The term 'Silk Road'

Assembled from 14 blocks · 2 evidence · 3 related

1. Story
2. A nineteenth-century German coinage applied retrospectively to a network that had no name, no owner and no map while it operated. Ferdinand von Richthofen introduced Seidenstrasse in 1877; the singular English form Silk Road spread through the twentieth century, and the plural Silk Roads is now preferred in scholarship and by UNESCO because it better describes a shifting web of corridors rather than a road. The name also distorts: silk was one commodity among many, and paper, horses, jade, glass, religions, techniques and disease all travelled the same corridors. Treating the term as an object rather than a fact makes the distortion visible. A concept, not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Ferdinand von Richthofen
5. The term 'Silk Road'
6. Connections
7. Ferdinand von Richthofen
8. Richthofen coins the term Seidenstrasse
9. Chang'an-Tianshan corridor inscribed by UNESCO
10. The term 'Silk Road'
11. Richthofen coins the term Seidenstrasse
12. Evidence
13. Ferdinand von Richthofen coins the term Seidenstrasse for the Han-period routes between China and the West. This is the origin of the name; no ancient or medieval source, in any language, calls the network a silk road.
14. A transnational serial property of 33 component sites across China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, covering roughly 5,000 km of corridor: capitals, palace complexes, trading settlements, Buddhist cave temples, beacon towers, passes and sections of the Great Wall. The property is defined as a network of routes, not a road.