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 history that begins in the second century BCE, reaches its political apogee under the Mongols in the thirteenth century CE, and ends, in something like its classical form, with the rise of oceanic trade in the sixteenth. Across those roughly seventeen hundred years, the network was invented, destroyed, revived, transformed by successive empires, and eventually displaced by sea power. What follows is a chronological account of that long process. I will warn the reader now: I think the standard textbook version of this story is wrong in one of its central claims, and I will return to the point.

For an overview of the network as a whole, see the main Silk Road guide. For a focused treatment of the goods that moved through it, see Silk Road trade, goods, and economy.

The Han opening

138 BCE. Zhang Qian walks out of the Han capital. Everything else flows from that single decision.

The Silk Road in its recognizable form begins with the Han dynasty of China. In 138 BCE, the emperor Wu dispatched the explorer-diplomat Zhang Qian westward into Central Asia, ostensibly to forge an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu nomads. Zhang’s mission failed militarily, but it returned with detailed intelligence about the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, the Pamirs, and Bactria, and with the realization that China lay at one end of a vast chain of markets. Within a generation, Han armies had pushed into the Tarim Basin, opened the Hexi Corridor, and established protectorates at Dunhuang, Khotan, and Kashgar. By the first century BCE, Chinese silk was reaching the markets of Parthia and, eventually, the Roman Empire.

The Han achievement was not the invention of long-distance trade — bronze Age beads and chariot technologies had already crossed the steppe — but the imposition of a sustained, politically backed system of exchange. The Han built relay stations, garrisoned the passes, and protected the caravans. They did so originally to acquire the “heavenly horses” of Fergana, but the consequence was a corridor of trade that would last, in some form, for more than a millennium. The more I read about this, the more I think the usual causal arrow (silk drove the roads) is drawn backwards; horses and military intelligence drove the roads, and silk was the by-product.

The Roman customer

The Han supply of silk met a Roman demand that, by the early centuries CE, had become something close to insatiable. Roman aristocrats paid extraordinary sums for Chinese silk, and the Roman writer Pliny the Elder complained in his Natural History (Book XII, in the standard Loeb pagination) that the empire was being drained of gold to pay for Eastern luxuries. Rome did not produce silk itself: the technology of sericulture was a Chinese monopoly, jealously guarded, and the secret of how silkworms were raised was, in effect, a state secret of the Chinese empire. (The story of that long monopoly, and its eventual collapse under the Byzantine emperor Justinian, is told in the article on the secret of Chinese silk.)

The history of the Silk Road is, in one sense, the history of everything that ever crossed it.

The two great empires — Han China and Rome — never met directly. Between them stood the Parthian Empire, a middleman state that taxed the overland trade and kept the two ends of the network politically separate. Silk reached Rome through Parthian, and later Sasanian, hands. The result was a trade that was extraordinarily lucrative for the middlemen, but politically and economically fragile: the overland corridor depended on the cooperation of a long chain of states, any one of which could disrupt it. The standard view treats the Parthians as mere tax-collectors; in my view that undersells them. They were the diplomats of the system, and without them the chain breaks.

A useful museum to visit, if the reader ever has the chance, is the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology in Urumqi. The Tarim mummies (the “Loulan beauty” and the Cherchen man are the crowd-pleasers), the Khotan and Turfan finds, and the Dunhuang-adjacent discoveries are on display there, and the institute’s English-language publications are an undervalued entry point to the field. Go in the morning; the building closes for lunch at 13:30 and the afternoon is the wrong way around.

A personal note

I have used the singular “Silk Road” throughout, even though the network was always plural. The singular is the convention of Richthofen and of UNESCO, and it is what the reader will find in every modern popular history. The plural — Silk Roads — is the older and arguably more accurate form, and a reader who wants the current scholarly nuance should know that the field has been moving slowly toward it.

Further reading

This is one of those topics where the standard reading list is long and the good reading list is short. Three works that I (the author) keep returning to:

• The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter — these are uneven but the good ones are very good.
• A recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal (Brill) for what scholars are actually arguing about right now.
• One primary source in translation. The Dunhuang manuscripts, in particular, are now mostly online; the British Library’s IDP database is the place to start.

Avoid the popular histories. They are usually wrong in small ways and large ones.

Related pages

See also The Han dynasty and the Silk Road, The Tang dynasty and the Silk Road, and The Roman Empire and the Silk Road.