Silk

node

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.

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