The Silk Road: the Ancient Network That Connected the World

Introduction

Among all the networks of exchange that human civilization has created, none has had more far-reaching consequences for the shape of the world than the Silk Road. For nearly two thousand years — from the second century before the common era through the fifteenth century of the common era — this vast web of overland and maritime trade routes connected China in the east to the Mediterranean world in the west, with India, Central Asia, Persia, Arabia, and East Africa woven into its complex fabric. Goods traveled along its routes: silk from China, spices from India, glassware from Rome, lapis lazuli from the mountains of Afghanistan, horses from the Fergana Valley of Central Asia. But goods were the least of it. Along the same routes traveled ideas, religions, technologies, artistic forms, languages, and microorganisms. Buddhism reached China along the Silk Road. Christianity reached the Tang Dynasty court of China along the Silk Road. Papermaking, printing, the compass, and gunpowder moved from China to the Islamic world and eventually to Europe along the Silk Road. The Black Death, the greatest demographic catastrophe in recorded human history, swept from Central Asia into Europe along the Silk Road. The Silk Road was not merely a trade route: it was the principal nervous system of the pre-modern world, the mechanism by which human civilizations exchanged the accumulated knowledge of their experience.

The name "Silk Road" is itself a historical curiosity: it was never used by the people who traveled it. The term Seidenstrasse — Silk Road in German — was coined by the German geographer and explorer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877, in the first volume of his monumental study of China. Richthofen used the term to describe the overland routes between China and the Roman world along which Chinese silk was the most prestigious commodity. Ancient merchants, diplomats, missionaries, and pilgrims who actually traveled these routes called them by many different names in many different languages, or simply described their journey destination by destination without any overarching name for the network they were traversing. The modern concept of "the Silk Road" as a unified, intentionally maintained system is in part a scholarly construct — but it captures a real historical phenomenon of profound importance, a network of exchange that shaped the world we live in.

This article tells the full story of the Silk Road: its origins in the diplomatic missions of Han Dynasty China, its functioning as a commercial and cultural highway across the breadth of Eurasia and beyond, the remarkable civilizations and peoples who sustained it, the technologies and religions and diseases it carried, the golden age of exchange under the Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth century, and the gradual decline that came when the great maritime routes around Africa provided Europeans with a cheaper and more direct path to the wealth of Asia.

The Origins: Zhang Qian and the Opening of the West

The formal origins of the Silk Road as a regularly maintained system of commercial and diplomatic exchange can be traced to the Han Dynasty of China — one of the greatest empires of antiquity, ruling a territory roughly comparable in population and economic output to the Roman Empire in the west and broadly contemporaneous with it. The catalyst was not commerce but military strategy.

In the second century before the common era, the Han Empire was locked in a dangerous confrontation with the Xiongnu, a confederation of nomadic peoples on the vast steppes north of China whose cavalry raiders could strike the northern frontier with devastating effect and who represented a persistent existential threat to Han security. The Han emperors had tried various strategies against the Xiongnu — tribute payments, defensive fortification of the Great Wall, offensive campaigns — with incomplete success. Emperor Wu, one of the greatest of the Han rulers, who came to the throne in 141 BC and reigned for over fifty years, decided to seek a different approach: an alliance with other peoples who shared Han's interest in containing Xiongnu power.