wide open. Silk became thefirst Chinese commodity to reach the Far West
on a large scale.
The Chinese and the Romans became aware of the existence of each other
at about the same time. In theHistory of the Later Han, Rome was described
as well governed under an elected monarchy, a wealthy place with honest
merchants, some of whom made profits of 1,000 percent from Indian Ocean
trade. They were said to have dealt in gold, silver, coral, amber, jasper, lapis
lazuli, cloth, and perfumes, all of which were actual products that reached
China from the far side of the Silk Road. The Chinese also claimed to have
obtained some very strange products from there: a“ring that shines at
night,”“moon-bright pearls,”the“rhinoceros that frightens chickens”(?),
and an“ointment which makes gold.”
Roman sources mention almost nothing about Chinese merchants and not
much about what the Romans used to pay for Chinese products. But they
were interested in silk, which became quite popular in the Roman Empire.
Pliny maintains that the Seres got their silk from trees. Following him, with
one exception–a second century writer named Pausanias, who claimed that
silk was produced by an insect resembling a huge spider– the Romans
continued to believe for overfive centuries that silk came from a plant rather
than an animal. Nor did they have any idea as to how the silk came to them.
The import of silk was not universally welcomed and not just because of its
impact on the balance of payments problem as in the case of pepper. The dour
republican rhetorician Seneca the Elder (54BCE– 39 CE) considered the wear-
ing of sheer, bordering on the transparent, garments indicative of the moral
decline his country was slipping into:“Wretchedflocks of maids labor [in
making silk clothes] so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin
dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or
foreigner with his wife’s body.”
Apparently Seneca the Elder did not appreciate the larger picture. Roman
women wearing Chinese silks represented the last link in a world system that
had been in the works for millennia. In this the addition of China was cru-
cial. It didn’t just connect a new region; it opened a new world that offered
new products and new markets, a world that had its own fully developed
complex of circuits and routes, emporiums, transit points and termini, cores
and peripheries. The cultural and technological impact in both directions
will remain an endless source of speculation and debate among historians,
but the economic consequence is much more straightforward. With China
connected to Central Asia, interlocking routes now ran from one side of the
Eurasian landmass to the other. By the early years of thefirst millenniumCE,
the sustained, systematic, large-scale movement of goods across a fully
integrated land system and a parallel sea system had become a reality.
136 The last link