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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…

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 civilization and carried them across half the world to be sold to the consumers of another. The system was inefficient by modern standards — a single caravan might take a year to move goods from Chang’an to Antioch — but the margins were so high, and the demand for exotic luxuries in places like Rome, Constantinople, and Baghdad so steady, that the trade persisted and grew.

This article is a comprehensive guide to the trade itself. It looks at what was actually carried, how the trade was organized, who the merchants were, what they used for money, and how the system was governed. For a broader cultural and historical introduction, see the main Silk Road guide. For the chronological story of the network, see the history of the Silk Road. For the geographic layout of the routes, see the routes and map of the Silk Road. And for the parallel sea routes, see the maritime Silk Road.

The cargo: what was actually traded

The list of goods in transit along the Silk Road is long, but most of them can be grouped into four broad categories: textiles and clothing, food and spices, precious materials, and bulk commodities. The trade in textiles is dominated, of course, by silk; that in food and spices by the spice trade; the precious-material trade by stones and metals; and the bulk trade by such items as horses, tea, salt, ceramics, and metals.

Silk was, as the modern name suggests, the prestige commodity of the early centuries. Chinese silk reached Rome in such quantities that the Roman writer Pliny the Elder complained, in the first century CE, that the Empire was being drained of gold to pay for it. The Chinese monopoly on sericulture lasted, in practice, until the sixth century, when — according to tradition — Nestorian monks smuggled silkworm eggs to the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and the secret of Chinese silk production finally began to spread. The details of that long monopoly and its eventual collapse are told in the article on the secret of Chinese silk.

Trade, in the end, is what the name implies.

Porcelain became the dominant ceramic export from the Tang period onward. The fine white wares of Jingdezhen, and later the blue-and-white porcelain of the Yuan and Ming, were so prized in the Islamic world that they inspired imitations in lustreware and faience in Egypt, Syria, and Iran. By the time of the Ming dynasty, porcelain was the most valuable Chinese export by weight, and the demand for it was a significant driver of the maritime trade.

The reverse flow — what the West and South sent East — was dominated by spices. Pepper from the Malabar Coast, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, cloves from the Moluccas, and nutmeg from the Banda Islands all moved by sea and, to a lesser extent, by land. Pepper in particular was so valuable that it functioned as a near-currency in late medieval Europe. The Portuguese voyages of the late fifteenth century were, at bottom, an attempt to capture the pepper trade by sea.

Other significant items in transit included:

  • Horses, especially the “heavenly horses” of Fergana, which the Han dynasty imported by the thousand to supply its cavalry. The Chinese side of this trade is described in the article on the horse trade.
  • Precious stones, including jade from Khotan, lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, rubies from Burma, and sapphires from Sri Lanka. The gemstone trade is treated in the dedicated article.
  • Glass, metalwork, and jewelry, especially from the Roman world and the Byzantine Empire.
  • Furs, slaves, and exotic animals moving in both directions.
  • Tea, which became a major commodity in the late period, though mostly along overland routes within Asia rather than all the way to Europe.

A particularly important class of cargoes consisted of intangible items that moved as books, scrolls, or skills. Paper-making — invented in China and transmitted westward through the Islamic world to medieval Europe — was perhaps the single most consequential technology transfer in world history. Printing technology, including woodblock printing and the later invention of movable type, was another. Indian numerals, including the zero, traveled through Islamic scholarship to Europe, and Greek scientific texts survived only because they were preserved in Arabic translation. The economic value of these intangible cargoes was, in the long run, far greater than that of the silks and spices.

Who did the trading

The merchants who actually moved goods along the Silk Road were a small, multilingual, often polyglot elite. The most famous of them were the Sogdians, an Iranian people whose homeland lay in the valleys of Samarkand and Bukhara, and who ran trading colonies from the Oxus to the Pacific. Sogdian merchants could be found in Tang China in such numbers that the An Lushan rebellion of 755 CE, which nearly destroyed the Tang dynasty, was led by a Sogdian.

Other important groups included the Khotanese, who controlled the southern Tarim route; the Uyghurs, who dominated the northern Tarim after the ninth century; the Tibetans, who controlled parts of the routes during their imperial expansion; the Nestorian Christian merchants, who linked the Syriac-speaking world with Central Asia; and the Muslim merchants of the Islamic Golden Age, who ran the Baghdad-to-Samarkand and the maritime routes across the Indian Ocean.

In the late period, the great merchant republics of Italy — Venice, Genoa, Pisa — became the dominant European traders. Venice in particular grew rich on the overland silk trade, while Genoa specialized in the Black Sea trade through the Genoese colonies at Caffa and Tana.

A personal note

I have used numbers in this article (price ratios of pepper, profit margins on silk) that come from the surviving sources, but the sources are uneven and the numbers are often hedged. The pepper ratio of “a hundredfold from Calicut to Europe” is conventional; the actual ratio depended on the year, the route, and the middlemen. Treat the numbers as order-of-magnitude indications, not as audited figures.

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.