Silk Road

The Silk Road was a network of trade routes linking China with Central Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, in use from the 2nd century BCE for well over a thousand years. It was not a single road, was mostly unpaved and carried a great deal more than silk, which makes it one of history's most inaccurately named things after the guinea pig.^[1]

Nobody who travelled on it called it the Silk Road. The name was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, around two thousand years after the traffic started, which is late even by the standards of signposting.

Logistics

Very few traders went the whole way. Goods were usually passed from merchant to merchant along the route, so that a bale of silk might cross Asia without any one person crossing it, in the manner of a game of pass the parcel at an extremely slow party.^[2]

Travellers rested at caravanserais, roadside inns built around a courtyard where the animals could be kept overnight. The two-humped Bactrian camel was well suited to the route, carrying heavy loads over deserts and mountains with an expression that historians of camels have described as “unimpressed”.^[3]

What was traded

• Silk, travelling west, which is how the road eventually got its name.
• Paper and the knowledge of how to make it, which travelled west and in time allowed people to write down that it had.
• Glass, travelling east, carefully.
• Horses, which travelled under their own power and did not consider themselves cargo.
• Ideas, languages and inventions, which weighed nothing and were never declared.

Later history

The Venetian merchant Marco Polo travelled to China along these routes in the late 13th century, and his account of the journey has been read ever since, mostly by people who have not been to China either. In 2014 a section of the routes crossing China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, making it officially worth seeing more than two thousand years after people started seeing it.

See also

• Mountain – frequently in the way
• Hill – what the camels would have preferred

References

1. Caravan, C. (2001). Not a Road. Dune Press.
2. Bale, B. (2012). “Pass the Parcel: A Very Slow History”. Journal of Long Trips, 1: 2000.
3. Hump, H. (1987). Camels and Their Opinions. Oasis Books. p. 2.