The Silk Road: the history of a network that linked two worlds

A caravan of camels advances across a desert of stones, tiny silhouettes under an immense sky. In the saddlebags: rolls of silk light as air, jade, spices with a distant scent. The track they follow leads nowhere in a single day; it links, from relay to relay, the capital of a Chinese empire to the markets of the Mediterranean. This web of tracks stretched across half the world is the Silk Road.

The Silk Road designates the network of trade routes that, for more than fifteen centuries, linked China to Central Asia, Persia and the Mediterranean world. Far from being a mere merchant road, it was an artery of exchange where, along with goods, techniques, religions and ideas circulated. To understand it is to grasp how ancient China opened up to the world — and the world to it.

A road opened by a diplomatic mission#

The Silk Road was born of a political mission, not a commercial one. Around 138 BCE, the emperor Han Wudi sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, to seek allies in Central Asia against the Xiongnu, nomadic peoples who threatened the empire in the north. Captured, held for more than ten years, Zhang Qian finally returned and brought back a harvest of information on the kingdoms of the West, their cities and their riches.

His journey revealed to the Han the existence of a whole world beyond their borders. From this first contact were born the routes that would soon carry Chinese silk westward. Zhang Qian was not a merchant: he was the diplomat whose expedition, by ricochet, opened one of the greatest exchange routes in history.

The Silk Road was not traced by merchants in search of profit, but opened by an ambassador in search of allies.

Silk, a jealously guarded secret#

If the road bears the name of silk, it is because this fabric was long the most coveted Chinese product — and the most mysterious. China jealously guarded the secret of its manufacture: the rearing of the silkworm and the unwinding of the cocoon remained, for centuries, an enigma for the peoples of the West, who paid for the cloth at the price of gold without knowing where it came from.

But silk did not travel alone. Westward also went jade, porcelain, paper and, later, gunpowder; eastward returned the horses of Central Asia, glass, precious stones, spices and new plants. Trade was carried on from relay to relay: few merchants travelled the entire road, each reselling their goods on one stretch, so that silk passed from hand to hand all the way to Rome.

Far more than goods#

Along the road, ideas and beliefs also circulated. It was by these tracks that Buddhism, born in India, entered China from the first centuries of our era, carried by monks and merchants. The caves of Dunhuang, on the edge of the desert, keep a dazzling testimony to this: thousands of paintings and manuscripts, a sanctuary of art where civilisations meet.

Along the route were strung staging towns made prosperous by the passage of caravans: Chang'an (present-day Xi'an), the Chinese starting point; Dunhuang, gate of the desert; further west, the legendary Samarkand, crossroads of Central Asia. These merchant oases mingled languages, currencies and religions, forming a cosmopolitanism rare for the time.

Decline and posterity#

From the fifteenth century, the overland Silk Road gradually declined. The rise of maritime routes, safer and able to carry larger volumes, diverted trade towards the seas; the political fragmentation of Central Asia made the tracks less passable. The caravans grew scarce, the oases fell asleep.

Its legacy, however, has never died out. The Silk Road remains the symbol par excellence of exchanges between civilisations, and contemporary China has even taken up its name for its great infrastructure project, the "new Silk Road." From Zhang Qian to container ships, the same idea persists: to link worlds. To discover it is to understand that ancient China was never a closed empire — and to learn Chinese is to be able to read the name of silk, of the oasis-cities and of a network that, first of all, made the East and the West speak to each other.

FAQ#

What is the Silk Road? The Silk Road (丝绸之路) is the network of trade routes that linked China to Central Asia, Persia and the Mediterranean, from antiquity to the fifteenth century. Silk was traded there, but also jade, paper, spices, and above all ideas and religions.

Who opened the Silk Road? It was born of the diplomatic mission of Zhang Qian, an envoy of emperor Han Wudi sent around 138 BCE to Central Asia. His journey revealed to the Han the kingdoms of the West and opened the way to commercial exchanges.

Why is it called the "Silk Road"? Silk was the most coveted Chinese product, whose secret of manufacture China guarded. The term itself is recent: it was coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877. In reality, it was a network of tracks, not a single road.

What was traded on the Silk Road? Besides silk, jade, porcelain, paper, spices, glass, horses and precious stones circulated there. But the road above all made ideas travel: it was by it that Buddhism entered China.

Photo credits: the images used in this article come from Pexels and Unsplash and are royalty-free.