The term 'Silk Road'

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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.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.