The Silk Road's Origins

The term "Silk Road" (Seidenstraße) was coined only in 1877 by the German geographer and geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe the network, or more accurately networks, of overland trade routes connecting China with Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and ultimately the Mediterranean world — a retrospective label for a set of exchanges that had operated, in various forms, for many centuries before any contemporary participant would have recognized the phrase or conceived of a single continuous "road." The conventional origin point for the Silk Road's formal opening is the mission of the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian, dispatched around 138 BCE by Emperor Wu of Han primarily to seek a military alliance with the Yuezhi people against the Xiongnu confederation, a nomadic power that had long threatened Han China's northern frontier. Zhang Qian was captured and held by the Xiongnu for roughly a decade before escaping and eventually reaching Bactria and Ferghana, in what is now Central Asia, returning to the Han court around 125 BCE with detailed, first-hand geographic and political intelligence about the "Western Regions" (Xiyu) that had previously been almost entirely unknown to the Chinese court — an account preserved in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, completed c. 94 BCE).