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 The origins of commercial ties and transport connections between Europe and Asia date back to the distant past. Marco Polo’s travels, Afanasy Nikitin’s Journey Beyond Three Seas, and the caravans of the legendary Great Silk Road were the first to expose Europeans to unique Chinese products and culture. The term “Silk Road” (Seidenstrasse) was pioneered by the German scholar Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen in his 1877 classic, China.
The Great Silk Road, which connected the East and the West for the first time in human history, became operational in the second half of the second century BC when the Chinese diplomat and traveler Zhang Qian discovered for the first time what for his compatriots became the Western Region – the nations of Central Asia. This was the meeting point of two roads that had previously existed separately from each other. One of them ran from the West, or Mediterranean countries, to Central Asia, and was laid by Hellenic troops during the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Seleucid General Demodamas; and the other went from the East, the Han Empire, to Central Asia, and was discovered by Zhang Qian who had traveled that region from North to South through Davan (Fergana), Sogd and Bactria.
In the era of the Xin and Han centralised empires, China became the world's main producer and exporter of silk. Silk was mostly consumed and appreciated by the higher estates in European countries. Silk was transported by caravans, many miles in length, that gave birth to a special infrastructure, including oases, medieval hotels (caravan serai), a system of armed security forces, and messenger services. All of that was made possible by the existence of this universal product silk. Silk is a light, compact and strong material, which makes it an ideal commodity for long-distance trade.
Silk is scarce, expensive, exceptionally beautiful and elegant, which makes the silk trade very profitable. Caravans loaded with silk cloth, yarn, furs, ceramics, ironware, enamel, cinnamon, ginger, bronze weapons and mirrors traveled from East to West. West-Tast traffic carried goods from Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean: camel wool carpets, glass, blankets, floor covers and luxury items. China and other regions on the Eurasian continent built a system of land trading routes which formed the Great Silk Road. Numerous oases existed along these caravan routes and cities grew and prospered along trading axes.
However, following a series of great maritime geographic discoveries in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, intercontinental land trading routes went into decline. In the 500 years which followed, all commercial and social links between Asia, on the one hand, and Europe and the rest of the world, on the other, relied on the seaways. |
