Silk Road

The Silk Road was never one road but a web of caravan routes, opened up after the Han dynasty sent the envoy Zhang Qian to Central Asia in the 2nd century BC. From the capital Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) traders followed the Hexi Corridor in Gansu to the oasis of Dunhuang, then skirted the Taklamakan Desert to Kashgar and on over the mountains. Silk, and later porcelain, travelled west; horses, glass, silver, spices and grapes came east, and few merchants ever covered the whole distance. Just as important were ideas: Buddhism reached China this way, along with music, art and later Islam. The name itself is modern, coined as “Seidenstraße” by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877, and in 2014 the Chang’an–Tianshan corridor was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.