right Cotton production
and trading is important to
Uzbekistan’s economy todaybottom right A Uyghur
couple at the Sunday market
in the old town of KashgarWher e wer e 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 west166
First Roman envoy
arrives at the Han
court in China,
establishing direct
diplomatic ties399
Chinese traveller
Faxian begins
his journeys in
South Asia480
Collapse of the
Western Roman
Empire550
Secret of silk making
reaches Europesilk road timelinec. 150
Ptolemy attempts to
map the Silk Road in
his Geography→