Silk Road

The overland route between China and Europe that moved goods thousands of miles and expanded consumers’ tastes in the regions it traversed.

The Silk Road is a series of routes, primarily overland, that enabled merchants to move goods a distance of 5,000 miles from the road’s origin in the Chinese city of Chang’an (X’ian) toward its western termini on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where merchants would arrange for the shipment of goods to Europe via such international commercial centers as Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and Venice. The route itself ran through settlements throughout central Asia, including (moving from east to west) Lanchow (Lanzhou, in modern China), Astana and Kao-chang (Gaochang) in the Gobi Desert, Kashgar and Yarkand at the western edges of the Taklamakan Desert, Balk and Bamiyan on the western border of the Hindu Kush. From that point, two distinct roads headed westward—a northern route that went through Samarkand and Bukhara, along the Amu Daria river toward the Aral Sea and from there to the northern shores of the Black Sea (and ready access to Constantinople) and a southern route that ran from Merv to Tehran, Baghdad, and then to Antioch on the shores of the Mediterranean.

The Silk Road was well established by 1000 B. c., a period when the Chinese were already importing goods from distant locales. It was already well established by the time Marco Polo made his historic journey to China, and it was on the mind of Christopher Columbus, who hoped to reach East Asia so that he could find a quicker way to bring silks and other goods that Europeans had grown to adore as a result of the ancient trade route.

It would be rare for anyone to do what Polo did—to travel the length of the ancient trading path. Instead, longdistance trade was primarily a series of short-distance exchanges that had developed over generations. Those exchanges, taken together, constituted a trade system that was in many ways the ideological inspiration for many of the European ventures into the Atlantic, including the numerous journeys in search of the Northwest Passage.

Further reading: Susan Whitfield, ed., The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (Chicago: Serindia Publications and the British Museum, 2004).