The Silk Road Atlas
Fifteen centuries of trade, faith, and discovery across Eurasia — mapped in 50 interlinked articles.
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The two pillar guides that frame everything else.
The Silk Road: A Complete Historical and Cultural Guide
For more than fifteen centuries, a web of overland and maritime routes bound together the civilizations of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Merchants, monks,…
Silk Road Trade: Goods, Routes, and Economy
The Silk Road was, at heart, an economic system. For more than a millennium, merchants loaded camels, mules, and ships with the high-value products of one…
History & Empires
From the Han opening of the routes to the Pax Mongolica.
History of the Silk Road
The Silk Road is not a single road, nor a single period. It is a long, layered history of contact between the civilizations of Asia, Europe, and Africa — a…
Han Dynasty and the Silk Road
The Silk Road, in the form historians now use the term, began under the Han. Between the second century BCE and the second century CE, Han China opened a…
Tang Dynasty and the Silk Road
The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) is often treated as the high point of Silk Road history. Its capital Chang’an, modern Xi’an, was, by the most common…
Roman Empire and the Silk Road
For roughly four centuries, the Roman Empire was the single most important western customer on the Silk Road — and yet the Romans themselves never set foot…
Mongol Empire and the Silk Road
No single political transformation affected the Silk Road as decisively as the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. From the moment Chinggis…
Pax Mongolica
The Pax Mongolica — the Mongol peace — is the name given by historians to the period, roughly 1260 to 1360, in which the Mongol Empire and its successor…
Islamic Golden Age and the Silk Road
The centuries between the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-eighth century and the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth are sometimes called the…
Routes & Cities
The geography of the network and the great caravan hubs.
Silk Road Routes and Map
The phrase "Silk Road" suggests a single paved highway from China to Rome, and nothing could be further from the truth. The Silk Road was in reality a…
Great Cities of the Silk Road
The Silk Road was a network of cities. The caravan trails that crossed the deserts and the mountains were punctuated by oasis cities that provided water,…
Xi'an: The Eastern Starting Point of the Silk Road
Every overland Silk Road began at Chang’an, the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. For more than a millennium — from the second century BCE to the…
Dunhuang and the Mogao Caves
Dunhuang, an oasis town at the western end of China's Hexi Corridor in what is now Gansu province, was the most important way station on the Chinese side of…
Kashgar and the Silk Road
Kashgar, in the western Tarim Basin in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, was the western gateway to the Tarim and the principal…
Samarkand and the Silk Road
Samarkand sits in the valley of the Zerafshan River in modern Uzbekistan, and for more than two thousand years it has been one of the great market cities of…
Bukhara and the Silk Road
Bukhara, the modern Bukhara-i-Sharif or "Noble Bukhara," sits in the middle reaches of the Zerafshan valley in modern Uzbekistan, a few days' journey…
Baghdad and the Silk Road
Baghdad, the round city founded by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur in 762 CE on the Tigris, was for a century the largest city in the world, and for several…
Antioch and the Silk Road
Antioch, on the Orontes River in what is now southeastern Turkey, was for nearly a thousand years the principal eastern market of the Roman, Byzantine, and…
Constantinople and the Silk Road
Constantinople, the capital of the Roman and Byzantine empires for more than a thousand years, was the principal European terminus of the overland Silk…
Venice and the End of the Silk Road
Venice, built on a group of small islands in a lagoon at the head of the Adriatic, was the western terminus of the overland Silk Road and one of the great…
Religion & Culture
The faiths, ideas, and technologies the road carried.
Religions of the Silk Road
Few regions of the world have been as religiously varied as the oasis cities of Central Asia. A traveler in ninth-century Samarkand might encounter Buddhist…
Buddhism on the Silk Road
Buddhism was the first of the great universal religions to travel the Silk Road, and the religion that most deeply stamped the network with its character.…
Nestorian Christianity on the Silk Road
Nestorian Christianity, the form of Christianity associated with the Church of the East, was one of the earliest and most surprising of the religions to…
Manichaeism on the Silk Road
Manichaeism is the religion that most clearly looks like a product of the Silk Road. Founded by the Persian prophet Mani in the third century CE, it…
Spread of Islam along the Silk Road
Islam was the last of the great universal religions to spread along the Silk Road, and the one that eventually came to dominate. Within roughly four…
Zoroastrianism on the Silk Road
Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of the Iranian peoples, was one of the earliest and most influential of the religions to travel the Silk Road. The…
Cultural Exchange Along the Silk Road
The most lasting effects of the Silk Road were not the silks and spices but the ideas, technologies, and habits that traveled with them. Across roughly…
Paper-making on the Silk Road
The transfer of paper-making from China to the Islamic world and, from there, to Europe is the single most consequential technology transfer in the history…
Printing Technology on the Silk Road
The Chinese invention of printing was one of the most important technological achievements of the pre-modern world. Woodblock printing, developed in China…
Trade & Goods
What moved along the routes and the merchants who moved it.
Silk and Silk Goods on the Silk Road
Of all the commodities that travelled the overland and maritime corridors connecting Asia with the Mediterranean, none gave the network its name, shaped its…
Chinese Silk Production
The thread that gave the Silk Road its name was produced by a caterpillar no longer than a finger, fed on the leaves of a single species of tree, and tended…
Secret of Chinese Silk
For more than two thousand years, the technique of raising silkworms, reeling their cocoons, and weaving the resulting thread into cloth was the most…
Spice Trade on the Silk Road
If silk gave the overland network its modern name, the spice trade gave it much of its profit. The dried berries, barks, flowers, and seeds of South and…
Porcelain on the Silk Road
Chinese porcelain is the most important ceramic export in the history of the world. From the Tang dynasty onward, the fine white wares of the southern…
Precious Stones on the Silk Road
The trade in precious and semi-precious stones was one of the most ancient and durable components of the Silk Road economy. Jade, lapis lazuli, rubies,…
Horse Trade on the Silk Road
Horses were among the most valuable commodities in transit along the Silk Road. From the early Han period to the late Middle Ages, the demand for…
Silk Road Economy
The Silk Road was, at heart, an economic system. For more than fifteen centuries, the demand for exotic goods in places distant from their origin generated…
Sogdian Merchants
The Sogdians were the most important long-distance merchants of the early medieval Silk Road. An Iranian people whose homeland lay in the valleys of the…
Maritime Silk Road
The phrase "Silk Road" most often evokes caravans of camels crossing the Taklamakan Desert and the Pamir Mountains. Yet for almost as long as there has been…
Travelers
The pilgrims, envoys, and merchants who left a record.
Famous Travelers of the Silk Road
The travelers who crossed the Silk Road were a small, unrepresentative, but extraordinarily influential minority of the people who lived along it. Most of…
Marco Polo and the Silk Road
Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant whose account of his travels in Asia became the most famous travel book of the medieval world, is the best-known of all…
Xuanzang and the Silk Road
Xuanzang, the Tang-dynasty Buddhist monk whose seventeen-year pilgrimage to India and back produced the most influential Chinese account of the Buddhist…
Ibn Battuta and the Silk Road
Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta, born in Tangier in 1304 CE, is the most widely travelled geographical writer of the medieval Islamic world. Over roughly three…
William of Rubruck
William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar from Flanders, was the author of the most detailed European account of the Mongol world before Marco Polo. He…
Decline & Legacy
Plague, blockade, the age of sail, and the modern revival.
Decline of the Silk Road
The decline of the Silk Road was not a single event. It was a long, drawn-out process spanning roughly three centuries, in which the overland network was…
Black Death and the Silk Road
The Black Death, the most destructive pandemic in recorded history, killed perhaps half the population of Europe and tens of millions more in Asia and North…
Ottoman Blockade and the Silk Road
The Ottoman blockade of the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of the central turning points in the long history of the…
Age of Discovery and the Silk Road
The phrase "Age of Discovery" usually points to the long sequence of European maritime voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that opened the…
Zheng He's Voyages and the Maritime Silk Road
Between 1405 and 1433, the early Ming court of China despatched seven enormous naval expeditions into the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The fleets,…
Modern Silk Road and UNESCO
The Silk Road is not only a historical network but also a modern idea. The phrase itself, coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen,…