Silk

Assembled from 12 blocks · 2 evidence · 9 related

1. Story
2. Woven textile from the cocoon of the domesticated moth Bombyx mori, produced in China for millennia before it moved west and the commodity that later gave the routes their modern name. Its importance was not only as a luxury: Han and Tang governments used bolts of silk as a unit of account, paying troops, officials and frontier allies in cloth, which pushed enormous quantities of it into circulation along the western frontier. Pliny the Elder complained that Rome drained a hundred million sesterces a year on eastern imports. Sericulture itself reached the Byzantine world in the sixth century, and India and Persia earlier, ending the eastern monopoly on production while the trade continued. A traded commodity, not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Silk
5. Connections
6. Han Empire
7. Sogdian merchant networks
8. Han establishes the Protectorate of the Western Regions
9. Silkworm cultivation reaches Byzantium
10. Evidence
11. Argues from excavated documents at seven Tarim and Central Asian sites that most recorded traffic was local and small-scale rather than long-distance luxury trade, and that Chinese government military expenditure was the dominant economic driver in the Tarim oases. A necessary corrective to the popular image of continuous caravans crossing the whole length.
12. The earliest and closest account of Zhang Qian's missions, the peoples and kingdoms he reported from Ferghana, Bactria and Parthia, and the Ferghana horses that prompted the Han campaigns of 104 to 101 BCE. Sima Qian was writing within living memory of the events.