On the Silk Road

Text Sophie Ibbotson Photos Michael Lee

We

use the term “Silk Road” without thinking too much about it. Our geography of its exact route is often hazy, but people typically remember that it was the trading route by which silk first travelled from China to Europe. There is some truth in this, but that’s just a fragment of a far larger, more important picture.

The term Seidenstraße (Silk Road) was first coined by a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, in the late 19th century. It may not have been very accurate, but it stuck.

There was never just one road but rather a network of interconnected land routes criss-crossing North Africa and the Mediterranean, the Middle East and

Where were the Silk Roads?

There can be no satisfactory answer to the question of where the Silk Roads started and finished. Historians have identified key terminals, but beyond them there were – and still are – more roads to travel.

In the West, the Silk Road reached as far as Istanbul and Venice, cities which thrived on commerce thanks to their strategic locations at the pinch points of maritime and land-based trading routes. A southern spur of the route stretched down to Alexandria and Cairo, having split from the roads to Turkey in Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus.

In the central region, the main route crossed northern Iran and then fanned out through Afghanistan and what are today the Central Asian republics. Some travellers would have headed south to Isfahan, Shiraz, and Yazd, then on to the Persian Gulf; others would have ventured north into the Caucasus and Russia. The Eurasian steppe and the mountains and deserts which followed undoubtedly posed the greatest physical challenges along the way: Temperatures could be either extremely cold or extremely hot, water and food were scarce, and bandits and slave traders could lie in wait to ambush victims around any corner.

All of these routes entered China in what is now the Xinjiang-uyghur Autonomous Region. Kashgar was the gateway to the East. From here, merchants could ride south through the Karakoram Mountains into the Indian Subcontinent. Those heading for China proper faced the perils of the Taklamakan Desert. The desert’s name translates as the “Place of No Return”, and so caravans had to skirt either the northern or southern side of the sands, hopping from oasis to oasis. The roads joined up again at Dunhuang, and from here they continued east to southeast Xi’an.

Wherever merchants travelled, so, too, did inventions and ideas. Sericulture, porcelain, gunpowder, and paper were all discovered in China and made their way west

Religions spread along the Silk Roads. The birthplaces of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Manicheism and Zoroastrianism, amongst other faiths, were in urban centres where traders would congregate. Missionaries and evangelists, itinerant preachers, and wandering ascetics set out along the trading routes, travelling in convoys with the merchants. In remote locations, Buddhist monasteries doubled as guesthouses, Arab traders spread Islam faster and further than the Arab Conquests, and Zoroastrian and Manichean beliefs survived in Silk Road outposts long after they had died out elsewhere.

Why did it come to an end?

The Silk Road was at its strongest when it was dominated by a few powerful dynasties. Political stability across wide areas enabled commerce to thrive, and overland travel was easier, safer, and more lucrative than in times of upheaval. When dynasties collapsed, empires fragmented and civil wars began. In relatively quick succession, the Yuan Dynasty fell, the Ottomans were defeated by the Timurids, and the Timurids themselves then fell. The Ming, China’s new rulers, were fearful of the Uighurs and other Turkic tribes. This souring of relations made trade increasingly difficult.

1498 Vasco da Gama discovers the sea route to India, via the Cape of Good Hope