The roads that moved.

c. 550–130 BC

The roads before the road

Persia builds a state highway from the Aegean to Iran; Alexander stitches Greek cities as far as the Syr Darya; jade and silk are already moving across the steppe — but nobody in China knows the West exists.

West — Achaemenid Persia, then the Seleucids. Middle — Bactrian Greeks, Saka and Scythian nomads, the Yuezhi. East — the Warring States, then Qin and early Han, with no contact west of Gansu.

• The Royal Road. Herodotus describes the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa: 111 stations, about 2,500 km, three months on foot, and relay couriers whom neither snow nor rain could stop (5.52–54; 8.98). Fact.
• Alexander's farthest city. Alexandria Eschate — «the farthest» — goes up on the Syr Darya at modern Khujand in 329 BC (Arrian 4.1.3). At Ai-Khanoum on the Oxus, dug in 1965–78, a Greek city had a gymnasium and the Delphic maxims cut in stone. Fact.
• Silk in the Altai ice. The frozen Pazyryk tombs, 5th–3rd century BC, hold Chinese silk embroidery, a Chinese mirror and the world's oldest pile carpet, Persian in style. Silk and Persian goods met on the steppe two centuries before Zhang Qian. Fact.
• The jade road ran east first. Khotan nephrite was reaching Chinese courts by the late Shang (Fu Hao's tomb, c. 1200 BC). Sourcing the earliest pieces to Khotan is inference — some may be Chinese nephrite; by the Han it is fact. Inference.
• The Yuezhi are driven west. Around 176–160 BC the Xiongnu push the Yuezhi out of Gansu to the Ili and then into Bactria (Shiji 123) — the migration that will make the Kushans. Fact.

What moved

• Khotan jade (goods; Khotan → Chang'an). Kunlun river jade was reaching Chinese courts by the late Shang — Fu Hao's tomb, c. 1200 BC — long before any silk went west. Whether those earliest pieces are Khotan stone is inference; by the Han it is fact, and the Shiji names «the jade of Yutian». The pre-Han line is ours. Evidence: Fu Hao tomb jades (c. 1200 BC); Warring States and Han jade; Shiji 123 on the jade of Yutian. Inference.
• Silk to the Altai (goods; Chang'an → Pazyryk). A silk saddle-cover with phoenix embroidery and a Chinese mirror lie in Pazyryk kurgan 5, frozen since the 5th–3rd century BC. Claims of silk in a 6th-century BC German grave and in Egyptian mummy hair are contested. No road is attested: the line is drawn dotted, and Chang'an stands in for the looms. Evidence: Pazyryk kurgan 5 silk and mirror (Rudenko 1970); Hochdorf and Egyptian claims doubtful. Fact.
• Persian carpet and textiles to the Altai (goods; Hamadan → Pazyryk). The world's oldest pile carpet, Achaemenid in style with a border of horsemen, was buried in the Altai ice beside Chinese silk. Persia and China met on the steppe two centuries before Zhang Qian. The steppe leg is ours; Hamadan stands in for Achaemenid Iran. Evidence: Pazyryk pile carpet with Achaemenid-style horsemen border (Rudenko 1970). Fact.
• Lapis lazuli (goods; Ai-Khanoum → Susa). One mine in Badakhshan — Sar-i Sang — fed the lapis of Ur, Tutankhamun's mask and the Persepolis foundation tablets, which list Sogdian lapis among the palace's materials. The mines and the finds are fact; the road between them is ours, and Ai-Khanoum stands in for the mine. Evidence: Sar-i Sang mines; lapis at Ur and in Tutankhamun's mask; Persepolis foundation tablets on Sogdian lapis. Fact.
• Horses and horsemanship (animal; Pazyryk → Chang'an, Susa). In 307 BC King Wuling of Zhao put his army in nomad trousers and on horseback; Persia's cavalry learned from the Saka the same way. The steppe taught both ends of the map to ride. The Iranian leg is not drawn; Pazyryk stands in for the steppe. Evidence: Shiji 43 on King Wuling's adoption of nomad cavalry dress, 307 BC; Persian cavalry from the Saka. Fact.
• The royal couriers — the idea of a state post (idea; Susa → Sardis). Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness stops them, says Herodotus of the Great King's relay riders. The angareion is the first state post on the map, and the Royal Road is the one line here drawn from a single text. Evidence: Herodotus 5.52–54 (the stages), 8.98 (the couriers); Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.6.17. Fact.
• Greek language, coinage and art (idea; Sardis → Ai-Khanoum, Balkh, Taxila). At Ai-Khanoum a Greek named Clearchus carved the Delphic maxims four thousand kilometres from Delphi; Greco-Bactrian coins are the finest of the Hellenistic world, and the Indo-Greek kings seeded the Buddha image of Gandhara. Alexander's own march took another line — this is the settlers' road. Evidence: Ai-Khanoum inscriptions; Greco-Bactrian coinage; Menander and the Milindapañha. Fact.
• Peoples on the move: the Yuezhi west, the Saka south (people; Zhangye → Balkh, Taxila). Beaten by the Xiongnu around 176 BC — the chanyu made their king's skull a cup — the Yuezhi leave the Hexi grasslands for the Ili and then, around 130 BC, cross the Oxus into Bactria. The Saka they displace go south into Taxila and Sistan. The Shiji gives the stages, not a line. Evidence: Shiji 123; Hanshu 96A on the Sai (Saka). Fact.
• Zoroastrianism along the Iranian roads (idea; Hamadan → Samarkand, Bukhara). Fire altars, ossuaries and the goddess Nana are attested in Sogdiana later; when the faith first reached the Zerafshan is unknown. Iran in this era is fact, Sogdiana this early is inference. Evidence: Achaemenid inscriptions; Sogdian Zoroastrian practice attested in later centuries. Inference.
• The Bactrian camel as pack animal (animal; Merv → Susa, Chang'an). Domesticated in Iran and Turkmenistan by the third millennium BC; on the Apadana reliefs at Persepolis, Bactrians lead two-humped camels to the Great King. The caravan animal of the whole map, before there were caravans. Merv stands in for the breed's homeland. Evidence: Persepolis Apadana reliefs; domestication in Iran/Turkmenistan by the 3rd millennium BC. Fact.

c. 130 BC – AD 220

The opening

Zhang Qian's report gives the Han a map; Han armies and garrisons push to the Tarim; four empires now sit end to end and silk reaches the Mediterranean — through middlemen, never directly.

West — Rome at Antioch, Palmyra and Alexandria. Middle-west — Parthia at Ctesiphon and the Kushan Empire in Bactria and Gandhara. Middle-east — the Tarim city-states under the Han Protectorate of the Western Regions from 60 BC. East — Han China at Chang'an, then Luoyang after AD 25.

• Zhang Qian. Leaves Chang'an in 138 BC with more than a hundred men, is held by the Xiongnu for about ten years, reaches Ferghana, Sogdiana and Bactria, and returns in 126 BC with one companion (Shiji 123). Fact.
• The War of the Heavenly Horses. The Han fight Ferghana in 104–101 BC for its bloodstock; grape and alfalfa seed come home with the envoys (Shiji 123). Fact.
• The Hexi commanderies. Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan and Dunhuang, with the Jade Gate, are fixed in 121–111 BC; the Protectorate of the Western Regions follows in 60 BC (Hanshu 96). Fact.
• Rome pays, and complains. Pliny grumbles that India, the Seres and Arabia drain Rome of a hundred million sesterces a year (NH 12.41); Seneca sneers at see-through silk on Roman women. The texts are real; the sum is rhetoric. Fact.
• The empires that never met. Gan Ying, sent west in AD 97, reaches «the western sea» and is talked out of the crossing by Parthian sailors. In AD 166 a party claiming to be from «Andun» arrives by sea with ivory, rhino horn and tortoiseshell — not Roman court goods. Merchants, not envoys, is the standard inference. Inference.

What moved

• Silk as state payment to the steppe (goods; Chang'an → Noin-Ula, Balkh, Samarkand). The biggest silk flow of the era is not trade but money: thousands of bolts a year paid to the Xiongnu under the heqin treaties — eight thousand bolts and six thousand jin of floss by 51 BC — and re-traded west. A Xiongnu prince at Noin-Ula lies with Han silk, a lacquer cup dated 2 BC and Bactrian wool. The resale line is inferred from those textiles. Evidence: Shiji 110 (heqin gifts); Hanshu 94B; Noin-Ula tombs: Han silk, lacquer cup inscribed 2 BC, Bactrian and Parthian wool. Fact.
• Silk to Parthia and Rome (goods; Chang'an → Ctesiphon, Palmyra, Antioch). Han damask lies in the tombs of Palmyra; Pliny complains and Seneca sneers. That silk reached Rome is fact; this line is a composite, and the Periplus says much of it went another way — Bactria to Barygaza and then by sea. Evidence: Palmyra tomb silks (Schmidt-Colinet 2000); Pliny NH 6.20, 12.41; Seneca, De beneficiis 7.9; Periplus 64. Fact.
• Ferghana's «heavenly horses» (animal; Osh → Chang'an). In 104–101 BC Li Guangli marches an army to Ferghana for its bloodstock and comes home with «several tens of the best horses and three thousand of lesser». His army walked this line. Evidence: Shiji 123: the campaigns of 104–101 BC. Fact.
• Grape vine and alfalfa (goods; Osh → Chang'an). The envoys bring seed home from Ferghana; the palace plants the vines for wine and the alfalfa for the new horses. Evidence: Shiji 123: envoys bring seed; planted by the palace for the horses. Fact.
• Roman glass, Indian ivory, Chinese lacquer — one Kushan storeroom (goods; Alexandria, Mathura, Chang'an → Begram). Two sealed rooms at Begram, the Kushan summer capital, held Roman glass, Indian ivory and Chinese lacquer together — the whole map in one cupboard. The glass and ivory roads are inference; the lacquer line is ours and not drawn. Evidence: Begram hoard, rooms 10 and 13, sealed 1st–2nd c. AD (Hackin 1939/1954; Mehendale). Fact.
• Gold coin: Roman aurei to India, Kushan gold on the Roman standard (goods; Alexandria, Peshawar → Muziris, Barygaza, Peshawar). Roman gold pours into Tamil Nadu — hoards at Kodumanal and Arikamedu — and around AD 100 Vima Kadphises strikes Kushan gold on the Roman weight standard. The Periplus names the ports. Evidence: Periplus 49, 56; Tamil Nadu hoards (Kodumanal, Arikamedu); Vima Kadphises gold c. AD 100. Fact.
• Pepper, spices, pearls (goods; Muziris → Alexandria). A single ship's cargo from Muziris, valued on a surviving papyrus at nearly seven million sesterces — a senator's fortune — sailed the monsoon to Egypt. Most historians think that by the first century this route carried more Roman trade than the whole overland system — Strabo counts 120 ships a year leaving one Red Sea port for India. Evidence: Periplus 56; Pliny NH 6.26; the Muziris papyrus, P.Vindob. G 40822 (Rathbone 2000). Fact.
• Buddhism enters China (idea; Peshawar, Taxila, Balkh, Ctesiphon → Luoyang, Chang'an). A Han prince keeps Buddhist rites in AD 65; a Parthian, An Shigao, is translating at Luoyang by 148 and a Kushan, Lokakṣema, in the 170s. Which road the monks took is unrecorded; a sea road through India is also possible. Evidence: Hou Hanshu 42 (Prince Ying, AD 65); An Shigao at Luoyang 148; Lokakṣema 170s. Fact.
• Han soldier-farmers to the Tarim; monks and merchants to Gansu (people; Chang'an → Dunhuang, Yumen, Loulan, Wuwei, Luoyang). Some sixty-five thousand wooden slips from Juyan and Dunhuang record the garrison colonies' rations, camel counts and envoy hospitality bills. Kushan and Parthian monks go the other way to Luoyang; Sogdian and Indian merchants to Gansu. Endpoints are fact, the lines are inference. Evidence: Juyan and Dunhuang wooden slips (Han garrison archives); Hou Hanshu 88. Fact.
• Diplomatic near-misses: Gan Ying west, the «Andun» party by sea (people; Kucha → Ctesiphon, Luoyang). Gan Ying, sent west by Ban Chao in AD 97, reaches the Gulf and is told the crossing takes two years, three with bad winds — and turns back. In 166 a party «from Andun» arrives by sea at Rinan with tortoiseshell and rhino horn. Neither empire ever met the other. Evidence: Hou Hanshu 88. Fact.
• Bactrian camels in Han service (animal; Turfan, Noin-Ula → Dunhuang, Chang'an). The Juyan slips count camels at the frontier; Han tomb figurines show them laden; the Xiongnu send them as tribute. The two-humped camel is the reason the Tarim road works at all. Evidence: Han tomb figurines; Juyan slips recording camel counts; Shiji 110 (Xiongnu tribute camels). Fact.
• The Antonine «plague», 165–180 (disease; Ctesiphon → Antioch). Lucius Verus's troops catch it at Seleucia-Ctesiphon and carry it to Antioch and Rome — possibly smallpox. Its ultimate origin is unknown and nothing ties it to any road on this map. Drawn dotted, as a «possibly». Evidence: Galen's descriptions; Ammianus 23.6.24 on Seleucia; no evidence tying it to a Silk Road corridor. Inference.

c. 220–755

The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries

China splits, the steppe reshuffles from Xiongnu to Rouran to Türks, and the Sogdian merchant diaspora from Samarkand becomes the network's connective tissue. Buddhism flows east on the same roads, the Tang reunify and push to the Pamirs, and the western half of the map is Sasanian, then, from 651, Islamic.

West — Byzantium at Constantinople and Sasanian Persia at Ctesiphon to 651, then the Umayyad caliphate. Middle — Hephthalites, then the Türk Khaganate from 552, Sogdian city-states, Tibet rising after 640. East — the Sixteen Kingdoms, Northern Wei and Sui, then Tang from 618 with the Anxi Protectorate at Kucha from 658.

• The Ancient Letters. Five Sogdian letters of c. 313, found undelivered in a Han watchtower west of Dunhuang, report that Luoyang has been sacked «by the Huns» and that the Sogdian colonies of Luoyang and Ye are dead. Fact.
• Pilgrims both ways. Faxian walks to India in 399–412 and sails home; Xuanzang walks both ways in 629–645 and writes the Record of the Western Regions. Fact.
• Silkworm eggs in a cane. Around 552 monks bring silkworm eggs to Justinian hidden in a cane (Procopius, Wars 8.17); Theophanes says it was a Persian. Byzantium has its own silk industry by the 570s. The event is text; the smuggler's identity is disputed. Fact.
• Maniakh goes to Constantinople. In 568 the Sogdian Maniakh leads a Türk embassy to sell silk to Byzantium after the Sasanians bought a consignment and burned it in front of the envoys (Menander Protector fr. 10). Fact.
• Forty bolts a horse. The Tang buy horses from the Uyghurs for silk — roughly forty bolts a horse, tens of thousands of horses a year after 758 — and pay their soldiers at Turfan in bolts. Silk went west because it was money. Fact.
• Talas, then An Lushan. In 751 an Abbasid–Karluk force beats a Tang army near Taraz; in 755 the Sogdian-Turkic general An Lushan rebels and the Tang abandon the Tarim. Talas did not by itself end Tang Central Asia; An Lushan did. Fact.

What moved

• The Sogdian merchant diaspora (people; Samarkand, Bukhara, Panjikent → Wuwei, Dunhuang, Turfan, Chang'an, Luoyang). Colonies from Samarkand to Luoyang, run by caravan chiefs whose office — sabao — is written into Chinese law. The Ancient Letters of 313 name the stations themselves: Samarkand, Dunhuang, Guzang, Jincheng, Luoyang, Ye. Evidence: The Ancient Letters (313); An Jia (579) and Wirkak (580) tombs at Xi'an; de la Vaissière 2005. Fact.
• Silk as Tang money (goods; Chang'an → Turfan, Dunhuang, Kucha, Ordu-Baliq). Tang soldiers at Turfan are paid their salaries in bolts; the Turfan price lists are quoted in silk; after 758 the state buys Uyghur horses at about forty bolts a horse, tens of thousands of horses a year. Silk went west because it was money. Evidence: Turfan (Astana) documents; Xin Tangshu 51; Hansen 2012 ch. 3–4; Beckwith 1991. Fact.
• Uyghur and Türk horses, and camels, for the Tang (animal; Ordu-Baliq, Beshbaliq → Chang'an, Lanzhou). The Tang state herds pass seven hundred thousand head in the 660s; sancai camels carry Sogdian musicians in the tombs. The horses are fact; the road they walked is inference. Evidence: Xin Tangshu 50 on the state herds; Tang sancai camel figurines with Sogdian musicians. Fact.
• Silkworm eggs to Byzantium, c. 552 (technology; Khotan, Samarkand → Constantinople). Monks from «Serinda» bring the eggs to Justinian hidden in a cane, says Procopius; Theophanes says it was a Persian. Where Serinda was — Sogdiana, Khotan, India? — is debated, and no source gives the route. Drawn dotted. Evidence: Procopius, Wars 8.17.1–8; Theophanes of Byzantium in Photius, Bibliotheca 64. Fact.
• The silk marketing war: Sogdians, Türks, Sasanians, Byzantines (goods; Suyab, Samarkand → Constantinople, Ctesiphon). Khosrow's court buys the Türks' silk and burns it in front of the envoys. So in 568 the Sogdian Maniakh takes a Türk embassy round Persia — north of the Caspian and through the Caucasus, says Menander — to sell it in Constantinople. The rest of the line is ours. Evidence: Menander Protector fr. 10 (Maniakh 568; Zemarchus's return embassy). Fact.
• Sasanian silver and Byzantine gold into China (goods; Constantinople, Ctesiphon → Turfan, Chang'an). More than a thousand Sasanian drachms have been found in China; Byzantine solidi lie in the Astana tombs at Turfan, often pierced for wear or locally imitated. The coins are found along this line; the exact route is inference. Evidence: >1,000 Sasanian drachms in China; solidi at Astana and Guyuan (Thierry & Morrisson 1994). Fact.
• Paper westward — before Talas (technology; Chang'an, Luoyang → Loulan, Niya, Dunhuang, Turfan, Samarkand, Panjikent). The Ancient Letters of 313 are themselves on paper; Loulan and Niya have paper fragments of the 3rd–4th century; the Mount Mugh archive in Sogdiana is on paper in the 720s. Paper crossed Asia four centuries before the battle of Talas. Evidence: Ancient Letters on paper (313); Loulan/Niya paper fragments; Mount Mugh documents (Bloom 2001). Fact.
• Buddhism at flood tide: translators, caves, pilgrims (idea; Peshawar, Taxila, Pataliputra → Kucha, Dunhuang, Chang'an). Kumarajiva runs the translation school at Chang'an from 401; the caves at Kizil, Mogao, Yungang and Longmen go up; Faxian and Xuanzang walk to India and Yijing sails. Texts and art come east by Xuanzang's home road; the pilgrims go the other way. Evidence: Kumarajiva at Chang'an 401; Kizil, Mogao, Yungang, Longmen; Faxian, Xuanzang, Yijing. Fact.
• The Church of the East reaches China (idea; Ctesiphon, Antioch → Chang'an, Turfan). The Xi'an stele of 781 records the monk Aluoben's arrival in 635 and a monastery of «Da Qin» from 638; Christian texts turn up at Dunhuang and a Sogdian Christian library at Bulayïq near Turfan. Aluoben's road is unrecorded. Evidence: Xi'an Stele (781); Christian texts at Dunhuang; the Bulayïq library near Turfan. Fact.
• Manichaeism (idea; Ctesiphon, Samarkand → Chang'an, Ordu-Baliq, Turfan). Mani's religion reaches the Tang court in 694 and converts the Uyghur khagan in 762/3 — the only Manichaean state in history. Its books and paintings survived at Turfan. Evidence: Tang record of arrival 694; Karabalgasun inscription on the khagan's conversion; Manichaean books at Turfan. Fact.
• Islam arrives at the western edge (idea; Ctesiphon → Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand). Ctesiphon falls in 637, Merv in 651, Bukhara in 709, Samarkand in 712. Kashgar and the Tarim wait until the next era. Evidence: The Arab conquest of Merv 651, Bukhara 709, Samarkand 712. Fact.
• Slaves in the oasis markets (people; Samarkand → Turfan, Niya). A Turfan contract of 639 records a Sogdian selling a Samarkand-born girl, Upach, for 120 silver coins; the Niya deeds of the 3rd century sell people alongside camels and wine. The contracts name the parties. Evidence: Turfan contract of 639 (Upach); Niya Kharoshthi sale deeds (3rd c.). Fact.
• The stirrup, steppe to Europe (technology; Ordu-Baliq → Constantinople). Paired iron stirrups appear in 4th–5th-century tombs in north-east China and Korea, in Avar graves in Hungary from the 560s, and in a Byzantine manual by 600. The finds are dated dots; the line between them is ours, and the origin pin is a proxy. Evidence: Chinese and Korean tombs (4th–5th c.); Avar graves in Hungary from the 560s; the Strategikon c. 600. Inference.
• Wine, glass, «golden peaches», whirl dancers and musicians (goods; Samarkand → Chang'an). A Turfan scale-fee register of the 620s catches the traffic in transit — silver, gold, silk thread, aromatics, sal ammoniac, brass — nearly every trader Sogdian. Samarkand sends the Tang court its golden peaches; its dancers spin at the Western Market. Evidence: Turfan scale-fee register c. 620s (Skaff 1998); Cefu yuangui on Samarkand's tribute peaches; Schafer 1963. Fact.
• The Plague of Justinian, 541 (disease; Suyab → Alexandria, Constantinople). Ancient DNA puts the strain's nearest relatives in Tian Shan rodents; the plague reaches Pelusium in 541 and Constantinople in 542. The route between them is undocumented — the Red Sea trade is the usual guess — so this is a dotted question mark, with Suyab standing in for the Tian Shan reservoir. Evidence: Procopius, Wars 2.22; aDNA on Tian Shan rodent reservoirs (Wagner et al. 2014; Eroshenko et al. 2017). Inference.

c. 750–1220

Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road

The centre of gravity moves west and north: Abbasid Baghdad, founded 762, and Samanid Bukhara pull silver, slaves and furs down the Volga and across the Kazakh steppe; the Tarim turns Turkic and, in the west, Muslim; Song China turns to the sea; the overland road between them is segmented by Uyghur Qocho, Tangut Xixia and the Kara-Khitai.

West — the Abbasids at Baghdad, then Buyids and Seljuks; Byzantium. Middle-west — Samanids at Bukhara, Khwarazm, Ghaznavids, Kara-Khanids at Kashgar, Kara-Khitai. Middle-east — Uyghur Qocho at Turfan, Tangut Xixia in the Hexi corridor. East — Song China, and Liao north China, the origin of the name «Cathay». North — Khazars at Itil, then the Volga Bulghars and the Rus.

• Ibn Fadlan on the Volga. In 921–22 the caliph's envoy travels Baghdad → Bukhara → Khwarazm → Bulghar on the Volga and describes Rus fur-and-slave traders and a ship burial. Fact.
• Silver north, furs south. Samanid dirhams minted at Samarkand and Tashkent turn up by the tens of thousands in hoards on Gotland and across Russia and the Baltic. The north paid in furs and slaves. Fact.
• Paper for a bureaucracy. A paper mill runs in Baghdad by the 790s and the caliphate's offices switch from papyrus and parchment to paper. The date is approximate. Fact.
• The sealed library. The Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest dated printed book, is sealed into Mogao Cave 17 at Dunhuang around 1000–1030 with forty thousand other documents. Why the cave was sealed — Khotan's fall to the Kara-Khanids in 1006? — is inference. Inference.
• Sixty thousand pots in one hull. The Arab dhow wrecked at Belitung around 826 carried some sixty thousand Chinese ceramics. The sea route's volume already dwarfs any caravan. Fact.

What moved

• Furs, walrus ivory, amber, honey and wax (goods; Bulghar, Kiev → Urgench, Bukhara, Baghdad). Sable, squirrel, ermine, beaver and fox from the Rus forests, sold at Bulghar and carried down through Khwarazm — Ibn Fadlan's road in reverse. Muqaddasi's list of Khwarazm's exports is a caption in itself. Evidence: Ibn Fadlan 921–22; al-Muqaddasi (c. 985) on Khwarazm's exports; Ibn Khurradadhbih on the Rus. Fact.
• Samanid silver dirhams north (goods; Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara → Bulghar, Kiev). Hundreds of thousands of dirhams struck at Samarkand, al-Shash and Bukhara lie in hoards across Russia, the Baltic and Gotland. The Bulghar leg is fact; mint to hoard is inference. Evidence: Dirham hoards in Russia, the Baltic and Scandinavia (Noonan; Kovalev); mints of Samarkand, al-Shash, Bukhara. Fact.
• Slaves: Turkic ghilman south, Saqaliba via the Rus (people; Otrar, Tashkent, Kiev → Baghdad, Bukhara). Al-Mu'tasim's Turkish guard at Samarra in the 830s comes from the steppe markets; Ibn Fadlan watches the Rus sell girls at Bulghar; Ibn Khurradadhbih's Radhanites carry eunuchs and slave girls. Endpoints are fact, the lines inference. Evidence: Samarra's Turkish guard (830s); Ibn Fadlan on the Rus at Bulghar; Ibn Khurradadhbih on the Radhanites. Fact.
• Paper industrialised: Samarkand → Baghdad → Cairo (technology; Samarkand → Baghdad, Alexandria). A mill runs in Baghdad by the 790s and the caliphate switches to paper; Damascus, Cairo, then Spain and Italy follow. The story that Chinese prisoners from Talas taught Samarkand to make paper is an 11th-century tradition — paper was already in Sogdiana. What changed after 750 was the market. Evidence: Baghdad mill by the 790s; al-Tha'alibi (c. 1000) on Samarkand paper and the Talas prisoners; Bloom 2001. Fact.
• Chinese ceramics to the Gulf and Egypt (goods; Hangzhou, Guangzhou → Siraf, Basra, Alexandria). The Belitung dhow, wrecked around 826, carried some sixty thousand Changsha bowls; sherds lie at Siraf, Samarra, Fustat and Nishapur. A sea flow — almost none went overland. Hangzhou stands in for the kilns. Evidence: Belitung wreck c. 826; sherds at Siraf, Samarra, Fustat, Nishapur. Fact.
• Indian numerals, Greek science, Persian letters — the Baghdad translation movement (idea; Mathura, Antioch, Rey, Merv → Baghdad, Bukhara). Al-Khwarizmi writes with Indian numerals around 825; Ibn Sina and al-Biruni work in Bukhara and Khwarazm around 1000; Fibonacci carries the numerals to Pisa in 1202. Mathura stands in for India's schools; the people and texts are named. Evidence: Al-Khwarizmi c. 825; Ibn Sina and al-Biruni c. 1000; Fibonacci 1202. Fact.
• Islam east: Bulghar 922, Kashgar c. 960, Khotan 1006 (idea; Baghdad, Bukhara → Bulghar, Kashgar, Khotan, Mathura). Ibn Fadlan's embassy converts the Volga Bulghars in 922; the Kara-Khanids take Islam around 960 and Khotan in 1006; Ghaznavid raids reach India from 1001. The dates are fact; the missionaries' roads are inference. Evidence: Ibn Fadlan; Kara-Khanid coins; Kashgari's Diwan (1070s). Fact.
• Printing exists but does not travel (technology; Dunhuang, Chang'an → Turfan). The Diamond Sutra of 868 is the oldest dated printed book; Uyghur wooden type sits at Turfan around 1300. And there it stops, east of the Pamirs — the Islamic world, Bloom argues, chose calligraphy. Evidence: Diamond Sutra 868; Uyghur wooden type at Turfan c. 1300; Bloom 2001. Fact.
• Cotton, sugar, citrus, rice across the Islamic world (goods; Barygaza → Baghdad, Alexandria). Watson's «Islamic green revolution»: Indian crops carried west to Iraq, Egypt and Spain. The thesis is contested, and Barygaza stands in for India. Evidence: Watson 1983; contested by Decker 2009. Inference.
• The Church of the East reaches the Türks and the Mongols' ancestors (idea; Merv, Samarkand → Taraz, Balasagun, Ordu-Baliq). The Kereyit convert around 1007, says Bar Hebraeus; Syriac gravestones fill the Chu valley in the 13th–14th centuries. The later evidence is fact; the 1007 date and the road are inference. Evidence: Bar Hebraeus on the Kereyit conversion; Syriac gravestones at Semirechye (13th–14th c.). Inference.
• Silk now made everywhere (goods; Bukhara, Nishapur, Constantinople, Chang'an → Derbent, Constantinople). Byzantine, Persian, Sogdian and Chinese silks all survive — at Moshchevaya Balka in the Caucasus and in European church treasuries. Which loom made which cloth is now disputed; the «zandaniji» attribution to Bukhara is doubted. Derbent stands in for the Caucasus finds. Evidence: Sogdian silks at Moshchevaya Balka and in European treasuries; the zandaniji question (Sims-Williams & Khan 2008). Fact.
• Persian and Arab merchant colonies in China; Uyghur scribes in Xixia (people; Siraf, Basra, Turfan → Guangzhou, Quanzhou, Zhangye, Kaifeng). Abu Zayd al-Sirafi records the Huang Chao massacre of Guangzhou's foreign merchants in 878/9 — his 120,000 dead is a topos. Uyghur scribes and Sogdian officials serve Xixia and Kaifeng at the other end of the map. Evidence: Abu Zayd al-Sirafi (c. 916) on 878/9; Xixia Tangut documents. Fact.

c. 1206–1368

Pax Mongolica

One empire, then four khanates, from Korea to the Black Sea; the yam relay stations, paiza passports and the deliberate deportation of craftsmen make an end-to-end journey possible for the first time — and the plague uses the same roads.

West — the Ilkhanate at Tabriz and Sultaniya, the Golden Horde at Sarai, Byzantium, and the Italian colonies at Caffa and Tana. Middle — the Chagatai Khanate at Almaliq. East — Yuan China at Khanbaliq, Shangdu and Quanzhou; Karakorum the imperial capital from 1235 to about 1260.

• The caravan at Otrar. In 1218 the murder of a Mongol caravan at Otrar triggers the conquest; Bukhara and Samarkand fall in 1220, Urgench and Merv in 1221. Juvaini's 1.3 million dead at Merv is a topos, not a count. Fact.
• «Perfectly safe, by day or by night». Pegolotti, around 1340, tells Florentine merchants the road from Tana to Cathay is perfectly safe and gives the stages: eight or nine months in all. He never went himself. Fact.
• The one who went the whole way. Rabban Bar Sauma, a Church-of-the-East monk born near Beijing, reaches Paris and Bordeaux in 1287–88 — the only person on this map to travel the whole road east to west. Fact.
• Blue-and-white. Persian cobalt goes east to Jingdezhen; the finished porcelain comes back west to Persian and Ottoman courts, where the Ardabil and Topkapı collections still hold it. The objects are fact; the cobalt sourcing rests on analysis. Inference.
• Plague on the road. Plague is in Issyk-Kul graves in 1338–39 by ancient DNA, at Sarai and Caffa in 1346, in Sicily in October 1347. The Chinese origin is still unproven. Fact.

What moved

• Cathay silk and gold brocade to Italy (goods; Hangzhou, Beshbaliq → Tana, Caffa, Tabriz, Trebizond). Pegolotti prices raw silk at both Quinsai and Tana; nasij — the Mongol gold brocade — turns up in papal inventories by 1295, woven by weavers deported from Herat to Beshbaliq. Genoa and Lucca lie off the map. Evidence: Pegolotti's silk prices at Tana and Quinsai; nasij in papal inventories 1295; Allsen 1997. Fact.
• Craftsmen and administrators moved by decree (people; Samarkand, Herat, Khanbaliq → Karakorum, Beshbaliq, Khanbaliq, Tabriz). A Paris goldsmith, Guillaume Boucher, builds a silver fountain at Karakorum; Herat's weavers are moved to Beshbaliq; Chinese engineers work Ilkhanid sieges and Muslim officials run Yunnan. The people are named; the roads they were marched along are inference. Evidence: Rubruck ch. 29–30 on Boucher; Yuan shi 122; Allsen 1997. Fact.
• Missionaries and merchants east; a monk west (people; Constantinople → Karakorum, Khanbaliq, Tabriz). Carpini in 1246, Rubruck in 1254, Montecorvino as archbishop of Khanbaliq in 1307, Odoric, Marignolli, the Polos — and, the other way, Rabban Bar Sauma from Beijing to Paris and Bordeaux. Their tracks are in §4 of the dossier. Evidence: Carpini 1245–47; Rubruck 1253–55; Montecorvino; Odoric 1318–30; Marignolli 1338–53; the Polos; Bar Sauma 1275–88. Fact.
• Horses and the yam: fresh mounts every forty kilometres (animal; Karakorum, Khanbaliq → Sarai, Tabriz, Almaliq). Stations every twenty-five miles, says Marco Polo, and couriers who cover two hundred miles a day. The paiza passports survive. The system is fact; the speeds are travellers' claims. Evidence: Polo Bk 2 ch. 26 (Yule); Rubruck; surviving paiza. Fact.
• Cobalt east, blue-and-white west (goods; Rey, Hangzhou → Hangzhou, Tabriz, Alexandria). Kashan cobalt goes east by sea to the kilns of Jingdezhen; Yuan blue-and-white comes back to Tabriz, Ardabil and Cairo from the 1320s. The pots are fact; the cobalt's origin is trace-element inference. Rey stands in for Kashan, Hangzhou for Jingdezhen. Evidence: Yuan blue-and-white 1320s–50s; the Ardabil and Topkapı collections; Kashan cobalt by trace-element analysis. Fact.
• Gunpowder west (technology; Khanbaliq → Tabriz, Caffa). Mongol siege engines in Persia and Hungary in 1241; Hasan al-Rammah's Arabic recipes around 1280; Roger Bacon around 1267; the first European picture of a gun in 1326. The endpoints are fact; the Mongol vector is inference. Evidence: Mongol siege weapons in Persia and Hungary (1241); Hasan al-Rammah c. 1280; Bacon c. 1267; Milemete 1326. Inference.
• Paper money — and its failed export (technology; Khanbaliq → Tabriz). The Ilkhan copies the Yuan chao at Tabriz in 1294 and the currency collapses within months. Rashid al-Din names the model, not the courier. Evidence: Polo Bk 2 ch. 24; Rashid al-Din on the Tabriz chao of 1294. Fact.
• Astronomy and medicine, both ways (idea; Khanbaliq, Maragha → Maragha, Khanbaliq, Tabriz). Chinese astronomers work at the Maragha observatory from 1259; Jamal al-Din brings Islamic instruments to Khanbaliq in 1267; Rashid al-Din's Tansuqnama translates Chinese medicine around 1313. The people are fact; the line is inference. Evidence: Maragha observatory (1259); Jamal al-Din at Khanbaliq (1267); the Tansuqnama c. 1313. Fact.
• World history and maps (idea; Khanbaliq → Tabriz). Bolad Aqa carries Chinese and Mongol records west to Rashid al-Din, whose Jami' al-tawarikh of c. 1307–14 is the first world history; the Korean Kangnido of 1402 shows Africa from Islamic maps. Evidence: Rashid al-Din, Jami' al-tawarikh (c. 1307–14); the Kangnido (1402). Fact.
• Spices, pearls and textiles by sea, bigger than ever (goods; Calicut, Hormuz → Hormuz, Aden, Alexandria, Quanzhou). Polo's return fleet of 1291–93, Ibn Battuta's junks at Calicut, Wang Dayuan's ports of 1349: the ocean is the main road, and this era knows it. Evidence: Polo's return fleet 1291–93; Ibn Battuta; Wang Dayuan (1349). Fact.
• Kipchak and Circassian mamluks to Egypt; Tatar slaves to Italy (people; Sarai, Derbent → Caffa, Alexandria). The Mamluk sultanate recruits its soldiers from the Golden Horde's steppe; Genoese notaries at Caffa record the sales; Tatar slaves reach Genoa and Venice. The sea leg to Egypt is not drawn. Evidence: Mamluk recruitment; Genoese notarial acts at Caffa (Sambuceto). Fact.
• Religions on the move: Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, the Church of the East (idea; Bukhara, Urgench, Karakorum → Khanbaliq, Sarai, Almaliq, Karakorum). Phags-pa at Khubilai's court; Berke and then Uzbeg Khan's Muslim Golden Horde, where Ibn Battuta stayed; Nestorian khatuns in the khans' own families, as Rubruck reports at Möngke's court. The Tibetan leg is unmapped; the Sufis' road north is drawn. Evidence: Phags-pa at Khubilai's court; Ibn Battuta at Uzbeg's court; Rubruck on the Nestorians at Möngke's court. Fact.
• The Black Death (disease; Balasagun → Sarai, Caffa, Constantinople, Alexandria). Two gravestones by Lake Issyk-Kul, dated 1338–39, say the dead «died of pestilence», and their DNA is ancestral to the European strain. From there the documented chain is Sarai and the Caffa siege in 1346, then Genoese ships to Messina in October 1347. The dots are fact and the line between them inference. The origin in China is not evidenced and is drawn nowhere: the plague came out of Central Asia by the Mongol roads, and whether it started in China is still unproven. Evidence: Spyrou et al. 2022 (Kara-Djigach aDNA); de' Mussis on Sarai and Caffa 1346; Ibn al-Wardi 1348; against a Chinese origin see Sussman 2011; for an earlier one, Hymes 2014. Fact.

c. 1370–1520s

Timur, Ming and the maritime turn

Timur rebuilds Samarkand with looted artisans; the Ming shut the Jade Gate to a tribute trickle but send Zheng He's fleets across the Indian Ocean; the Portuguese arrive from the other side in 1498, and the ocean, not the oasis, becomes the main east–west highway. Overland trade continues — smaller, regional, and now mostly Bukhara ↔ India ↔ Muscovy.

West — the Ottomans at Constantinople from 1453, Mamluk Egypt, Venice and Genoa off the map. Middle — the Timurids at Samarkand and Herat, then the Uzbek Shaybanids at Bukhara and Safavid Iran; Moghulistan in the Tarim. East — Ming China at Nanjing then Beijing, with Jiayuguan as the gate. Ocean — Calicut, Hormuz and Malacca, Portuguese from 1511.

• Eight hundred camels. Clavijo, the Castilian envoy to Timur, watches a caravan of eight hundred camels bring Chinese goods into Samarkand in 1404. Fact.
• Zheng He's fleets. Seven voyages in 1405–33 reach Calicut, Hormuz, Aden and the Swahili coast; a giraffe reaches Nanjing in 1414 as a qilin. The «440-foot treasure ship» is a late literary figure — inference at best. Fact.
• Herat to Beijing, 1419–22. Shahrukh's embassy, diarised by Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, shows the overland road still open under Ming tribute rules. Fact.
• The Portuguese arrive. Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498; Goa taken in 1510, Malacca in 1511, Hormuz in 1515. Fact.
• The blockade that wasn't. The story that the Ottomans blocked the Silk Road and so Europe sailed is wrong: Venetian spice imports through the Levant recovered and grew in the 1500s. The caravan trade's real decline is the 17th–18th century. Fact.

What moved

• Artisans and loot to Samarkand (people; Mathura, Tabriz, Urgench → Samarkand). Timur sacks Delhi in 1398 and Damascus in 1401 — Ibn Khaldun met him outside the walls — and marches the craftsmen home. Clavijo walks the new bazaars in 1404. Mathura stands in for Delhi. Evidence: Timur's sack of Delhi 1398 and Damascus 1401 (Ibn Khaldun); Clavijo 1404. Fact.
• Chinese silk and porcelain by «tribute» caravan; horses, jade and camels in return (goods; Samarkand, Herat, Khanbaliq → Khanbaliq, Samarkand, Herat). Envoys from Samarkand, Herat, Turfan and Hami bring horses and Khotan jade to Beijing under Ming tribute rules and go home with silk and porcelain — eight hundred camels' worth, in the caravan Clavijo saw. Naqqash's diary of 1419–22 gives the stages. Evidence: Ming Shilu tribute records; Clavijo 1404; Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash 1419–22; Ali Akbar Khitayi 1516. Fact.
• Steppe horses to India — the trade that replaces silk (animal; Otrar, Bukhara → Mathura). Tens of thousands of horses a year to India by the 1600s, says Levi; Babur's memoirs show the road already busy. The 17th-century figures are fact; the 15th-century scale is inference. Mathura stands in for Delhi and Multan. Evidence: Babur's memoirs; Levi 2002 on Indian merchants in Central Asia. Inference.
• Spices by sea; blue-and-white to Ottoman and Persian courts (goods; Quanzhou, Calicut → Alexandria, Hormuz, Constantinople). Zheng He's cargoes, Topkapı's porcelain, and Venice buying pepper at Alexandria and Beirut in greater volume in the 1490s than ever — the blockade that never happened. Evidence: Ma Huan on Zheng He's cargoes; the Topkapı porcelain; Lane 1940 on Venetian spice imports. Fact.
• Zheng He's fleets: silk and porcelain out; giraffes and frankincense in (goods; Hangzhou → Malacca, Galle, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden). Seven voyages from the fleet base at Liujiagang, 1405–33, reaching Malacca, Sri Lanka, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden and Malindi; a giraffe arrives at Nanjing in 1414 as a qilin. Hangzhou stands in for the Yangtze base. The «440-foot treasure ship» is a late literary number. Evidence: Ma Huan, Yingyai shenglan; the Liujiagang and Changle inscriptions (1431); the Galle stele (1409). Fact.
• Rhubarb via Bukhara to Muscovy (goods; Jiuquan, Zhangye → Bukhara, Sarai). Polo already notes the rhubarb of Suzhou; the Bukharan and Russian monopoly on the medicinal root is a 17th–18th-century story, projected back here. Sarai stands in for the road north to Muscovy. Evidence: Polo on Suzhou rhubarb; the Bukharan–Russian rhubarb monopoly (17th–18th c.). Inference.
• Persian and Russian captives sold at Bukhara and Khiva (people; Sarai, Nishapur → Bukhara, Urgench). Tatar raids on Muscovy and Uzbek raids into Safavid Khorasan feed the slave markets of Bukhara and Khiva; Anthony Jenkinson saw them in 1558, just past this frame. The 16th-century trade is fact; the 15th-century volume is inference. Evidence: Shaybanid and later sources; Anthony Jenkinson (1558). Inference.
• Islam completes the Tarim; Sufi networks link Bukhara, Kashgar and India (idea; Kashgar, Bukhara → Turfan, Hami, Mathura). Turfan and Hami turn Muslim under the Moghul khans in the 15th century; the Naqshbandi order ties Bukhara to Kashgar and Delhi; in 1578 Altan Khan gives the Dalai Lama his title and the Mongols take Tibetan Buddhism. The dates are fact, the lines inference. Evidence: Tarikh-i Rashidi (Mirza Haydar, 1540s); Ming reports on Hami. Fact.
• Gunpowder weapons east and south (technology; Khanbaliq, Constantinople → Hami, Turfan, Hormuz, Barygaza). Babur's matchlocks win Panipat in 1526; the Portuguese are at Diu in 1509 with ship-borne guns; Ming firearms reach the Hami guard. The sea leg from Constantinople and Lisbon is not drawn. Evidence: Babur's matchlocks at Panipat 1526; Portuguese at Diu 1509. Fact.
• New World silver — what came next (goods; Palembang → Quanzhou, Guangzhou). From 1571 the Manila galleon carries Potosí silver across the Pacific to China — the sequel, off this map's edge and past its last era. Palembang stands in for the South China Sea approach. Evidence: Flynn & Giráldez 1995. Fact.
• Plague waves recur (disease; Alexandria → Constantinople, Samarkand). Plague returns across Central Asia and the Mediterranean into the 1400s and 1500s from regional reservoirs — no single origin, and no mappable Silk Road vector. Drawn as dots only. Evidence: Dols 1977 on plague in the Middle East. No mappable vector. Fact.

The Zerafshan valley — Samarkand, Bukhara, Panjikent, with Chach at Tashkent; an Achaemenid province on the Behistun inscription. · Eastern Iranian (Sogdian, cousin of Bactrian and Khotanese); settled city-state people, not nomads.

Sogdians

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Trades: caravan chiefs (sabao), silk east to west, musk, pepper, silver, glass, wine, horses and slaves, interpreters for the Türks, whirl dancers and lute players, translators of Buddhism, Manichaeism and Christianity.

Zoroastrian in a Sogdian variety — ossuaries, fire altars, the goddess Nana — with Buddhist, Manichaean and Church-of-the-East minorities. The Xin Tangshu says of Samarkand: when a child is born they put honey in its mouth and glue in its palms, so that it will speak sweetly and hold money as if glued. (The popular version that puts a coin in the newborn's hand is a modern retelling; the text says honey and glue.)

Absorbed. Islamised and Persianised in the 8th–10th centuries — Narshakhi records the language loss — and Sogdian vanishes as a written language around the 11th century. In China the surname families (An, Kang, Shi, Cao) became Chinese within two or three generations; An Lushan was one. Fact.

The Hexi grasslands between Zhangye and Dunhuang; driven by the Xiongnu to the Ili around 176 BC and over the Oxus into Bactria around 130 BC. · Unknown for the Yuezhi — Tocharian or Iranian is debated. The Kushan state wrote Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, in Greek letters.

Yuezhi → Kushans

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Trades: horse-breeders turned empire, gold coin on the Roman standard, the Pamir, Gandhara and Indus roads, Buddhist monks to Luoyang.

Everything at once: coins with Greek, Iranian, Indian and Buddhist gods. Kanishka's council, and the great stupa at Peshawar that Faxian saw.

Conquered — by Sasanian Iran around 230–270, then the Kidarite and Hephthalite Huns. No modern people descends from them as a group; their populations became the Bactrian-, Persian- and Pashto-speaking peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Fact.

No continuity claim is tenable — our verdict.

The Mongolian plateau and the Ordos; Modu chanyu unites them in 209 BC. · Unknown. Yeniseian, Turkic and Mongolic have all been proposed; ancient DNA shows a genetically mixed elite. We do not know what language they spoke.

Xiongnu

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Trades: the first steppe empire, the first big silk customer — heqin treaty silk, silk re-traded west, horses and camels, control of the Tarim through a «Commandant of Slaves».

Sky (Tengri) and ancestor cults; sacrificial gatherings at the Dragon City. At Noin-Ula a Xiongnu prince lies with a Han lacquer cup dated 2 BC, Han silk and a wool hanging of Bactrian-looking men — China and Iran on his walls.

Absorbed. The Southern Xiongnu founded short-lived north-Chinese states and dissolved into the Chinese and Xianbei populations by the 5th–6th century; the northern branch was destroyed in 89–91 and «vanishes west». Fact.

Whether the northern Xiongnu became Europe's Huns is a live debate (de la Vaissière yes, others no) — inference. Mongolia's state narrative claims them as the first Mongolian state: a modern claim.

Parthia, at Nisa near modern Ashgabat; capital later at Ctesiphon. · Parthian, a north-western Iranian language; the ruling Parni clan came in from the Caspian steppe around 247 BC.

Parthians

Active: The roads before the road; The opening. Trades: the middlemen who kept Rome and China apart, Isidore's Parthian Stations from Antioch to Kandahar, the sailors who turned Gan Ying back, cataphracts and horse-archers, the first named Buddhist translator at Luoyang.

Zoroastrian-ish with Greek and Mesopotamian cults; philhellene kings. Gan Ying at the shore, told the crossing takes «two years, three with bad winds — take provisions for three years».

Overthrown by Ardashir I in 224; the Parthian great houses served the Sasanians for four centuries. The language died by about 700 but survives in Manichaean manuscripts from Turfan — a Parthian voice preserved in a Tarim oasis. Fact.

Alexander's foundations of 329–327 BC and Seleucid settlement; Diodotus breaks away around 250 BC. · Greek-speaking settlers — soldiers and Seleucid colonists — ruling an Iranian-speaking Bactria.

Bactrian Greeks and Indo-Greeks

Active: The roads before the road; The opening. Trades: Greek cities as far as Khujand and Ai-Khanoum, the finest Hellenistic coinage, Menander's debate with a Buddhist monk, the seed of Gandhara's Buddha image.

Greek gods on the coins, Buddhist patronage under the Indo-Greeks. At Ai-Khanoum a Greek named Clearchus carved the Delphic maxims — «as a child, be well-behaved… as an old man, without sorrow» — four thousand kilometres from Delphi.

Destroyed and absorbed: Ai-Khanoum burned around 145 BC, Bactria taken by the Yuezhi around 130 BC, the Punjab by Sakas and Kushans. Greek script lived on for Bactrian until the 8th century. Fact.

Claims that the Kalash or Hunza peoples descend from Alexander's soldiers are legend — genetic studies find no Greek signal.

The whole steppe belt from the Danube to the Altai in the first millennium BC; the Pazyryk culture is the Altai branch. · Eastern Iranian nomads — Scythian, Saka, Sarmatian and Alan are branches.

Saka and Scythians

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Trades: the horse-archer and the animal-style gold, horse breeders, Chinese silk and Persian carpets in the same graves, the Indo-Scythians of Taxila and the kshatrapas of Barygaza, the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan.

Sky, fire and horse cults; in Khotan, Buddhism. The Issyk kurgan's «Golden Man» — four thousand gold plaques on a young warrior, now on Kazakhstan's banknotes.

Absorbed — into Turkic peoples on the steppe and in the Tarim, where Khotanese dies after the Kara-Khanid conquest around 1006; into Iranians and Indians in the south. Fact.

Kazakhstan's and Iran's uses of the Saka as ancestors are modern claims; Pashtun-from-Saka theories are weak inference.

The northern Tarim oases — Kucha, Karashahr, Turfan. · Tocharian A and B, an Indo-European branch closer to Europe's languages than to Iranian, written in Brahmi; texts of the 5th–10th centuries. Origins debated; the Tarim mummies are a separate question.

Tocharians

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Trades: oasis kings who fed and taxed the caravans, Kumārajīva's translation school, the Kizil painters, the Kucha orchestra at the Tang court.

Buddhism, Sarvāstivāda at Kucha; Manichaean texts in Tocharian at Turfan. Xuanzang at Kucha in 630: «the music of this country excels that of all other countries.»

Vanished as a language by about 1000, Turkicised under the Uyghur kingdom. No modern group calls itself Tocharian. Fact.

The Wei and Yellow River heartland; sent west as soldier-farmers from 121 BC, as convicts, officials and merchants, and as settler kingdoms like the Qu family's Gaochang. · Sinitic; on the frontier heavily intermarried — the Cao rulers of Dunhuang married Uyghur and Khotanese princesses.

Han garrison and merchant families

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: the record-keepers: 65,000 wooden slips, the Astana contracts, the Cave 17 library, garrison pay in bolts of silk, paper-makers, well-diggers, brick-builders, caravan finance from Chang'an's Western Market.

Ancestor rites, Daoism, Buddhism — the Mogao patrons are Chinese families. Zhang Yichao throws out the Tibetans in 848 and sends the news two thousand kilometres to Chang'an by a monk.

Continuous. The Han of Gansu descend from these settlers plus later waves; the Han of Turfan were absorbed into the Uyghur kingdom after 850. Fact.

Fars and the Iranian plateau; Ctesiphon from 224 to 637; after 651 the Persian-speaking world runs from Baghdad to Bukhara. · Middle Persian, then New Persian from the 9th century at Samanid Bukhara.

Persians — Sasanian, then Islamic

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: silver plate, brocade, cut glass, drachms in China by the thousand, refugee princes and a fire temple at Chang'an, Persian ships at Guangzhou, the language of trade, poetry and the Mongol chancery.

Zoroastrian, then Muslim; Persian Jews and Christians. Khosrow I's court burns the Sogdian silk in front of the Türk envoys in 568 — Persia would rather destroy silk than let the Türks sell it.

Continuous. Fact.

The Hejaz and Arabia; Ctesiphon falls in 637, Merv in 651, Bukhara in 709, Samarkand in 712. · Semitic (Arabic); the conquest armies were Arab tribesmen, the later Gulf «Arab» merchants often Persian-speaking Muslims.

Arabs

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: garrison colonies — half of every house in Bukhara, a caliphate hungry for paper, slaves, furs and silver, Arabic as the language of the sciences, the Sea Road from Basra and Siraf to Guangzhou.

Islam. Ibn Fadlan, the caliph's envoy, shivering on the Ustyurt in 922 — «my beard froze into one lump» — on his way to convert the Bulghars.

Absorbed in the east — Arabic-speaking villages survive in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, a few thousand people with a dying dialect. Arabs remain Arabs from Iraq to Yemen. Fact.

Gandhara, the Ganges, Gujarat, Malabar and the Tamil country. · Indo-Aryan — Gandhari Prakrit, Sanskrit, Gujarati — and Dravidian Tamil.

Indians — Gandharan monks, Kroraina scribes, Gujarati and Tamil merchants

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: Buddhist texts and the Buddha image over the Pamirs, the Kharoshthi administration of Niya and Loulan, astronomers who computed the Tang calendar, pepper, pearls, ivory, cotton and numerals, Tamil merchant guilds from Sumatra to Quanzhou, Gujarati merchants who ran Malacca.

Buddhist, Hindu, Jain; Muslim Gujaratis by the last era. The Quanzhou stone of 1281 carves a Shiva shrine's dedication in Tamil and Chinese.

Continuous — India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Buddhism died in its Gandharan homeland by about the 11th century and lives on through the peoples these monks taught; the Central Asian Indian colonies dwindled after 1917. Fact.

Rome; capital at Constantinople from 330. · Latin, then Greek-speaking Mediterranean state.

Romans and Byzantines — the western customers

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: almost never on the road — they bought, silk through Parthian, Kushan and Indian hands, pepper by the shipload at Alexandria, gold coin to India, Justinian's silkworm coup and a state silk industry.

Pagan, then Christian. Pliny thinks silk is combed off leaves; the Hou Hanshu thinks Romans look Chinese. Neither empire knew where the other was.

Byzantium destroyed by the Ottomans in 1453; its Greek population continued under Ottoman rule. Fact.

The Altai, where they were ironsmiths for the Rouran; Bumin overthrows the Rouran in 552 and the empire runs from Manchuria to the Crimea within thirty years. · Old Turkic — the first Turkic language written, in the Orkhon runiform script of 732–735.

Göktürks

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Trades: the steppe's toll-collectors and silk-brokers, silk as tribute, sold west through Sogdian ministers, Xuanzang's escort from Tong Yabghu's court, horses, slaves, mercenaries.

Tengri and ancestor cults, with Sogdian Manichaeans and Christians at court. The Kül Tegin inscription: «The Chinese, who give gold, silver and silk without limit, have always used sweet words and soft goods… because you were seduced by them, many of you died, Turkic people.»

Destroyed by the Tang — the Eastern khaganate in 630, the Western in 657–659 — restored in 682, then overthrown by the Uyghurs and Basmil in 744; the Ashina line ends. Fact.

The modern states' claims of direct national descent — Turkey's official history, Kazakh and Kyrgyz textbooks — are modern claims: the Türk empire was a ruling clan over many peoples.

The Orkhon–Selenge steppe, with its capital at Ordu-Baliq; after the Kyrgyz destroy the khaganate in 840, refugees settle Turfan, Beshbaliq and Zhangye. · Old Turkic → Old Uyghur, in a script adapted from Sogdian that later modelled the Mongol and Manchu scripts → Chagatai Turki → modern Uyghur.

Uyghurs — steppe empire, then Turfan kingdom

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: the Tang's horse-dealers — forty bolts a horse, the Tang's saviours, who retook Chang'an and Luoyang from An Lushan's rebels and looted Luoyang for the trouble, scribes, Buddhist translators, printers with wooden type, vine-growers and cotton-weavers, the Mongols' first literate administrators.

Manichaean from 762/3 — the only Manichaean state in history — then Buddhist at Qocho, with a Church-of-the-East minority at Bulayïq; Muslim from the 15th century. The Bezeklik murals of Uyghur princes in red robes, cut out in 1905 and mostly destroyed in Berlin in 1945.

The one card where the fate is a live political question. Linguistically the line from Qocho Uyghur through Chagatai to modern Uyghur is real. Fact.

Three things at once: the language line Qocho → Chagatai → modern Uyghur is fact; demographically the modern Uyghurs descend from the Uyghur settlers and the Tocharian-, Saka-, Sogdian-, Han- and Mongol-derived populations they absorbed — inference, from an old East–West genetic mixture; and the name itself is a 20th-century revival, revived at Tashkent in 1921 and made official in 1934–35. The PRC and Uyghur nationalist narratives disagree about all of this. The Ganzhou branch survives separately as the Buddhist Yugur of Gansu — fact.

The Yarlung valley; Songtsen Gampo unites the plateau; the Tang princess Wencheng is married in 641. · Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman); the empire's script was made around 640 on an Indian model.

Tibetans

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: the Tarim's other superpower for two centuries, Dunhuang held 786–848; Miran garrisoned, Tibetan as the lingua franca of the 9th–10th-century Hexi, horse-breeders and musk-sellers, the teachers of the Tanguts and the Mongols.

Bon and Buddhism; from the 13th century the exporter of Buddhism to the steppe. Sakya Pandita meets Prince Godan at Wuwei in 1247 and submits Tibet to the Mongols — the deal that put a lama beside every khan; Phags-pa's square script becomes the Yuan alphabet.

The empire collapsed in 842 with Lang Darma's assassination; the people are the modern Tibetans. Continuous — and politically contested at every point after 1950. The card stops at 1578. Fact.

The north-eastern Tibetan plateau, then the Ordos; Yuanhao proclaims himself emperor in 1038 at Yinchuan. · Tangut, a Qiangic (Tibeto-Burman) language with its own 6,000-character script devised in 1036; the ruling clan claimed Xianbei descent.

Tanguts — Xi Xia

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Trades: the toll-gate of era 3 — the Hexi corridor taken from the Ganzhou Uyghurs in 1028 and from Dunhuang in 1036, every caravan between the Tarim and Song China taxed, horses, camels and salt, Buddhist printers — a Tangut Tripitaka and some of the world's earliest movable-type prints.

Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism together, with a Church-of-the-East community. Chinggis Khan died in 1227 while besieging them; the capital fell, and the Tanguts were the last people he destroyed.

Destroyed as a state by the Mongols in 1227, with a massacre the sources dwell on; the people survived as Yuan subjects and soldiers. A Tangut pillar of 1502 is the last dated text; the language died by about 1600. Fact.

The Western Türk successor state in the Caucasus–Volga steppe, c. 650–969; capital at Itil in the Volga delta, never found. · Turkic, probably Oghuric like Bulghar (inference); a multi-ethnic steppe state under a Turkic ruling stratum.

Khazars

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Trades: the toll-gate of the north — a tithe on Rus merchants passing down the Volga, furs, slaves, honey, wax and Khwarazmian goods at Itil, the Radhanite route ran through it, a Khwarazmian Muslim guard.

The ruling house adopted Judaism around the 8th–9th century — the Khazar Correspondence, Ibn Fadlan's «the king of the Khazars is a Jew» — how deep it went is debated. A Khazar coin of 837/8 imitates an Abbasid dirham but reads «Moses is the messenger of God», found in a hoard on Gotland.

Destroyed by Sviatoslav of Kiev — Sarkel in 965, Itil around 968/9; a rump lasted into the 11th century; remnants absorbed by Pechenegs, Oghuz, Kipchaks and Rus. No modern people is Khazar. Fact.

The hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews descend from converted Khazars (Koestler 1976; Elhaik 2013) is rejected by most historians and by the larger genetic studies, and is used today as an antisemitic talking-point — legend.

A branch of Kubrat's Great Bulgaria that went north up the Volga; the city of Bulghar by the 10th century. · Oghuric Turkic, the same family as Danube Bulgaria's founders, over a Finno-Ugric farming population.

Volga Bulghars

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Trades: the fur market of the north, sable, squirrel and slave-girls sold to the Rus in 922, leather, honey, wax, walrus ivory, where Samanid dirhams turned into furs.

Islam from 922 — Almish asked Baghdad for teachers and fortress-builders, and got Ibn Fadlan. The summer nights so short the muezzin could not fit the prayers in.

Conquered by Batu in 1236, absorbed into the Golden Horde; Bulghar burned by Rus raiders and superseded by Kazan. Fact.

Two modern peoples claim them: the Chuvash on the language line (fact) and the Kazan Tatars as a political identity (modern claim; partial descent is plausible inference).

Sweden via Ladoga and the river roads; Kiev under Oleg around 882. · Scandinavians, mostly Swedes, who took Slavic wives and within four generations Slavic names and speech. The Norse origin is consensus, and still politicised.

Rus and Varangians

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Trades: river merchants and slavers, beaver and black-fox furs and swords down the Don and Volga, «sometimes on camels to Baghdad», slaves sold at Bulghar and Itil for Samanid silver — the hoards of Gotland, treaty trading rights at Constantinople.

Norse gods, then Christian from 988. The ship burial at Bulghar: a chieftain burned with his ship, weapons, horses and a slave girl who volunteered — «you Arabs put your dead in the earth for the worms; we burn him in an instant so he goes to paradise at once.»

Became the East Slavs. The Ingvar runestones of c. 1040 record a Swedish expedition to the Caspian that never came home — the last Varangian venture on this map. Fact.

Unknown — Ibn Khurradadhbih starts them in «the land of the Franks» and Spain. That single passage is almost all we have; Gil doubts they were an organised group at all. · Jewish merchants who, says the one good source, spoke Arabic, Persian, Greek, Frankish, Andalusian and Slavic.

Radhanite Jewish merchants

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Trades: the only merchants any 9th-century source describes going end to end, musk, aloes, camphor and cinnamon west, eunuchs, slave girls and boys, brocade, furs and swords east, a route through the atlas: Constantinople → Itil → the Caspian → Balkh → the Uyghurs → China.

Judaism. The Judaeo-Persian letter from Dandan-Uiliq near Khotan, around the 760s — a Jewish trader writing about sheep and cloth in Persian with Hebrew letters — proof of Jewish merchants on the southern Tarim a century before the Radhanites were described.

Vanish from the record after the 10th century as the Italian cities and the Cairo Geniza merchants take over long-distance trade. No descendant group. Fact.

The Armenian highland — Ani, the Bagratid caravan city — and Cilician Armenia on the Mediterranean from 1198 to 1375. · Armenian, its own branch of Indo-European; Christian since 301/314.

Armenians

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: merchants and go-betweens who spoke everyone's languages, Ayas, where the Polos landed, King Het'um's ride to Karakorum in 1254, colonies at Tabriz, Sultaniya, Caffa and Tana, the New Julfa silk merchants of Isfahan — the sequel.

Armenian Apostolic Christianity. Het'um's chronicler on Karakorum's court — the first Christian king to see it, feasted for fifty days.

Continuous — Armenia and a diaspora; Cilicia fell to the Mamluks in 1375; the Ottoman genocide of 1915 destroyed the Anatolian communities, outside our eras and on the fate line. Fact.

The Persian church of Ctesiphon, independent from 424; patriarch moved to Baghdad in 775. · A church, not a people — Syriac liturgy carried by Persians, Sogdians, Turks, Mongols and Chinese.

The Church of the East

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Trades: metropolitans at Merv, Herat, Samarkand, Kashgar and Almaliq, Aluoben at Chang'an in 635 and the stele of 781, the Bulayïq library near Turfan, Kereyit, Naiman and Öngüt converts; Mongol royal mothers, Bar Sauma, the Ilkhan's envoy to Europe, six hundred gravestones in the Chu valley.

Dyophysite Christianity. Two Chu-valley gravestones of 1338–39 say the dead «died of pestilence» — the first written trace of the Black Death, on Christian tombstones by Lake Issyk-Kul.

Collapsed in the 14th century — the Ilkhanate turned Muslim in 1295, the Chagatai khans persecuted, Timur massacred, the Ming expelled foreigners in 1368, and plague emptied the Chu valley. Chinese Jingjiao was extinct by 1400. Fact.

The Onon–Kherlen valleys; Temüjin proclaimed Chinggis Khan in 1206. · Mongolic; the Secret History of 1240 is the first Mongol book, in the Uyghur script adopted in 1204.

Mongols

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: the only through-road the map ever had: the yam post system, paiza passports, craftsmen deported by decree, ortoq partnerships bankrolling Muslim and Uyghur merchants tax-free, silk bought in the Tang tradition of paying the steppe, their armies also carried the plague (inference).

Tengri and shamans, deliberately tolerant; then Buddhism and Islam. The religious debate Möngke staged at Karakorum on 30 May 1254 — Rubruck versus Buddhists, Muslims and Nestorians — ending, he admits, with everyone drinking.

The empire broke up — the Ilkhanate in 1335, the Yuan in 1368, the Chagatai split, the Golden Horde into Kazan, Crimea and Astrakhan, taken by Russia between 1552 and 1783. The people continue. Fact.

Chinggis is the modern Mongolian state's founding symbol — a modern claim on a fact.

The two maritime republics; into the Black Sea after 1261 — Pera in 1267, Caffa in 1266, Tana in 1332, both at Trebizond and Tabriz. · Ligurian and Venetian Italians; Latin Christians.

Genoese and Venetians

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: shipping, notaries, bills of exchange — 900 notarial acts from Caffa in 1289–90 alone, the Polos and Pegolotti's handbook, silk and spices in; Tatar, Circassian and Russian slaves out, Genoese in Yuan China — a Latin tombstone at Yangzhou, 1342, the galleys that carried the plague from Caffa to Messina in 1347.

Latin Christian, with Franciscan bishops at Caffa and Zayton. Pegolotti's advice: grow a beard, hire a good dragoman and at least two good men-servants, take a woman if you like, and the road is «perfectly safe, whether by day or by night».

Expelled from the Black Sea by the Ottomans — Pera in 1453, Caffa and Tana in 1475; the republics lasted until 1797. Fact.

Sumatra and the Straits — Srivijaya at Palembang, the Malacca sultanate from about 1400 — the Tamil Chola country, and Gujarat. · Austronesian (Malay), Dravidian (Tamil), Indo-Aryan (Gujarati).

Malay, Tamil and Gujarati sea traders

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Trades: the Sea Road's own crews and brokers, Srivijaya taxed the Straits and taught Sanskrit to the pilgrim Yijing, Malay as the ports' lingua franca, the Tamil «Five Hundred» guild from Takuapa to Quanzhou, a thousand Gujarati merchants at Malacca, pepper and porcelain to Aden and the Red Sea.

Hindu–Buddhist, then Islam from the 13th century. Ma Huan on Malacca: the Chinese fleet built a stockaded warehouse there, and the king sailed to Nanjing with his family to thank the Ming emperor in 1411.

Continuous — the merchant guilds vanished after the 13th–14th century and the Portuguese took Malacca in 1511. Fact.

629–645

Xuanzang

Sixteen years, both ways on foot. West by the northern road and the Tian Shan, home by the Pamirs and the southern oases — and a Record of 138 countries at the end of it. Where the Record is silent, the road comes from his disciples' Biography, written forty years later.

1271–1295

Marco Polo

Twenty-four years: out overland with his father and uncle at seventeen, seventeen of them in Khubilai's service, home by sea escorting a Mongol bride. Chapters follow Yule–Cordier; the «did he go» question is answered on the first stop.

1325–1354

Ibn Battuta

Twenty-nine years by every road. The Silk Road stretch — Crimea, Sarai, Khwarazm, Bukhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Delhi — is solid and datable. The China chapter is doubted: his Beijing is almost certainly borrowed and his dates do not fit, so the track stops at Hangzhou and is drawn dashed.

capital · Xi'an, China

Chang'an

Han capital from 202 BC and Tang capital from 618 to 907 — the eastern terminus of every overland road, with a Western Market run by Sogdian families.

Sacked in 881 and 904, and never a capital again.

Lit in the prelude as the manifest's proxy for the Chinese courts that bought Khotan jade and sent silk to the Altai (flows 0.1, 0.2, 0.5); the dossier's §2a row starts it in era 1.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Luoyang, China

Luoyang

Eastern Han capital from AD 25 to 190 and home of the White Horse monastery, where Parthian and Kushan monks translated the first Buddhist texts into Chinese.

Sacked in 311 — the disaster Ancient Letter II reports to Samarkand.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

capital · Beijing, China

Khanbaliq

Yuan capital from 1267–72, Dadu to the Chinese, Cambaluc to Marco Polo, who spent seventeen years in Khubilai's service here.

Ming capital again from 1421.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Xanadu, Inner Mongolia

Shangdu

Built in 1256 as Khubilai's summer capital — the Xanadu where Marco Polo was presented to the Great Khan in 1275.

Ruined after 1369.

Active: Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Hangzhou, China

Hangzhou

Southern Song capital from 1138 to 1276 and Pegolotti's Cassai — Quinsai to Polo, who called it the finest city in the world.

The Grand Canal meets the sea here.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

port · Quanzhou, China

Quanzhou

Maritime Trade Office from 1087; Zayton to Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, both of whom sailed from here.

Mosques, a Hindu temple and Christian tombstones survive from its Yuan heyday.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

port · Guangzhou, China

Guangzhou

Han-era sea port, Canton to later Europeans, with an Arab and Persian merchant quarter by the 8th century.

The Huang Chao massacre of 878/9 emptied that quarter for a generation.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Lanzhou, China

Lanzhou

The Yellow River crossing — Jincheng to the Han, and a Sogdian station the Ancient Letters may name.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Wuwei, China

Wuwei

Commandery from 121 BC; Guzang to the Sogdians, whose colony here wrote Ancient Letters II and V.

Tangut Liangzhou from 1028; Sakya Pandita met the Mongols here in 1247.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Zhangye, China

Zhangye

Commandery from 111 BC and Ganzhou to the Uyghurs, who ruled it from the 890s to 1028.

Marco Polo spent a year here «on business».

Lit in the prelude as the Yuezhi homeland in the Hexi grasslands (flow 0.8); the dossier's row starts it in era 1.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Jiuquan, China

Jiuquan

Commandery from 121 BC; Suzhou to Marco Polo, who noted its rhubarb.

The Ming fort of Jiayuguan stands twenty kilometres west.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

pass · Jiayuguan, China

Jiayuguan

The Ming «First Pass under Heaven», fortified in 1372 — the gate through which the tribute trickle of the last era passed.

Active: Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Dunhuang, China

Dunhuang

Commandery from 111 BC and the great fork of the Tarim: north or south of the Taklamakan.

The Mogao caves from about 366; the Library Cave sealed around 1000–1030 with forty thousand documents.

Lit in the prelude as the jade road's Hexi gate (flow 0.1, whose pre-Han line is ours); the dossier's row starts it in era 1.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

pass · Xiaofangpan ruin, Gansu

Yumen

The Jade Gate, fixed around 111 BC — the Han frontier post west of Dunhuang.

The Ancient Letters were found on this limes, in a watchtower's mailbag.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

oasis · Hami, China

Hami

Yiwu to the Tang, Kumul to the Uyghurs: the gateway oasis where Xuanzang was welcomed by Chinese monks.

The Ming «Hami guard» held it from 1406 to 1513.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Gaochang ruin, Xinjiang

Turfan

The Gaochang kingdom from 460 to 640, whose king detained and then funded Xuanzang; the Uyghur kingdom of Qocho from the 850s to 1209.

Islamised in the 15th century. The Astana tombs kept its contracts and pay records.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Jimsar, Xinjiang

Beshbaliq

Tang Beiting Protectorate from 702, then the Uyghur summer capital.

The Mongols settled deported weavers from Herat here.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

oasis · Yanqi, Xinjiang

Karashahr

Agni to its Tocharian-speaking people, a Buddhist city and one of the Tang Four Garrisons.

Xuanzang's Record begins here.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

oasis · Kuqa, Xinjiang

Kucha

Kumarajiva's birthplace in 344 and the seat of the Tang Anxi Protectorate from 658; the Kizil caves lie nearby.

Xuanzang thought its music the finest of any country.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

oasis · Aksu, Xinjiang

Aksu

Gumo to the Han: the junction for the Bedel pass over the Tian Shan, where Xuanzang turned north.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

oasis · Kashgar, Xinjiang

Kashgar

Shule to the Han — where the northern and southern Tarim routes meet the mountains.

Kara-Khanid capital, Muslim from about 960; Bar Sauma found it deserted after the wars of the 1270s.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Lop Nur ruin, Xinjiang

Loulan

Kroraina: a Han-era kingdom whose administration ran in Gandhari Prakrit on wooden tablets.

Abandoned over the 4th century as the Tarim river shifted — not swallowed overnight.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

oasis · Ruin near Ruoqiang, Xinjiang

Miran

Buddhist shrines with Roman-style winged figures of the 3rd century; a Tibetan fort in the 8th–9th.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

oasis · Qiemo, Xinjiang

Cherchen

Marco Polo's Charchan on the southern rim of the Taklamakan.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

oasis · Ruin near Minfeng, Xinjiang

Niya

Cadota: a Kharoshthi archive of slaves, camels and wine on wooden tablets.

Abandoned in the 4th century.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

oasis · Hotan, Xinjiang

Khotan

The jade source since the Shang and a Saka-speaking Buddhist kingdom for a thousand years.

Falls to the Kara-Khanids around 1006; a Judaeo-Persian trader's letter from nearby Dandan-Uiliq is two centuries older.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Yarkant, Xinjiang

Yarkand

Shache to the Han: the junction for the Karakoram and Wakhan roads.

The Yarkand Khanate's capital in the 16th century.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

pass · Tashkurgan, Xinjiang

Tashkurgan

A candidate for Ptolemy's «Stone Tower» — disputed — and Xuanzang's Qiepantuo on the Pamir road.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

pass · Ishkashim, Afghanistan

Wakhan

The Wakhan corridor: Xuanzang's road home and Marco Polo's «Pamier», twelve days across a plateau so high that fire burned dim.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

pass · Kyrgyz–China border

Irkeshtam

The Terek and Irkeshtam passes: Kashgar's door into the Alai and Ferghana.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Osh, Kyrgyzstan

Osh

Ferghana's eastern market — the country of the «heavenly horses» the Han fought for in 104–101 BC.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Khujand, Tajikistan

Khujand

Alexandria Eschate, «the farthest», founded on the Syr Darya in 329 BC (Arrian 4.1.3).

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Tashkent

Chach: Zhang Qian's Kangju region, and the Samanid mint of al-Shash whose silver reached Gotland.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Samarkand

Afrasiab: the Sogdian capital and the hub of the whole network, with a church, a mosque from 712 and paper mills.

Sacked in 1220; Timur's capital from 1370, rebuilt with looted artisans.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Panjikent, Tajikistan

Panjikent

A Sogdian town of painted houses, abandoned after 722; its lord's archive survived on Mount Mugh.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

capital · Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Bukhara

Samanid capital from 892 to 999 and the head of the Fur Road; the Arabs took half of every house in 709.

Sacked in 1220; Shaybanid capital from 1500.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Termez, Uzbekistan

Termez

Tarmita: the Oxus crossing, with Kushan Buddhist monasteries at Kara Tepe.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Balkh, Afghanistan

Balkh

Bactra: Zhang Qian's Daxia capital and the Navavihara monastery whose abbots became the Barmakids.

Sacked in 1220; Ibn Battuta found it «utterly ruined and uninhabited».

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Ruin, Takhar, Afghanistan

Ai-Khanoum

A Greek city on the Oxus, c. 300–145 BC, with a gymnasium and the Delphic maxims — burned by nomads.

Active: The roads before the road. Fact.

city · Bamyan, Afghanistan

Bamiyan

The colossal Buddhas Xuanzang measured at 140–150 feet; sacked by the Mongols in 1221.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Fact.

city · Bagram, Afghanistan

Begram

Kapisa, the Kushan summer capital, whose sealed storeroom held Roman glass, Indian ivory and Chinese lacquer together.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

capital · Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar

Purushapura, Kanishka's capital around AD 127–150, with the great stupa Faxian saw.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

city · Taxila, Pakistan

Taxila

Greek, Saka and Kushan city in turn; both Faxian and Xuanzang studied at its monasteries.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

city · Mathura, India

Mathura

The Kushan southern capital and a Buddhist sculpture school; Faxian's road south.

Lit in eras 3 and 5 as the manifest's proxy for the north-Indian market (Ghaznavid raids, flow 3.7; the horse trade to Delhi, 5.3); the dossier's row runs eras 1–2.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Patna, India

Pataliputra

Mauryan and Gupta capital, with Nalanda nearby; Faxian spent three years here copying texts.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

port · Bharuch, India

Barygaza

The Periplus's great Gujarati port, where silk from Bactria was sold to the monsoon ships (§§41–49).

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Fact.

oasis · Mary, Turkmenistan

Merv

Antiochia Margiana; where Iran meets Central Asia, and a Church-of-the-East metropolitan seat by 544.

Seljuk capital; sacked in 1221 and never fully recovered.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Nishapur, Iran

Nishapur

A Khorasan-road city of scholars and lustreware under the Samanids and Seljuks; on Bar Sauma's route.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Herat, Afghanistan

Herat

Timurid capital from 1405 to 1507, from which Shahrukh's embassy left for Beijing in 1419.

Its weavers were deported to Beshbaliq by the Mongols.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · south Tehran, Iran

Rey

Rayy: the Khorasan road's hub, sacked by the Mongols in 1220.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Hamadan, Iran

Hamadan

Ecbatana, the Median and Achaemenid summer capital on the Khorasan road.

Active: The roads before the road; The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Shush, Iran

Susa

The Royal Road's terminus and the Great King's chancery (Herodotus 5.52).

Active: The roads before the road. Fact.

capital · Salman Pak, Iraq

Ctesiphon

Parthian and Sasanian capital, the seat of the Church of the East's patriarch and the exilarch's synagogue.

Falls to the Arabs in 637.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

capital · Baghdad, Iraq

Baghdad

Founded in 762 as the round city; the translation movement, the paper mill and the patriarchate all sit here.

Sacked in 1258.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

port · Basra, Iraq

Basra

Baghdad's Gulf port, from which the dhows sailed for India and China.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

port · Bandar Siraf, Iran

Siraf

The 9th–10th-century Gulf emporium whose Persian shipowners brought Chinese ceramics west.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Fact.

port · Hormuz Island, Iran

Hormuz

An island city from about 1300, visited by Polo, Ibn Battuta and Zheng He; Portuguese from 1515.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Tadmur, Syria

Palmyra

The caravan city whose tombs hold Han silks; destroyed in 273.

Active: The opening. Fact.

city · Antakya, Türkiye

Antioch

Roman terminus of the Euphrates road, with its port at Seleucia.

Kept lit in era 3 as the Anatolian line's terminus (dossier corridor E15, eras 2–3); the §2a row ends it in era 2 and starts it in era 0, but no era-0 corridor reaches it, so it lights from era 1.

Active: The opening; The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Fact.

port · Trabzon, Türkiye

Trebizond

The Ilkhanate's outlet to the Black Sea and Marco Polo's way home.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Tabriz, Iran

Tabriz

Ilkhanid capital with Genoese, Venetian, Armenian and Jewish quarters; Marco Polo's great market.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · Soltaniyeh, Iran

Sultaniya

Ilkhanid capital from 1305 to 1335, under Öljeitü's dome; a Latin archbishopric from 1318.

Active: Pax Mongolica. Fact.

city · Maragheh, Iran

Maragha

The observatory of 1259, where Chinese and Persian astronomers worked side by side.

Active: Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Konye-Urgench, Turkmenistan

Urgench

Gurganj, the Khwarazmian capital and al-Biruni's homeland; sacked in 1221.

Pegolotti's Organci and, for Ibn Battuta, «the largest city of the Turks».

Kept lit in era 5 as the manifest's proxy for Khiva on the northern slave and rhubarb roads (flows 5.6, 5.7); the §2a row ends it in era 4.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

oasis · Ruin near Shaulder, Kazakhstan

Otrar

Farab: the caravan massacre of 1218 that triggered the Mongol conquest; sacked in 1219.

Timur died here in 1405.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

city · Taraz, Kazakhstan

Taraz

Talas: the battle of 751 was fought somewhere near here.

Rubruck found a colony of German miners deported from Hungary.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Ak-Beshim ruin, Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan

Suyab

The Western Türk seat where Xuanzang met the qaghan at a hunt; a Tang garrison from 679.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries. Fact.

capital · Burana tower, Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan

Balasagun

Kara-Khanid, then Kara-Khitai capital.

The Christian cemeteries at Kara-Djigach nearby hold the plague graves of 1338–39.

Kept lit in era 4 as the Black Death's origin pin (flow 4.13; presence: the Kara-Djigach cemetery); the §2a row ends it in era 3.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Ruin near Huocheng, Xinjiang

Almaliq

Chagatai capital, Pegolotti's Armalec; a Franciscan mission was martyred here in 1339.

Active: Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Kharkhorin, Mongolia

Karakorum

Founded in 1235; twelve temples, two mosques and a church when Rubruck saw it in 1254.

Abandoned as capital around 1260.

Active: Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Selitrennoye, Russia

Sarai

Old Sarai, founded in the 1240s: the Golden Horde's court, with Mongol, Alan, Kipchak, Rus and Italian bazaars when Ibn Battuta came in 1332.

New Sarai, from the 1340s, is a debated site.

Kept lit in era 5 as the manifest's proxy for the Astrakhan slave road (flow 5.7); the §2a row ends it in era 4.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

capital · near Astrakhan, Russia (unlocated)

Itil

The Khazar capital of the 8th–10th centuries, with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and pagan quarters — its site never securely found.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Inference.

city · Ruin near Atyrau, Kazakhstan

Saraychik

Pegolotti's Saracanco: the Golden Horde's crossing of the Ural river.

Kept lit in era 5 with Sarai and Urgench so the northern road stays drawable (flows 5.6, 5.7); the §2a row ends it in era 4.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

port · Azov, Russia

Tana

Venetian and Genoese colony at the mouth of the Don — the starting point of Pegolotti's road to Cathay.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

port · Feodosia, Crimea

Caffa

Genoese colony from 1266, with an Armenian majority and a Tatar slave market.

The plague siege of 1346.

Active: Pax Mongolica; Timur, Ming and the maritime turn. Fact.

port · Sudak, Crimea

Sudak

Soldaia: Rubruck's landing in 1253 and the Polo brothers' base.

Active: Pax Mongolica. Fact.

pass · Derbent, Dagestan

Derbent

The Caspian Gates and the Sasanian wall; Rubruck's road home.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

city · Noyon Uul, Mongolia

Noin-Ula

Xiongnu elite tombs with Han silk, a lacquer cup dated 2 BC and Bactrian textiles.

Active: The opening. Fact.

capital · Kaifeng, China

Kaifeng

Song capital from 960 to 1127, with a Persian-speaking Jewish community whose synagogue dates from 1163.

Added for presence glyphs; coordinates to Clio-check.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Fact.

capital · Yinchuan, China

Yinchuan

Zhongxing, the Tangut capital from 1038, whose script, printers and Buddhas fell to Chinggis Khan's last campaign in 1227.

Added for presence glyphs; coordinates to Clio-check.

Active: Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road; Pax Mongolica. Fact.

capital · Karabalgasun, Mongolia

Ordu-Baliq

Karabalgasun, the Uyghur capital on the Orkhon from 744 to 840 — the only Manichaean state in history.

Destroyed by the Kyrgyz in 840.

Added for presence glyphs; coordinates to Clio-check.

Active: The Sogdian and Buddhist centuries; Baghdad, Bukhara and the fur road. Fact.