There was never a Silk Road. There was a web — thousands of kilometres of caravan track, mountain pass, oasis and sea lane, along which almost nobody travelled the whole way. And at the end of it, in a city on the Ganges, someone is still weaving the results.
✨ Fun fact: Nobody who ever walked it called it the Silk Road. The name was coined in 1877 by a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen — nineteen centuries too late to be of any use to the people carrying the silk.
Nobody walked it
This is the first thing to unlearn. There was no Marco Polo trudging from Xi’an to Venice with a bale of silk on his back — or rather there was, occasionally, but that was not how the trade worked.
Goods moved in relays. A Chinese merchant sold to a Sogdian at Dunhuang. The Sogdian carried it to Samarkand and sold it on. Someone else took it to Merv, someone else to Isfahan, someone else to Aleppo, and a Venetian bought it at the far end and pretended he had been to China.
Which is why nothing arrived unchanged. Every hand it passed through added something, dropped something, misunderstood something usefully. The Silk Road was not a pipeline. It was a very long game of telephone — and the mistakes are where the beauty comes from.
Why silk, of all things
Because it was the perfect cargo: extremely valuable, extremely light, it does not rot, and for roughly three thousand years only China could make it.
In Tang China, silk was money — taxes were assessed in bolts of it and soldiers were paid in it. And the technology was a capital secret: carrying silkworm eggs out of the country was forbidden on pain of death.
It escaped anyway, twice, and both stories are about smuggling. A Chinese princess, married into the kingdom of Khotan, is said to have hidden silkworm eggs in her headdress, where no border guard would dare look. And in the year 552, two monks walked into the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian carrying hollow bamboo canes — with silkworm eggs inside them.
A three-thousand-year monopoly ended in a walking stick. The full story is in The Crafts of China.
The cities in the middle
The road’s real wealth accumulated not at its ends but in its middle — in the caravan cities. Kashgar. Merv. Bukhara. Samarkand, where Timur later assembled a workshop out of craftsmen kidnapped from every city he conquered.
The consummate middlemen were the Sogdians, a Central Asian merchant people whose letters and account books survive, and whose language became the trade language of the road. They are the most important people in this story that almost nobody has heard of. See The Crafts of Uzbekistan.
It was never only silk
This is where it gets interesting, because the road ran in both directions and carried far stranger cargo than cloth.
Going east: Persian cobalt — which is why Chinese blue-and-white porcelain is blue. Indian indigo, which is why an old Uzbek suzani is that particular blue. Glass, horses, and — travelling out of India and up through Central Asia into China, Korea and Japan — Buddhism.
Going west: silk, obviously. But also paper. After the battle of Talas in 751, Chinese papermakers were taken prisoner and the technique reached Samarkand — which became the first great paper city outside China, and from there it went to Baghdad, to Spain, and eventually to a print shop in Mainz. Every book you have ever read owes something to that.
And also: the Black Death, which travelled the same roads as the silk. It is important to say so. The road was a nervous system, and nervous systems carry everything.
Motifs are the best travellers of all
Watch a single shape move. The boteh is drawn in Persia; it is woven into shawls in Kashmir; it is copied by mills in a Scottish town called Paisley, which gives it the name the whole world now uses; and it lands on a Banarasi border as the kalga.
Or the chintamani — three discs and a pair of stripes — which starts as a Buddhist symbol, drifts west and becomes the mark of Ottoman power.
Or the lotus, or the pomegranate, or the vine. Trace any motif far enough and you find it has a longer passport than you do.
India was not a stop on the road. India was a hub.
Here is what most Silk Road maps get wrong. They draw a line from China to Rome and leave India in the margin — and that is nonsense.
Indian cloth went everywhere, and had for a very long time:
- Pliny the Elder complained, in the first century, that Rome was haemorrhaging gold to the East for luxuries — and Indian cotton and spice were a large part of the bill.
- Gujarati block-printed cottons have been dug out of the rubbish dumps of Fustat, Old Cairo, dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Indian cloth was being worn in Egypt for hundreds of years, and we know it because someone threw it away.
- Patola from Patan went east to Indonesia and was treated there as sacred — heirloom cloth, used in ritual, not worn.
- Dhaka muslin went to Rome, to Baghdad, to Europe.
How it ended — and how it didn’t
The road’s golden age was the Mongol peace: one empire, from Korea to Hungary, and a merchant could cross it. When that broke, the overland routes fragmented.
Then, in 1498, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape and reached India by sea, and the economics changed forever. A ship carries what a thousand camels cannot. The caravan cities began their long, beautiful decline into the places we now visit as tourists.
But the traffic did not stop. It went to water. Chinese silk crossed the Pacific on the Manila galleons to Acapulco and on to Seville, where it was embroidered into the fringed shawl that Spain now considers utterly its own — the mantón de Manila. See The Crafts of Spain.
The road did not close. It got wet.
Which brings us home
Now look at a Banarasi.
The silk is a Chinese invention. The gold thread is zari, from the Persian zar. The design is a naqsha, and the man who ties it into the loom is a naqshband — both Persian words, and in sixteenth-century Yazd there was a celebrated silk designer whose actual professional title was naqshband. The buti descends from a Timurid-Mughal flower that came down from Samarkand with Babur. The drawloom that makes it possible is a cousin of the two-man loom they still use for cloud brocade in Nanjing.
Banaras is a Silk Road city. It simply has the bad luck of not being on most of the maps.
Everything on that saree came down a road, and the weaver at the loom this morning is the last person in a queue two thousand years long. That is not a metaphor. That is just the supply chain.
Where to see it
- China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou — the largest silk museum on earth.
- The Mogao Caves, Dunhuang — the great oasis library of the road.
- The Registan, Samarkand, and the old city of Bukhara.
- The British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London — including the Fustat fragments of Indian cloth.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- National Museum, New Delhi — and, at the other end of the story, the looms of Varanasi.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Silk Road?
Not a single road but a network of overland and maritime trade routes linking China, Central Asia, Persia, India, the Middle East and Europe. Goods moved in relays between many merchants rather than being carried end to end.
Who named the Silk Road?
The German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, in 1877. The people who used it never called it that.
What travelled on it besides silk?
Paper, cobalt, indigo, glass, horses, spices, gunpowder, printing — along with Buddhism, Islam, art motifs, and the plague.
Was India part of the Silk Road?
Centrally. Indian cotton, muslin and printed cloth were exported to Rome, Egypt, South-East Asia and beyond — Gujarati printed cottons have been excavated in Old Cairo — and Persian and Central Asian design entered India along the same routes.
How does the Silk Road connect to a Banarasi saree?
Almost completely. The silk is Chinese in origin; zari, naqsha and naqshband are Persian words; the buti descends from a Timurid-Mughal motif; and the drawloom is kin to the Chinese one. A Banarasi is a Silk Road object.
Sources & further reading
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road and Silk, Slaves and Stupas; the open-access collections of the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou. On the Fustat textile finds, see the Indian textile holdings of the Ashmolean Museum and the V&A.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: the crafts of China · the crafts of Iran · the crafts of Uzbekistan · the meaning of Kinkhab.
