Maritime Silk Road
The sea lanes from Chinese ports to India, Arabia and East Africa that carried silk and porcelain for two millennia.
Overview
Monsoon sailing, mastered in the Indian Ocean by the 1st century CE, allowed predictable annual voyages, and ports such as Guangzhou and Quanzhou in China, Malacca, Calicut, Hormuz and Aden grew into a chain of entrepots. Chinese silk, porcelain and tea moved west while spices, aromatics, ivory and silver moved east. Zheng He's state expeditions of 1405 to 1433 marked the peak of official projection before Ming retrenchment, though private networks carried on. Europeans inserted themselves into these waters in the 1500s. Today the same seas carry the densest container traffic on earth, an unbroken commercial chain.
Related Topics
Silk Road
Not one road but a shifting web of paths stretching roughly 6,400 kilometers from Chang'an, modern Xian, through the oasis towns o...
Amber Road
Amber, fossilized resin prized for ornament and credited with healing powers, washed up along the Baltic and North Sea coasts and ...
Incense Route
Running up to 3,000 kilometers from the frankincense groves of Dhofar and Hadramawt, in modern Yemen and Oman, through the Hejaz t...
Royal Road of Persia
Built or organized under Darius I in the 5th century BCE, the road ran about 2,700 kilometers from the Aegean coast of Asia Minor ...