History & Empires
The 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…
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 sustained, politically backed corridor of overland trade that linked the Yellow River valley to the markets of Parthia, India, and the Mediterranean — a corridor that was not a single road, but a system. What the Han did that no previous eastern Eurasian polity had managed was simple to describe and almost impossible to copy: they built protected routes, garrisoned waystations, and diplomatic embassies that made the regular transit of merchants, missionaries, and envoys actually work. The story of that system is the foundation of the wider history told in the broader history of the Silk Road.
Long before the Han, the steppe and the Tarim had carried goods and ideas across Eurasia. Bronze Age beads. Chariot technology. Jade from Khotan. None of it amounted to a trade system in the modern sense. What changed in the second century BCE was the political will to project Chinese power westward into the Tarim, and to keep that projection going for decades. I have always thought this is the under-appreciated point about the Han achievement: not the exploration, but the duration.
The emperor and the envoy
Zhang Qian set out in 138 BCE — and the rest of the network follows from that.
The Han emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) faced a persistent problem on his northern frontier. The Xiongnu confederation, a nomadic power centred on the eastern steppe, raided the Han frontiers and blocked Han communications with the Western Regions — the term the Chinese used for the Tarim Basin and everything beyond. In 138 BCE, the emperor sent a court official named Zhang Qian on a secret mission to the Yuezhi, a people who had been driven westward into Transoxiana by the Xiongnu, in the hope of forming a joint military alliance. (Sima Qian’s account, in Shiji chapter 123, remains the place to start; the Burton Watson translation is the one I keep on the shelf.)
Without the Han, there is no Silk Road in the sense we use the term.
Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu within a decade of setting out and held for about ten years. On his escape he continued west, eventually reached the Yuezhi, and returned to the Han court around 126 BCE. The mission failed in its immediate strategic purpose, but the intelligence he brought back changed Chinese policy: he had seen the markets of Bactria and Sogdiana, the herds of Fergana, and the great sedentary kingdoms of the Tarim. He had also learned that the road west existed, and that it could be made to exist politically. The conventional narrative treats Zhang Qian as a hero-explorer; I think the more honest reading is that he was a lucky diplomat who got taken hostage and made the best of it.
Securing the Tarim Basin
Within a decade of Zhang Qian’s return, Han armies had pushed into the Hexi Corridor, expelled the Xiongnu from the oasis states of the Tarim, and established a chain of protectorates that ran from Dunhuang in the east to the Pamirs in the west. The city of Chang’an, the Han capital and the eastern terminus of the overland routes, was the political centre of the system. From Chang’an, a road led through the Wei valley to the Gansu corridor, past the garrison towns of Wuwei and Zhangye, to the oasis of Dunhuang, and from there divided into the northern and southern branches that skirted the Taklamakan. Popular accounts tend to oversell the engineering; the actual control ran through a small number of fortified posts, of which the Yumenguan and Yangguan passes are the ones a visitor can still walk.
Han control of the Tarim was real but not absolute. The Western Han maintained agricultural colonies, garrisoned forts, and appointed local kings under Chinese suzerainty, but the actual business of moving goods was conducted by caravans of private merchants whose networks predated the Han presence and would long outlast it. What strikes me about this arrangement, on re-reading, is how little of it was novel. The Han supplied the security. The Sogdians and the oasis peoples supplied the commerce. Neither half worked without the other.
A personal note
A note on Han sources. The Han dynasty was one of the best-documented periods in world history, but the documentation is heavily biased toward the imperial center. The voices of the caravan drivers, the oasis farmers, the Sogdian and Indian merchants, and the Xiongnu nomads appear, if at all, as filtered through the Chinese imperial chancery. A reader looking for the subaltern view of the Han Silk Road will be largely disappointed. The sources do not preserve it.
Further reading
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter for the region or period.