The Silk Road

For two thousand years a web of roads and sea-lanes ran from the heart of China to the shores of the Mediterranean, and along it moved almost everything that would make the modern world: silk and horses, glass and paper, gunpowder and porcelain, Buddhism and Islam, and — in the end — the plague that killed half of Europe. We call it the Silk Road. No one who traveled it ever did. E.B Cohen tells the whole story from the ground up, beginning with an uncomfortable admission: "the Silk Road" is a name a German geographer invented in 1877, and almost everything popular memory attaches to it is half wrong. There was never a single road. Silk was only one cargo among many, and often not the most important. Almost no one traveled the full length; goods and gods were passed hand to hand across a chain of middlemen — above all the Sogdians, a brilliant merchant people history has nearly forgotten. From the envoy Zhang Qian, sent west by a Han emperor in search of an alliance and heavenly horses, to the buried Sogdian mail found in the sand, to the cave at Dunhuang where a Daoist monk stumbled on a sealed library a thousand years old, to Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, to the Black Death riding the caravans, to China's twenty-first-century attempt to build the road all over again in steel and concrete — this is the Silk Road as it actually was: a highway for horses and disease as much as for luxury, and the first machine for connecting the world. Rigorous, vivid, and honest about how thin and strange the evidence can be, it corrects the myths in both directions and follows the road all the way to the present.