Ferdinand von Richthofen

person

German geographer and geologist, 1833 to 1905, who travelled extensively in China between 1868 and 1872 and later held chairs at Bonn, Leipzig and Berlin. In the first volume of his study China, published in Berlin in 1877, he coined the term Seidenstrasse, silk road, for the routes he reconstructed between Han China and the West. He meant something narrower than the phrase now carries: a specific set of Han-period connections, described as a geographer describing terrain. Nobody who used the routes called them that, in any language, at any point in their working life. A person, not a place.

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