The Silk Road
The overland trade network linking China, Central Asia, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean from roughly the 2nd century BCE to the 15th century CE.
The Silk Road was not one road but a shifting web of caravan routes, roughly 6,400 kilometers end to end, linking Han-dynasty China through the oases of Central Asia to Persia, India, and the Mediterranean. Active in some form from about 130 BCE to 1450 CE, it carried silk westward and gold, glass, wool, and horses eastward — and it carried ideas, diseases, and technologies with the same traffic.
How the trade actually worked
Almost no merchant traveled the full route. Goods moved in relays through oasis cities — Dunhuang, Kashgar, Samarkand, Merv — with each leg financed and staffed locally, and profits compounding through middlemen. Silk moved west; from China came also paper and gunpowder in time; westward flowed glassware, wool, and silver. The Sogdians of Samarkand became the great intermediaries, their language the lingua franca of the route for centuries. Roman demand for silk was large enough that Pliny complained the trade drained Rome of gold.
What traveled besides silk
Buddhism entered China from India by this corridor, translated into Chinese by monks at Dunhuang; Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, and later Islam followed. Papermaking spread west and reached Europe via the Islamic world. The 14th-century wave of plague that devastated Europe is traced by many historians to the same overland corridors. The route's history is inseparable from the Mongol Empire's 13th-century unification, which made transcontinental travel briefly safe and brought Marco Polo's account to Europe.
The end of the route
The collapse came from the sea: Portuguese and Spanish ocean routes in the 15th–16th centuries carried bulk cargo at a fraction of caravan cost, and the overland relays lost their economics. The romantic name itself is a 19th-century invention (Ferdinand von Richthofen's "Seidenstrasse") — the historical reality was many branching routes named after specific commodities and cities. Related reading: the printing press, ocean currents, and cultural transmission of the printing revolution.
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central asia history silk road trade