The Silk Road

The Silk Road was never a road, and it was not a sea route. It was a shifting web of overland caravan tracks across deserts, steppes, and mountain passes between China and the Mediterranean, and it sits here among the sea lanes because it is the archetype of every trade route since. The name itself is modern, coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877. Few merchants ever traveled its whole length. Goods moved in relays from oasis to oasis, and with them moved religions, technologies, art, languages, and disease, which is why historians now treat the Silk Road less as a highway for silk than as the first great network of globalization.

The classic routes began at Chang'an, today's Xi'an, and ran west through the Hexi Corridor in Gansu to Dunhuang and the Jade Gate. There they split around the Taklamakan Desert, a northern route through Turpan and Kucha below the Tian Shan, a southern one through Khotan along the Kunlun foothills, rejoining at Kashgar. From there caravans climbed the Pamirs into the Fergana Valley and on to Samarkand, Bukhara, and Merv, across Iran to Mesopotamia, and finally to Antioch, Tyre, and Constantinople. Branches reached India through the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, and steppe routes ran farther north. Britannica puts the main span at about 6,400 kilometers. Bactrian camels, caravanserais, and oasis cities made the journey possible.

The routes took shape after the Han envoy Zhang Qian traveled west from 138 BCE, and Han armies secured the Hexi Corridor. Chinese silk reached Rome, while horses, glass, and silver flowed east. Sogdian merchants from around Samarkand dominated the trade for centuries, and Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam spread along it. Trade peaked under the Tang and again under the Mongols, whose 13th-century empire carried Marco Polo and, in the 1340s, the Black Death. As the empire broke up and European ships reached Asia by sea after 1498, the overland routes declined. UNESCO inscribed the Chang'an–Tianshan corridor of China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in 2014 and the Zarafshan–Karakum corridor of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in 2023. China revived the name in 2013 for the overland belt of its Belt and Road Initiative.

• China
  The world's most populous nation reborn as an economic superpower began in
• Central Asia
  The five stans, landlocked between Russia, China, and Iran crosses
• The Eurasian Steppe
  The grass corridor that carried empires from Hungary to Manchuria northern branches cross
• The Maritime Silk Road
  The monsoon sea lanes from China to India, Arabia, and East Africa, and the name of China's 21st-century port initiative overland counterpart of
• Uzbekistan
  The Silk Road heartland, home to Samarkand and Bukhara passes through
• The Spice Route
  The sea trade in pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon that drew Europe into Asia and remade the world map related trade route
• Tian Shan
  The Celestial Mountains of Central Asia, a 2,500-km system of glaciated ranges runs along
• The Mongol Empire
  The largest contiguous land empire in history, forged on the steppe within a single lifetime secured by
• Taklamakan Desert
  A vast cold sand sea in western China, ringed by mountains and crossed by the Silk Road skirts
• The Roman Empire
  The Mediterranean state whose roads, law and Latin still shape three continents western market
• Istanbul
  The city straddling Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus western terminus