What if the Silk Road was a relay, not one road?

The “Silk Road” was never a highway from Chang’an to Rome. It was a network of oases, merchants, envoys, monks and states: goods changed hands, religions changed form, and when political control shifted, routes rerouted rather than simply vanishing.

What you will follow

This guided story moves the same world map through 13 sourced scenes. It begins at the opening rather than dropping you into an unexplained year.

How to read the map: The map uses discrete, approximate border snapshots. A narrated year may use the closest available snapshot, and schematic arrows show relationships rather than precise routes.

Related subjects on the map

• Silk Road exchange
• Han–Xiongnu wars
• Spread of Buddhism
• Tang–Tibetan wars
• An Lushan rebellion

Sources used by this story

1. Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2. Susan Whitfield, Life along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
3. Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
5. Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
6. Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
7. Erik Zurcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
8. Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).