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SEP 20, 2021
The Silk Road: 8 Goods Traded Along the Ancient Network

The vibrant network opened up exchanges between far-flung cultures
throughout central Eurasia.
DAVE ROOS
Prisma/UIG/Getty Images

The Silk Road wasn’t a single route, but rather a vibrant trade network
that crisscrossed central Eurasia for centuries, bringing far-flung
cultures into contact. Traveling by camel and horseback, merchants,
nomads, missionaries, warriors and diplomats not only exchanged exotic
goods, but transferred knowledge, technology, medicine and religious
beliefs that reshaped ancient civilizations.

The term “silk road” was coined in 1877 by Ferdinand Freiherr von
Richthofen, a German geographer, who focused on the flourishing silk
trade between the Chinese Han Empire (206 B.C. to 220 A.C.) and Rome.
But modern scholars recognize that the Silk Road (or Silk Roads)
continued to enable cross-continental trade until large-scale maritime
trade replaced overland caravans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Here are eight of the most important trade goods that fueled centuries
of Silk Road cultural exchange:

1. Silk
It’s called the Silk Road for a reason. Silk, first produced in China as
early as 3,000 B.C., was the ideal overland trade item for merchant and
diplomatic caravans that may have traveled thousands of miles to reach
their destinations, says Xin Wen, a historian of medieval China and
Inner Asia at Princeton University.

“Your carrying capacity was very limited, so you brought whatever was
most valuable, but also the lightest,” says Wen, whose upcoming book is
titled The King’s Road: Diplomatic Travelers and the Making of the Silk
Road in Eastern Eurasia, 850–1000. “Not only does silk fit these
characteristics exactly—high value, low weight—but it’s also extremely
versatile.”

The Roman elite prized Chinese silk as a luxuriously thin textile, and
later, when silk-making technology was brought to the Mediterranean,
artisans in Damascus created the reversible woven silk textile known as
damask.

But silk was more than clothing, says Wen. In Buddhist cultures it was
made into ritual banners or used as a canvas for paintings. In the
important Silk Road settlement of Turfan in Eastern China, silk was used
as currency, writes historian Valerie Hansen, and in the Tang Dynasty
(618 to 907 A.C.), silk was collected as a form of tax.

2. Horses
Terra cotta statues of a Qin Dynasty Horseman, on display in France 1992.
Terra cotta statues of a Qin Dynasty Horseman, on display in France 1992.

Patrick Aventurier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Horses were first domesticated in the steppes of Central Asia around
3700 B.C. and transported nomadic tribes that hunted and raided across
vast territories that bordered China, India, Persia and the
Mediterranean. Once the horse was introduced into agrarian societies, it
became a sought-after tool for transport, cultivation and cavalry,
writes historian James Millward in Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction.

The silk-for-horse trade was one of the most important and long-lasting
exchanges on the Silk Road. Chinese merchants and officials traded bolts
of silk for well-bred horses from the Mongolian steppes and Tibetan
plateau. In turn, nomad elites prized the silk for the status it
conferred or the additional goods it could buy.

Wen says that horses, by providing their own transportation, were the
ultimate high-value, low-weight commodity on the Silk Road, and were “a
very unique luxury item for the elite of the Eurasian world.”

It’s not surprising that the famous tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi
Huang (259–210 B.C.) not only contains 8,000 terra cotta warriors, but
also lifelike statues of 520 chariot horses and 150 cavalry horses.

3. Paper
Paper, invented in China in the second century A.C., first spread
throughout Asia with the dissemination of Buddhism. In 751, paper was
introduced to the Islamic world when Arab forces clashed with the Tang
Dynasty at the Battle of Talas. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid built a paper
mill in Baghdad that introduced paper-making to Egypt, North Africa and
Spain, where paper finally reached Europe in the 12th and 13th
centuries, writes Millward.

On the Silk Road, travelers carried paper documents that served as
passports to cross nomadic lands or spend the night at a caravansary, a
Silk Road oasis. But the most important function of paper along the Silk
Road was that it was bound into texts and books that transmitted
entirely new systems of thought, especially religion.

“It’s not a coincidence that Buddhism spread to China around the same
time that paper became prevalent in the region,” says Wen. “Same with
Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism. One of the central significances of the
Silk Road is that it served as a channel for the spread of different
ideas and cultural interactions, and much of that relied on paper.”

4. Spices
Cinnamon seller, miniature from Tractatus de herbis, 15th-century France.
Cinnamon seller, miniature from Tractatus de herbis, 15th-century France.

Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Spices from East and South Asia, like cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cassia
from China, were exotic and coveted trade items, but they didn’t
typically travel the overland routes of the Silk Road. Instead, spices
were mainly transported along an ancient maritime Silk Road that linked
port cities from Indonesia westward through India and the Arabian Peninsula..

Across the Silk Road, spices were valued for their use in cooking, but
also for religious ceremonies and as medicine. And unlike silk, which
could be produced wherever silk worms could be kept alive, many spices
were derived from plants that only grew in very specific environments.

“That means there’s a clearer origin for spice than for some of the
other luxury items, which adds to their value,” says Wen.

5. Jade
Millennia before there was such a thing as the Silk Road, China traded
with its western neighbors along the so-called Jade Road.

Jade, the crystalline-green gemstone, was central to Chinese ritual
culture. When jade supplies ran low in the 5th millennium B.C., it was
necessary for China to establish trade relations with western neighbors
like the ancient Iranian Kingdom of Khotan, whose rivers were rich with
hunks of nephrite jade, the best variety of jade for carving intricate
figurines and jewelry. The jade trade to China flourished throughout the
Silk Road period, as did trade in other semi-precious gems like pearls.

6. Glassware
Westerners often assume that most Silk Road goods traveled from the
exotic Far East westward to the Mediterranean and Europe, but Silk Road
trade went in all directions. For example, archeologists excavating
burial mounds in China, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines have found
Roman glassware among the prized possessions of the Asian elite. The
distinct type of soda-lime glass made in Rome and fashioned into vases
and goblets would have eagerly been traded for silk, which Romans were
obsessed with.

7. Furs
The taiga is the vast stretch of evergreen forest that runs through
Siberia in Eurasia and continues into Canada in North America. In the
days of the Silk Road, writes Millward, the taiga attracted hardy bands
of trappers who harvested fox, sable, mink, beaver and ermine pelts.
This northern “fur road” supplied luxurious coats and hats to Chinese
dynasties and other Eurasian elites. Millward writes that Genghis Khan
cemented one of his earliest political alliances with a gift of a sable
coat. By the 17th century, in the waning days of the Silk Road, rulers
from the Chinese Qing Dynasty could buy furs from both Siberian and
Canadian trappers.

8. Slaves
Enslaved people were a tragically common “trade good” along the Silk
Road. Raiding armies would take captives and sell them to private
traders who would find buyers in far-flung ports and capitals from
Dublin in the West to Shandong in Eastern China, writes Silk Road
historian Susan Whitfield. The slaves became servants, entertainers and
eunuchs for royal courts.

Wen says that while enslavement was pervasive in premodern Eurasia along
the Silk Road, none of these kingdoms or societies could be classified
as “slave-based” in the same way that the African slave trade operated
in the New World.

“Slaves were more like an ornament of the life of the Silk Road elite,”
says Wen, “Not a major economic source.”

BY DAVE ROOS
Dave Roos is a freelance writer based in the United States and Mexico. A
longtime contributor to HowStuffWorks, Dave has also been published in
The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek.