60 Fun Facts About Silk Road

Roughly how long were the overland routes of the Silk Road?

Very few travellers ever covered the whole distance; goods passed through a chain of middlemen.

Which German geographer popularised the term 'Silk Road' (Seidenstraße) in 1877?

He made seven expeditions to China; his student Sven Hedin wrote the first book titled The Silk Road in 1938.

Which Chinese dynasty opened the Silk Road by expanding into Central Asia around 114 BCE?

The Great Wall was extended westward partly to protect the new trade route.

Which Han envoy's missions to the West, from 138 BCE, trail-blazed the Silk Road?

He was sent to find the Yuezhi as allies against the Xiongnu and came back with reports on Ferghana, Bactria and Parthia.

How long did the Xiongnu hold the Han envoy captive on his outward journey to the Yuezhi?

He married a Xiongnu wife, escaped, completed his mission and was captured again on the way home.

What were the 'heavenly horses' that drew Han China towards Ferghana?

China fought the Han–Dayuan war partly to get them.

The northern Silk Road began at Chang'an, which is now called what?

The Later Han moved the capital east to Luoyang; the route ran on through Gansu.

The overland Silk Road split into northern and southern branches to skirt which desert?

The branches rejoined at Kashgar; the desert's name is often glossed as 'go in and you won't come out'.

Which power acted as the vital bridge linking the Silk Road to the Mediterranean?

Rome's on-and-off wars with Parthia repeatedly choked the trade.

Which of these was a Western export sent east along the Silk Road?

Horses, camels, honey and gold went east too; tea, dyes, perfumes and porcelain came west.

Many Romans, including Seneca and Virgil, believed silk was obtained from what?

Pliny the Elder knew better, describing the silk moth weaving 'webs, like spiders'.

Why did the Roman Senate repeatedly, and vainly, try to ban the wearing of silk?

Seneca complained that silk dresses hid neither the body nor decency.

Per Chinese histories, in what year did the first Roman embassy reach China?

Roman glassware has been found in Han tombs and as far away as Silla Korea.

According to Strabo, how many ships a year sailed from Roman Egypt to India by the time of Augustus?

A Greek 'travel guide' to the route, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, was written around 60 CE.

Which Byzantine emperor sent monks to smuggle silkworm eggs out of the East in the 6th century?

The monks hid eggs or tiny larvae in their bamboo canes, and Byzantium won a European silk monopoly.

How did the two monks carry the silkworm eggs back to Constantinople?

Adult silkworms were too fragile to move, so eggs and young larvae were smuggled instead.

Which Central Asian people dominated Silk Road trade from the 4th to the 8th century?

A Sogdian embassy reached Justin II in 568 to set up direct silk trade bypassing Persia.

What did the Tang dynasty do to the Silk Road in 639?

The Tibetans took it in 678 and the Tang won it back in 699 under Empress Wu.

At which battle in 751 did the Abbasid Caliphate halt Chinese westward expansion?

Legend says Chinese prisoners from the battle brought a valuable craft to Samarkand.

Which craft is said to have reached the Islamic world through Chinese prisoners taken at a battle in 751?

The first paper mill in the Islamic world was reputedly founded at Samarkand.

Which city did the Abbasids build that became the most important on the Silk Road?

It overtook Damascus, which had itself overtaken Ctesiphon under the Umayyads.

Which Mongol ruler had Bukhara and Samarkand burned to the ground in the early 13th century?

Samarkand rose again in 1370 as the capital of a new empire.

Which ruler made Samarkand his capital in 1370 and filled it with forcibly moved artisans?

The Registan, Gur-e-Amir and Bibi-Khanym Mosque date from his dynasty and its successors.

Between which years did Marco Polo travel through Asia along the Silk Road?

He spent 17 years in Kublai Khan's service and never once used the phrase 'Silk Road'.

Which Moroccan traveller crossed the Silk Road from Tabriz between 1325 and 1354?

A Christian diplomat went the other way, from Beijing to the courts of Europe in 1287–88.

Which Christian diplomat left Beijing in the 1280s to seek alliances with Edward I, Philip IV and the Pope?

He was a Uyghur Christian of the Church of the East, representing the Ilkhan Arghun.

The Black Death is thought to have reached Europe from Central Asia via which animal reservoir?

One theory has Genoese traders carrying it west from Trebizond on the Black Sea.

Whose control of the overland routes from 1453 pushed Europeans to seek sea routes to Asia?

The article credits this with helping start the Age of Discovery.

Which people held a near-monopoly on Persian silk exports between 1700 and 1765?

The trade collapsed with the Safavid Empire in the 1720s.

Which religion's monasteries offered havens for travellers and spread most notably along the Silk Road?

Merchants funded monasteries and in return got somewhere to stay from city to city.

Which Chinese pilgrim's Silk Road journey to India was fictionalised as Journey to the West?

The 16th-century novel gave him a monkey king and a pig demon for company.

A stele of 781 records missionaries of which branch of Christianity arriving in China via the Silk Road?

It carried Syriac with it; Nestorian, Manichaean and Buddhist faiths all reached China this way.

The southern stretches of the route from Khotan were first used, as early as 5000 BCE, to trade what?

Some Chinese writers argue 'Jade Road' would have been the more accurate name.

The Tarim mummies, dated as early as 1600 BCE, suggest what about the region?

Their people may have spoken Indo-European languages later replaced by Turkic and Chinese.

A 6th-century BCE elite burial near which German city contained both Greek bronzes and Chinese silks?

Possible Chinese silk from around 1070 BCE has even turned up in ancient Egypt.

Who primarily established and operated the Maritime Silk Road in Southeast Asia?

They sailed sewn-plank, lashed-lug ships; China built its own trade ships only from the 10th century.

Which section of the Silk Road became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014?

The Zarafshan–Karakum corridor followed in 2023.

What is a caravanserai?

They were spaced roughly a day's journey apart, built around a courtyard with storerooms and stabling.

How many humps does the Bactrian camel, the classic Silk Road pack animal, have?

The wild Bactrian camel is a separate species and the Old World's only truly wild camelid.

The Mogao Caves, with their walled-up Library Cave, lie near which Silk Road oasis?

Its walled-up Library Cave, found in 1900, held tens of thousands of manuscripts.

What is the Diamond Sutra of 868, found in the Library Cave at Mogao?

A British-led expedition carried it and thousands of other manuscripts away in 1907.

Which Hungarian-born archaeologist reached the Library Cave in 1907 and removed thousands of manuscripts?

Pelliot came for France in 1908, then Japanese and Russian expeditions followed.

Who found the Library Cave at Mogao around 1900?

He had appointed himself caretaker and was trying to raise money to repair the statues.

Silk is spun from the cocoons of which insect?

Wild silks exist too, but their torn cocoons cannot be reeled into one long thread.

Silk production originated in China during which period?

Evidence goes back to the Yangshao culture of the 4th millennium BC.

Where did Xi Jinping first announce the 'Silk Road Economic Belt' in September 2013?

A month later in Indonesia he added a '21st-century Maritime Silk Road'; together they became the Belt and Road Initiative.

Warwick Ball calls the Silk Road a modern 'myth' partly because which commerce mattered far more to Rome?

William Dalrymple similarly argues for an India-centred 'Golden Road' before the 13th century.

What does 'relay trade' mean in the context of the Silk Road?

That is why almost nobody, not even Marco Polo, travelled the whole length.

The southern 'Karakoram route' survives as a paved highway through which pass linking Pakistan and China?

It crossed the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan and rejoined the northern route near Merv.

Which Han general led 70,000 troops west in the 1st century CE and reached the Caspian shore?

From there he sent the envoy Gan Ying towards Rome.

How much cheaper was pre-modern sea transport than overland, according to William Dalrymple?

Ships could also carry vastly more cargo and skirt war zones, at the price of storms and pirates.

Which blue stone flecked with gold was traded along the Silk Road and ground into powder for paint?

Artistic influences flowed both ways, with Greco-Buddhist art the most vivid product of the mixing in Central Asia.

Which Roman writer, unlike Seneca and Virgil, knew silk came from a moth rather than a tree?

Pliny wrote of the bombyx, or silk moth, while most Romans clung to the belief that silk was combed from trees.

Under the Umayyads, which city overtook Ctesiphon as the major trade centre before Baghdad was built?

Baghdad then became the most important city on the whole Silk Road.

One theory has Genoese traders carrying the Black Death west from which Black Sea entrepôt?

Strong evidence traces the plague to marmots in Central Asia, carried west to the Black Sea by Silk Road traders.

Whose party is said to have reached farthest east along the Silk Road from the Mediterranean?

The goal was probably to regularise contacts and cut out Parthian middlemen during a lull in Rome's wars with Parthia.

Han troops and Roman legionaries are recorded clashing at which battle of 36 BCE?

The Romans were probably captives or mercenaries of the Xiongnu; some suggest the Chinese crossbow reached Rome through such encounters.

Which Chinese province did the northern Silk Road pass through after leaving Shaanxi?

It then split into three routes, two skirting the Taklamakan to rejoin at Kashgar and one running north of the Tian Shan via Turpan and Almaty.

Frankincense, aloes and myrrh reached China along the northern Silk Road from which region?

Persia sent dates, saffron and pistachios, India sandalwood and Egypt glass bottles; China returned silk brocade, lacquer and porcelain.

Rabban Bar Sauma travelled to Europe as a representative of which Mongol ruler?

Arghun was a grandnephew of Kublai Khan; Bar Sauma sought alliances with Edward I, Philip IV, the Pope and the Byzantine emperor.