How the Silk Road Actually Worked (and What Could Go Terribly Wrong On It)

You don’t have to spend a long time read­ing up on the Silk Road before you see the term itself (“Silk Road”) called a mis­nomer. In fact, what we refer to by that name com­pris­es a whole net­work of trade routes con­nect­ing Asia, Africa, and Europe, whose traf­fic con­stant­ly shift­ed over a mil­len­ni­um and a half accord­ing to cli­mat­ic, geopo­lit­i­cal, and civ­i­liza­tion­al con­di­tions. Nor was silk the only, or even the pri­ma­ry type of good car­ried along those routes. From East to West went tea, dyes, per­fumes, porce­lain, and paper; from West to East, glass­ware, hors­es, camels, hon­ey, wine, and gold, to name just a few items in peren­ni­al demand. It was along the Silk Road, or Silk-and-Many-Oth­er-Things-Roads, that gun­pow­der spread out of Chi­na — and the Black Death spread out of Europe.

Accord­ing to the Knowl­ed­gia video above, the rough­ly 4,000-mile-long Silk Road was offi­cial­ly opened in 130 BC. But it was­n’t with­out its pre­de­ces­sors: in 500 BC, for exam­ple, the “Roy­al Road” estab­lished by Dar­ius I’s Achaemenid Empire “stretched from Susa, which lies in mod­ern-day Iran, all the way, near­ly 2,000 miles to the west, to Sardis, which is today a part of Turkey,” with spurs reach­ing India and North­ern Africa.

What­ev­er its eco­nom­ic impact, the Roy­al Road had noth­ing like the cul­tur­al effects of the Silk Road, any his­to­ry of which empha­sizes the “new think­ing and new ways of life being passed along the net­work of trade routes,” to say noth­ing of “the spread of reli­gions or ide­olo­gies that would occur thanks to the mer­chants and trav­el­ers them­selves.”

This despite the fact that few of those mer­chants or trav­el­ers crossed the Silk Road­’s entire length. But we can all name at least one man who made the full jour­ney: the thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry Venet­ian explor­er Mar­co Polo, who as a teenag­er first made the trek to Kublai Khan’s plea­sure dome with his father. (At that point, the Mon­gol Empire had already uni­fied its routes, but not before lay­ing waste to a fair few set­tle­ments along the way.) It is to Polo’s writ­ings that we owe our endur­ing­ly roman­tic image of the Silk Road, but he under­stood the dan­gers of that law­less gaunt­let across empires as well as any­one. The Urban Atlas video above lists a few of them, includ­ing desert heat, dis­eases, hal­lu­ci­na­tions, ban­dit­ry, and slav­ery. Today, we encounter no such per­ils on the way from Rome to Xi’an, a jour­ney we can make on a flight with a stopover in Bei­jing. Per­haps Mar­co Polo would say we’ve all gone soft, but then, he’d prob­a­bly be more inter­est­ed in learn­ing about our roads in the sky.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Inge­nious Engi­neer­ing of Silk: How the 2,000-Year-Old Pat­tern Loom Pow­ered the Silk Road and the Wealth of Ancient Chi­na

Behold an Incred­i­bly Detailed, Hand­made Map Of Medieval Trade Routes

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Artist Illus­trates Each and Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

The Most Dis­tant Places Vis­it­ed by the Romans: Africa, Scan­di­navia, Chi­na, India, Ara­bia & Oth­er Far-Flung Lands

How a Vol­canic Erup­tion Helped Unleash the Black Death in Europe in 1347

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.