The Silk Roads facilitated the passage of not only goods to trade but also the knowledge and technology that went into producing them. Foodstuffs were often traded across Central Asia, and with them, an exchange in technologies and agricultural practices too, as well as new crops and even new breeds of animals.

The Silk Routes were of great importance in the passage of not only goods and crafts but also of religions and ideologies throughout Central Asia, the Near East and Europe. Buddhism spread from India into northern Asia, Mongolia, and China, whilst Christianity and Islam emerged and were disseminated by trade, pilgrims, and military conquest.  The literary, architectural and artistic effects of this can be traced today in the cultures of civilizations along the Silk Routes. 

Ghengis Khan and his Mongol armies rose to power at the end of the twelfth century, at a moment when few opposing rulers could put up much resistance to them.  The vast Mongol empire he created stretched from China to Europe, across which the Silk Routes functioned as efficient lines of communication as well as trade.

Trade routes wound over an astonishing area of land and sea, the Silk Route traditionally crossing overland and spices being transported more frequently by sea. Yet, in addition to merchandise, ideas, cultures, religions and technologies also passed along these routes, and were very important in the development of civilizations and empires across Central Asia.  The stronger these empires grew, the more capable they were of protecting the trade routes that supplied them. 

The expansion of empires in Central Asia went hand-in-hand with the need for fast and efficient communication on a wide-scale, and from the sixth century BC, the Persian and the Chinese emperors constructed networks of roads, highways and canals across the macro-region. These allowed rulers to administer to their lands, but traders benefitted from them too. Goods, ideas and skills passed along these roads, including technologies for designing weapons.   

The first explorers who travelled the Silk Route found it a difficult and hazardous journey, across the mountains, deserts and steppes of Central Asia. There are many different routes, skirting a variety of countries and these all came to be used to transport goods, both to the east and the west.  The eastern starting point was the Chinese city of Xi’an, and various routes continued as far as Turkey, Greece and Italy.

The expedition of Zhang Qian in 138 BC is considered to be the foundation of the first ‘Silk Road’. On his return to Han China, his most important achievement was to demonstrate the possibility for safe travel far to the west. From these beginnings developed interactions with civilizations across Asia and consequently the exchange of goods, especially of China’s most precious commodity, silk. The Romans, the Parthians and the Kushans all engaged in this trade. 

Silk Route trade became increasingly popular with European merchants from the thirteenth century onwards. The Route’s very nature changed as navigators found ways of trading directly with producers in the Far East, cutting out the ‘middlemen’ of merchants who had traversed different parts of Central Asia.

Political stability was important in keeping a flourishing trade along the Silk Roads and in regulating the goods traded. The collapse of the Chinese Han Empire in the third century AD and the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries disrupted trade by making these regions unsafe for travel.  Other powers took over their role, most notably the Sassanid Empire in Western Asia and the Sogdians further east, under whose administration the Silk Roads thrived once more.   

The voyages of medieval merchants to the Far East provided fuel for exotic stories about their travels on their return.  The earliest account dates from the fourth century BC, and includes many fabulous stories, whilst much later, in the thirteenth century, the explorer Marco Polo was also widely disbelieved with regard to his stories of the East. This element of mystery also helped to make eastern goods very fashionable in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.