Silk Road

• 1. Introduction

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  The Silk Road was never a road, and for much of its life it had no name at all. It was a network of Asian trade routes, active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century, spanning over 6400 km on land. Marco Polo traveled it during a period of Mongol-enabled ease of movement, yet he never once used the term. The name itself came late, coined in the late 19th century, long after the routes themselves had gone quiet. So what was this thing that linked the Eastern and Western worlds for some sixteen centuries? It carried silk textiles produced primarily in China, but it also moved paper and gunpowder, plague and prophets, jade hauled from mines as long ago as 5000 BCE. Few people ever traveled its full length. Instead, goods passed through a succession of middlemen, changing hands many times before reaching their final destinations. This is the story of a web that the popular imagination flattened into a single line, and of the steppe nomads, Sogdian merchants, and wandering monks whose contributions that flattening tends to erase.

• 2. A Name Coined Late

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  Ferdinand von Richthofen popularized the German term Seidenstraße, literally Silk Road, in 1877, having made seven expeditions to China between 1868 and 1872. The phrase had circulated in the decades prior, but it gained no widespread acceptance in academia or among the public until the 20th century. The first book actually titled The Silk Road came from the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin in 1938.

  Warwick Ball has gone so far as to call the whole idea a myth of modern academia. He argues there was no coherent overland trade system and no free movement of goods from East Asia to the West until the period of the Mongol Empire. By his account the maritime spice trade with India and Arabia mattered far more to the Roman economy than silk from China, which at sea moved mostly through India and on land passed through intermediaries such as the Sogdians.

  William Dalrymple sharpens the point with a number: in pre-modern times, maritime travel cost only a fifth of overland transport. He argues for the pre-13th century primacy of an India-dominated Golden Road extending from Rome to Japan. Critics add that the conventional literature has privileged the sedentary and literate empires at either end of Eurasia, sidelining prominent civilisations such as India and Iran along with the steppe nomads.

  The southern stretches, running from Khotan in Xinjiang to Eastern China, were first used for jade and not silk, as long ago as 5000 BCE, and remain in use for that purpose. The term Jade Road would have fit those paths better, and it is in current use in China today.

• 3. Han Beginnings

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  Around 130 BCE, the Han dynasty extended its reach across the Tarim Basin and the Hexi Corridor, opening a route to China Proper. The opening followed the reports of Zhang Qian, an envoy originally sent to obtain an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu. He visited the kingdom of Dayuan in Ferghana, the Yuezhi lands in Transoxiana, the Bactrian country of Daxia, and Kangju, and he relayed accounts of places he never reached, including Anxi, which was Parthia, and Shendu, the Indian subcontinent.

  The Chinese were drawn to the tall and powerful horses, called heavenly horses, held by the Dayuan, animals of capital importance in fighting the nomadic Xiongnu. After winning the War of the Heavenly Horses and the Han-Xiongnu War, Chinese armies established themselves in Central Asia. The Hou Hanshu records that as a rule rather more than ten missions went forward in the course of a year, dispatched as far as Seleucid Syria.

  Ban Chao, a Han general of the 1st century CE, led an army of 70,000 mounted infantry and light cavalry to secure the trade routes, pushing west across the Pamirs to the shores of the Caspian Sea and the borders of Parthia. From there he sent the envoy Gan Ying toward Daqin, meaning Rome. The Chinese extended the Great Wall of China to protect their trade, and Han forces regularly policed the route against the Xiongnu.

  The Dupuys record a stranger encounter. In 36 BCE, at the battle of Sogdiana near modern Bukhara, a Han expedition apparently met and defeated a contingent of Roman legionaries, possibly survivors of Antony's army invading Parthia. The margin of Chinese victory appears to have been their crossbows, whose bolts seem easily to have penetrated Roman shields and armour.

• 4. Rome's Silk Craze

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  Up to 120 ships set sail every year from Myos Hormos in Roman Egypt to India by the time of Augustus, according to Strabo. After the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, trade between China, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe blossomed on an unprecedented scale. A Greek travel guide to this Indian Ocean route, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, was written in 60 CE, and Roman ports at Barygaza and Barbarikon connected the empire to the Central Asian routes.

  The Romans craved Chinese silk even though they believed it grew on trees, a notion repeated by Seneca the Younger and by Virgil in his Georgics. Pliny the Elder knew better. Writing of the silk moth in his Natural Histories, he noted that the creatures weave webs, like spiders, that become a luxurious clothing material for women.

  The Roman Senate issued several edicts, all in vain, to prohibit the wearing of silk on economic and moral grounds. The imports drained gold from the empire, and the thin cloth was judged decadent. Seneca complained that he could see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes.

  Roman wares traveled remarkably far. The earliest Roman glassware bowl found in China came from a Western Han tomb in Guangzhou, dated to the early 1st century BCE. Roman-style glassware turned up in Gyeongju, capital of the Silla kingdom in Korea, and Roman embassies reached China beginning in 166 CE during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Emperor Huan of Han. The Western Roman Empire and its demand for Asian luxuries collapsed in the fifth century.

• 5. Stolen Silkworms

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  Two Nestorian Christian monks, according to the Byzantine historian Procopius, eventually uncovered how silk was made. The Emperor Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565, sent monks as spies from Constantinople to China and back to steal silkworm eggs. The theft gave the Byzantine Empire a silk monopoly in medieval Europe, with production centered in Thrace in northern Greece.

  In 568, the Byzantine ruler Justin II received a Sogdian embassy representing Istämi of the First Turkic Khaganate. The two parties formed an alliance against Khosrow I of the Sasanian Empire, letting the Byzantines bypass Sasanian merchants and buy Chinese silk directly from the Sogdians. Even then, Chinese silk remained far superior to anything made in the West, a gap perhaps underscored by coins of Justin II found in a Chinese tomb in Shanxi dated to the Sui dynasty.

  Chinese histories tracked these distant contacts with care. The Tang records describe a state called Fu-lin, virtually identical to the older Daqin, and note an embassy in 643 attributed to Constans II at the court of Emperor Taizong. The History of Song describes a final embassy arriving in 1081, apparently sent by Michael VII Doukas to Emperor Shenzong.

  The ties grew genuinely tangled under the Mongols. The History of Yuan claims a Byzantine man became a leading astronomer and physician at the court of Kublai Khan, granted the title Prince of Fu lin. The Uyghur Nestorian diplomat Rabban Bar Sauma set out from Khanbaliq, today Beijing, and sought military alliances across Europe with Edward I of England, Philip IV of France, Pope Nicholas IV, and the Byzantine ruler Andronikos II Palaiologos.

• 6. Faiths On The Move

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  In 781, an inscribed stele recorded Nestorian Christian missionaries arriving on the Silk Road, carrying the Syriac language and new forms of worship eastward. The routes moved Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam across Eurasia, each tied to specific religious communities and their institutions. Established Buddhist monasteries along the way offered foreigners both a haven and a new religion.

  Buddhism reached China via the Silk Road beginning in the 1st century CE, according to a semi-legendary account of an ambassador sent west by Emperor Ming, who reigned from 58 to 75. The Buddhist movement became the first large-scale missionary movement in the history of world religions. Under the Kushans, Buddhism spread to China from the middle of the first century to the middle of the third, and the first translators of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese were Parthian, Kushan, Sogdian, or Kuchean. Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty, who ruled from 268 to 239 BCE, had already raised the religion to official status in his northern Indian empire.

  Chinese pilgrims later reversed the flow. From the 4th century onward they traveled to India for original scriptures, with Fa-hsien's journey from 395 to 414, then Xuanzang from 629 to 644, and Hyecho, who set out from Korea. Xuanzang's travels were fictionalized in the 16th century as Journey to the West, a fantasy adventure of demons and disciples.

  Judaism moved east after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 559 BCE by Cyrus the Great, when freed Judean slaves dispersed through the Persian Empire. A group of Judean merchants from Gaul, the Radanites, ran trade networks from China to Rome, aided by a positive relationship with the Khazar Turks. Richard Foltz observes there is more evidence for Iranian influence on Jewish religious ideas than the reverse, tracing concepts of heaven, hell, and apocalypse, along with the devil's origin in Angra Mainyu, to Persian thought.

• 7. Mongols, Plague, And Decline

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  The Mongol expansion across Asia from around 1207 to 1360 re-established the routes through Karakorum and Khanbaliq and brought political stability. It ended the dominance of the Islamic Caliphate over world trade. After every conquest the Mongols enlisted local traders, scholars, and artisans to build and manage their empire, developing overland and maritime routes from the Black Sea and Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

  The Venetian Marco Polo became one of the first Europeans to travel the route to China, and his tales in The Travels of Marco Polo opened Western eyes to the Far East. He was preceded by missionaries such as William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, and followed by travelers including Ibn Battuta, who crossed from Tabriz between 1325 and 1354. The tombstones of two siblings, Caterina and Antonio Vilioni, who died in 1342 and 1344, were unearthed in the twentieth century at Yangzhou, evidence of Europeans living in China.

  The routes carried disease as readily as silk. The Black Death, which devastated Europe starting in the late 1340s, may have reached the continent along Mongol trade routes. One theory holds that Genoese traders from Trebizond carried it west, and strong evidence ties its origin to marmots in Central Asia.

  The fragmentation of the Mongol Empire loosened the unity that had held the Silk Road together. Nomad power declined, undercut by the Black Death and by sedentary civilisations equipped with gunpowder. From 1453 the Ottoman Empire competed with other gunpowder empires for the overland routes, pushing European polities to seek alternatives and beginning the Age of Discovery. Armenians later dominated what remained; from 1700 to 1765 the entire export of Persian silk passed through Armenian hands. That silk trade flourished until the collapse of the Safavid Empire in the 1720s.

  The routes did not vanish from memory. UNESCO named the Chang'an-Tianshan corridor a World Heritage Site on the 22nd of June 2014, and added the Zarafshan-Karakum Corridor in 2023. In Bishkek and Almaty, a major east-west street in each city still carries the name Jibek Jolu, the Silk Road.