The Silk Road across Eurasia

The Silk Road was never a single road but a shifting network of caravan routes and sea lanes linking China, Central Asia, Persia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean for over 1,500 years. Along it moved silk and spices, gold and glass, but also religions, technologies, art and disease.

Turn on the trade-routes layer in ChronoAtlas and drag the timeline to see how the great empires - Han and Tang China, Persia, the Abbasids, the Mongols - rose and fell around these arteries of exchange, and how goods and ideas crossed a continent by relay.

Key facts

• Chinese silk reached Rome, where it was so prized that senators worried about the drain of gold to the east.
• The routes carried Buddhism from India into China and Central Asia along with the traders.
• The Pax Mongolica in the 13th century made the overland routes safer than they had been for centuries.
• The Black Death is thought to have travelled west along these same routes in the 14th century.