丝绸之路 Sīchóu zhī lù — The Silk Road

A road that was not a road, and what actually travelled on it

丝绸之路 is a nineteenth-century coinage — the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented Seidenstraße in 1877 — and it names something that was never a single road and was never mainly about silk. What existed was a shifting network of routes across Central Asia, running from the Chinese capital at Chang'an through the Gansu corridor, around the northern or southern edge of the Taklamakan desert, and on through the oasis cities to Persia, the Levant and eventually Rome. Very few people travelled its whole length. Goods moved in relays between merchants over generations, which is part of why the two ends of it knew so little about each other. Silk went west, and so did paper, peaches, rhubarb, gunpowder eventually, and Chinese technologies of printing and casting. Coming east: horses from Ferghana, which is what the Han envoy Zhang Qian was originally sent to find in the second century BC; glass, precious stones and metalwork; cotton, grapes, walnuts, carrots and pomegranates; and, most consequentially, religions. Buddhism arrived from India by this route and remade Chinese intellectual life; Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and later Islam all came the same way, which is the reason there has been a Muslim community in Xi'an since the Tang and why lesson 93's noodle shop exists. Diseases travelled too, including plague. The physical evidence is what 王老师 points at. The Mogao caves at Dunhuang hold some 492 decorated grottoes cut between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, with wall paintings covering tens of thousands of square metres and a sealed library cave whose manuscripts — in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Uyghur, Khotanese and Hebrew — were found in 1900 and then largely dispersed to European and Japanese collections, which remains a live grievance. The caves at Bingling, Maijishan and Yungang are others. All of them sit on the route, and all of them are Buddhist art made by people who had learned the iconography from somebody further west. And Alex's last line is the real point. The network depended entirely on water: the oasis cities existed because of snowmelt rivers off the Tian Shan and Kunlun, the stages between 驿站 were set by how far a camel could go between wells, and when rivers shifted or dried, cities were abandoned — Loulan and Niya are under sand. The route's long decline had several causes, including the growth of sea trade from the Song onwards and political fragmentation, but water was the constraint underneath everything. One note on the modern echo. 一带一路 — the Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013 — deliberately invokes this history, and you will see the phrase constantly in Chinese media. It is a large and contested programme of infrastructure investment, argued about inside and outside China on grounds of debt, geopolitics and development, and it is a different subject from the historical route. This lesson is about the history and the grammar.