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The name "Silk Road" suggests a single highway along which camels carried bales of silk from China to Europe. In reality, it was never one road, and silk was only one of many things it carried. The term itself is surprisingly modern: it was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe a vast network of trade routes that had linked East and West for well over a thousand years.
Regular contact along these routes began in the second century BC, when the Chinese Han dynasty sent an official named Zhang Qian on missions to Central Asia. He returned with knowledge of distant kingdoms and their famous horses, and trade soon followed. Over the following centuries, the routes stretched across deserts, mountains and grasslands, connecting China with India, Persia, Arabia and the Mediterranean.
Very few traders ever travelled the entire distance. Instead, goods passed from hand to hand, from one merchant to the next, often changing owners many times in the great market cities along the way, such as Samarkand. Each trader added a profit, which is one reason why Chinese silk was so expensive by the time it reached Rome.
Silk was certainly valuable, but the routes also carried spices, precious stones, glass, paper, horses and countless other goods. More important in the long run were the ideas and technologies that travelled with them. Buddhism spread from India into China along these routes, and the knowledge of how to make paper gradually moved westwards from China into the Islamic world and eventually into Europe. Music, art, foods and languages were exchanged too.
Not everything that travelled was welcome. Diseases could also move along trade routes, and many historians believe that the plague known as the Black Death spread from Central Asia towards Europe in the fourteenth century partly in this way.
The importance of the routes declined as sea travel became safer and cheaper, allowing goods to be transported in large quantities by ship. Today, however, the Silk Road remains a powerful symbol of connection between cultures, and in 2014 a section of the routes in China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List.