The Silk Road Network in Full

The term "Silk Road" (Seidenstrasse) was coined only in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, but the network it describes had already existed for close to two millennia by then. Its formal opening is conventionally dated to the diplomatic mission of the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian, sent west by Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty around 138 BCE to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu confederation. Zhang Qian did not secure the alliance, but his reports on the kingdoms of Ferghana, Bactria, and Parthia gave the Han court its first systematic knowledge of Central Asia, and within decades Han garrisons and the "Hanging Corridor" through Gansu extended Chinese control west toward the Tarim Basin, securing the oasis towns of Dunhuang, Kashgar, and Khotan that would anchor the eastern end of the network. The road was never a single path but a shifting mesh of caravan tracks skirting the Taklamakan Desert to the north and south, funneling through mountain passes such as the Torugart and the Wakhan Corridor before converging on Merv, Bukhara, and Samarkand in Central Asia and continuing to Antioch and the Mediterranean.