The ancient network of trade routes that linked China with the Mediterranean for over 1,500 years.
Stop 01 · 138–126 BCE
The Opening of the Road
In 138 BCE the Han Emperor Wu sent Zhang Qian west with about a hundred men to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu, the nomad power on China's northern frontier. The Xiongnu captured him and held him for years; he married a Xiongnu wife before escaping to Ferghana, then on to the Yuezhi and Bactria. The Yuezhi had no wish to fight, and on the way home he was caught again. Only Zhang and his guide Ganfu made it back, around 126 BCE. He failed to find allies, but his reports of rich western states and of Ferghana's powerful horses led to the first formal trade and diplomatic links between China and Central Asia.
In 138 BCE the Han Emperor Wu sent Zhang Qian west with about a hundred men to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu, the nomad power on China's northern frontier. The Xiongnu captured him and held him for years; he married a Xiongnu wife before escaping to Ferghana, then on to the Yuezhi and Bactria. The Yuezhi had no wish to fight, and on the way home he was caught again. Only Zhang and his guide Ganfu made it back, around 126 BCE. He failed to find allies, but his reports of rich western states and of Ferghana's powerful horses led to the first formal trade and diplomatic links between China and Central Asia.
By the 2nd century CE the Kushan Empire, founded by a branch of the same Yuezhi that Zhang Qian had visited, stretched from Bactria into northern India and was ruled from Purushapura (modern Peshawar) and Mathura. It sat at the pivot point of trade between Rome and China. Silk moved west, and Roman gold, glass and wine moved east; the Kushan summer capital at Kapisa, near modern Bagram, has yielded a hoard of art from Greece to China. Under Kanishka, whose reign is now usually dated from 127, Kushan armies crossed the Karakoram, and a road from Gandhara to China stayed in Kushan hands for over a century. Buddhism travelled it north and east into the heart of Asia.
For centuries silk reached the Mediterranean overland from China, through Parthian and then Sasanian Persian lands to the markets of Syria, but how it was made stayed a Chinese secret. According to the Byzantine historian Procopius, two Nestorian Christian monks learned the method, and Emperor Justinian sent them back along the Silk Road for silkworm eggs, which were smuggled out of Central Asia in 553–554. Silk-making took root in the Byzantine Empire, and after Justinian's reign silk became an imperial monopoly made in state workshops, though Chinese silk was still thought finer. The Sogdians, merchants based around Samarkand, wanted to trade directly: in 568 a Turkic embassy led by the Sogdian Maniah reached Constantinople bearing silk.
During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the Silk Road reached its peak. Chang'an, the Tang capital and eastern end of the road, was through much of these centuries the largest city anywhere, a walled grid about 8 by 9.7 kilometres with some 110 walled wards. Its West Market had a Persian bazaar, wine shops and taverns. Merchants came from Persia, Sogdia and beyond, and when the Arabs conquered Persia, Peroz, son of the last Sasanian shah, fled with his court to the Tang. Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians and Muslims all had followers in China. Two censuses of the 7th and 8th centuries counted about 50 million people in the empire.
In July 751 the expanding Tang and Abbasid empires met on the Talas River, near Taraz on today's Kazakh–Kyrgyz border, in a contest for the lands around the Syr Darya. The Tang general Gao Xianzhi fought Ziyad ibn Salih's army to a stalemate for five days, until the Karluk Turks, two-thirds of his force, turned on him; the Tang survivors retreated over the Tian Shan. A later story says Chinese prisoners taken there brought papermaking to Samarkand, but paper was already in use in Central Asia, and paper was made widely in the Islamic world only after a mill opened in Baghdad in 794–795. Four years after Talas, the An Lushan rebellion began to wreck Tang power.
The Mongol conquests launched by Genghis Khan (r. 1206–1227) put almost the whole Silk Road under one ruling family. Even after the empire split into four khanates, nearly a century of relative peace followed, with fewer rival rulers taking tolls, and the routes became safer than ever. From 1234 the Yam relay network kept fresh horses at stations about a day's ride apart. Travellers like Marco Polo used the roads: he left Venice in 1271 with his father and uncle, sailed to Acre, rode to Hormuz and crossed Asia to Kublai Khan's summer palace at Shangdu, arriving aged 21. Business methods moved too: bills of exchange, deposit banking and insurance reached Europe in this period.
The open roads also carried disease. Gravestones of a Nestorian Christian community in the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in modern Kyrgyzstan, record a spike of deaths from 'pestilence' in 1338–1339, and DNA from teeth in those graves has been found to contain the plague bacterium. Where the pandemic began is still debated. Epidemics reportedly killed about 25 million people across Asia in the years before the plague reached Constantinople in 1347. By tradition it entered Europe at Caffa in Crimea, a Genoese trading port besieged by the Golden Horde, and Genoese ships carried it around the Mediterranean. The Black Death killed up to 50 million people, perhaps 30 to 60 per cent of Europe's population.
By 1500 the land routes of the Silk Road were in decline. Mongol unity was long gone, and after taking Constantinople in 1453 the Ottomans held the routes into the eastern Mediterranean. From the 11th to the 15th centuries Venice and Genoa had dominated Europe's trade with Asia, buying spices in Levantine and Egyptian ports. Ships were growing larger and more capable, and Europeans, tired of paying Middle Eastern and Venetian middlemen, went looking for a sea route to the East. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. On 20 May 1498 Vasco da Gama, guided across the Indian Ocean from Malindi by a Gujarati pilot, landed at Kozhikode (Calicut) in India.