cultural Center in Washington, D. C. and a virtual talk for the American Center for Mongolian Studies for the second book in the Silk Road Series, Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde: The Mongol Khans Conquer Russia.

Diane delivered a lecture in Venice for the launch of her most recent book, a work of historical fiction for the citywide celebration of the 700th anniversary of the death of Marco Polo. The book is called "Cobalt Blue: Marco Polo in Dadu."

She has written of the Mongol Peace, the period that followed the conquests and changed the world.

The Silk Road Series is narrative history for adults. The empire was vast and the stories are unique. The stories of these five books are linked together and the characters appear in each other's stories. The first book is under consideration for becoming a television series. Like "Shogun", Wolff's books contain an authentic portrait of an Asian culture.

She has written three standalone stories are for young readers. These are historical fiction and may be assigned to students in global history from ninth grade and up.

Diane is the author of three works about Chinese history and culture. Her book on Chinese calligraphy won an ALA Most Notable Book Award in the year of its publication. Robert A. F. Thurman wrote introduction to her book Tibet Unconquered. She is widely published as a journalist and reviewer, in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribute. She had a column on the historical backdrop to current events for four years in the Orlando Sentinel that went out nationally over the Knight-Ridder wire.

Wolff took a degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University, specializing in Chinese History and Japanese history. She has done post-graduate work at Columbia University, University of California at Berkeley and was tutored in Japanese at the Inter-University Center in Tokyo.

Diane has traveled widely in Asia. In 1980, she has been involved in cultural diplomacy from the beginning of her career. She was a member of a cultural delegation to the People’s Republic of China, part of the sister city program with Shanghai inaugurated by Senator Dianne Feinstein, then Mayor of San Francisco. Diane worked on arts exchange in music, painting and dance. She also served on welcoming committees for a group of university-based Shanghai landscape architects on their travels to San Francisco where they were conducting studies and creating designs for a major Chinese garden for the Yerba Buena Center in downtown San Francisco.