Zhang Qian's Mission and the Opening of the Silk Road
Emperor Wu sent an envoy west in 138 BC to find allies against the Xiongnu, and the route he opened carried silk to Rome. Zhang Qian's mission was diplomatic and it failed. He was to find the Yuezhi, a people the Xiongnu had driven west, and propose a joint attack; he was captured on the way and held for ten years, married a Xiongnu wife, escaped, reached the Yuezhi in Bactria, and found them settled, prosperous and uninterested. He got home after thirteen years with one of his original hundred companions. What he brought back was information. He described states nobody in China had heard of — Ferghana, Bactria, Parthia, and reports of India and of a place he called Lijian that may be Rome — and, decisively, the tall horses of Ferghana, which the Han needed against Xiongnu cavalry. Wu sent expeditions to obtain them and eventually an army of some 60,000 men, of whom a fraction returned with about three thousand horses. Garrisons were pushed west along the Gansu corridor, and the trade followed the flag. Silk went west through intermediaries and nobody at either end knew where it came from; Pliny complained about the cost and thought it grew on trees. Buddhism came east along the same route within two centuries. The name Silk Road was coined by a German geographer in 1877. There was also no single road and no continuous journey. Goods passed through many hands across Central Asia, and the first recorded direct contact between the Roman and Chinese states is an embassy in 166 that may have been merchants inventing credentials.
- Year: 138 BCE
- Category: Diplomacy
