The name sounds romantic and a little misleading. There was never one road, and silk was only one of the things carried along it. The routes we call the Silk Road were a shifting web of trails across deserts, mountains and seas linking China with Central Asia, India, Persia, the Arab world and the Mediterranean. What moved along them changed the world far more than any single cargo.
A caravan on the Silk Road, from the Catalan Atlas of 1375, attributed to Abraham Cresques. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Where the name came from
Nobody who travelled these routes called them the Silk Road. The term was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, who used "Seidenstrasse" in his work on China. It stuck because silk was the luxury Romans associated with the distant East.
How it started
Trade across Eurasia existed long before, but the routes became regular in the 2nd century BCE. The Han Chinese emperor Wu sent the envoy Zhang Qian west to find allies against the nomadic Xiongnu. Zhang Qian's reports on the kingdoms of Central Asia, and on the famous horses of the Ferghana valley, opened official contact and trade with the west.
Very few traders made the whole journey. Goods passed from hand to hand, caravan to caravan, with Sogdian, Persian, Indian and later Arab merchants as key middlemen. Oasis cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara, Kashgar and Dunhuang grew rich on the traffic.
What travelled besides silk
Religions. Buddhism moved from India into Central Asia and then China along these routes, carried by monks and merchants. The cave temples at Dunhuang and the giant Buddhas once at Bamiyan are part of that story. Later, Islam spread along the same paths, as did Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism.
Technology. Papermaking spread west from China into the Islamic world, where Baghdad and Samarkand became centres of paper production long before Europe adopted it. Gunpowder, the compass and printing techniques also travelled west over the centuries.
Food and plants. Grapes, alfalfa and new varieties of fruit reached China. Spices, sugar, citrus and rice moved in other directions. Many of the foods that feel "traditional" in a region arrived by caravan.
Art and ideas. Greek-influenced Buddhist sculpture in Gandhara, Persian textile patterns in Chinese silks, and Chinese ceramics in Middle Eastern courts all show how styles mixed. Scholars carried mathematics, astronomy and medicine between cultures.
Disease. The connections had a darker side. The Black Death of the 14th century is widely believed to have spread west from Central Asia along trade routes, reaching the Black Sea and then Europe in the 1340s. It killed a huge share of Europe's population.
Why the routes faded
Overland trade peaked under the Tang dynasty and again under the Mongol Empire, when a single power controlled much of the route. After the Mongol empire broke up, travel became riskier. From the late 15th century, European sea routes around Africa to India and China made it cheaper to move goods by ship, and the caravan cities slowly lost their importance.
The Silk Road today
In 2014, UNESCO listed the Chang'an-Tianshan corridor, a 5,000-kilometre stretch through China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as a World Heritage Site. And China's Belt and Road Initiative borrows the old name for a very modern set of railways, ports and pipelines.
The original lesson still holds. When people trade, they don't just exchange goods. They exchange beliefs, recipes, inventions and, sometimes, illnesses. The Silk Road was the world's first great experiment in globalisation, two thousand years before anyone used the word.
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