Silk and Silk Goods on the Silk Road

Of all the commodities that travelled the overland and maritime corridors connecting Asia with the Mediterranean, none gave the network its name, shaped its early history, or carried its cultural prestige as decisively as silk. The thin, lustrous thread spun by the mulberry-fed caterpillar of Bombyx mori was, for nearly a millennium, the single most valuable trade good in Eurasia — a textile so prized in Rome that it provoked a senator’s complaint, so closely guarded in China that its methods were treated as a state secret, and so durable in the markets of Byzantium and the Islamic world that it bankrupted dynasties and financed empires. The story of silk is, in many ways, the story of the Silk Road itself — and I would argue that, in the long run, the cloth mattered more than the caravans that carried it.

This article traces the trade in silk and silk goods from its origins in the workshops of ancient China to its eventual diffusion across Eurasia, with attention to the varieties of cloth in circulation, the merchants who handled them, and the social meanings attached to wearing them. For the broader context of long-distance commerce, see the article on Silk Road trade, goods, and economy. The technical processes by which the thread was produced are described in the article on Chinese silk production, and the long Chinese monopoly on sericulture is examined in the article on the secret of Chinese silk.

Origins and early trade

Silk cloth appears in Chinese archaeological contexts as early as the third millennium BCE, with the most famous early finds coming from sites associated with the Yangshao and Longshan cultures. By the time of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE), sericulture was an established craft, and silk was being used not only for clothing but as a writing surface, a binding material, and — this is the detail I had not appreciated until I read Kuhn — a form of taxable wealth that local officials could levy in lieu of coin. The opening of the overland routes to the west under the Han dynasty in the second century BCE converted what had been a regional Chinese commodity into the engine of an intercontinental trade.

The opening of the routes owed as much to strategic as to commercial concerns. The Han emperor Wu dispatched the envoy Zhang Qian into Central Asia in 138 BCE with the aim of forging an alliance against the Xiongnu confederation. The mission failed in its immediate military purpose, but it returned with detailed intelligence about the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin and, beyond them, the markets of Bactria, Sogdiana, and Parthia. Within a generation, Han armies had secured the Hexi Corridor and the oases of the Tarim Basin, and Chinese silk was moving west in significant quantities. The official Chinese histories record that, in 126 BCE, an embassy from Parthia arrived at the Han court, having itself travelled via the same routes; the chronicler noted with satisfaction that Parthian kings were eager to receive Chinese silk. That sentence, in the Shiji, is one of the earliest concrete datings we have for the overland silk trade, and it is short enough to be worth quoting in full.

Silk is, in many ways, a more interesting story than the caravans that carried it.

The varieties of silk in trade

It is a mistake to think of “silk” as a single, uniform commodity. The silks that moved along the Silk Road in any given century varied enormously in weight, weave, dye, and finish, and the gradations carried real economic and social meaning. A modern reader looking at a museum case full of fragments tends to see “silk”; a Tang-period broker in Chang’an would have seen perhaps a dozen distinct products, each with a separate name, price, and customer.

The earliest and most prestigious Chinese silks were woven silks — flat, plain-weave tabby cloths produced on drawlooms in the workshops of the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys. These were the silks most prized in Han and Roman tombs, and they established the cloth’s reputation for lightness and sheen. By the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), Chinese workshops were also producing gauze silks, lightweight open-weave fabrics often used for veils and ceremonial garments, and damask silks, in which patterns were created by varying the weave structure rather than by embroidery. The Tang court, in particular, was famous for its brocades — heavy, multicoloured silks in which gold-wrapped threads were laid into the weave to produce raised patterns. Some Tang brocades, preserved in the cave temples of Dunhuang (cave 156 in particular, if you ever get there), can be matched to fragments found in Central Asian tombs at Astana near Turfan, demonstrating the long geographical reach of the Chinese luxury industry. I have stood in front of those Dunhuang panels and the matching Astana fragments in the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi, and the resemblance is striking.

In addition to cloth, raw and thrown silk moved west in bales. Raw silk, in the form of reels of unbleached thread, was easier to transport and could be re-woven into local styles, and it dominated the early Roman market. The Romans were not alone in importing it; the Sasanian Persians, the Sogdian merchants of Transoxiana, and the Byzantine state all imported large quantities of Chinese raw silk to feed their own weaving industries. The Sasanians in particular developed a sophisticated silk-weaving tradition in the sixth and seventh centuries, and Sasanian silks — many of them depicting hunting scenes, winged horses, and rosettes within roundels — have been found from China to the Alps.

After the collapse of the Chinese monopoly on sericulture in the sixth century, local silk industries emerged in Byzantium, Syria, Iran, and Central Asia. From the eighth century onward, the most sophisticated centres of silk production were in the Islamic world, where Baghdad, Damascus, and later Bukhara and Samarkand produced silks that were exported both east and west. Persian and Central Asian silks, often woven with small repeating patterns and bold colours, became prestige goods in their own right, and they were imitated in turn by Chinese workshops during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). The conventional narrative, in my view, slightly oversells the “decline” of Chinese silk in the post-Tang centuries; the Chinese industry continued to produce extraordinary things, but the centre of international fashion moved elsewhere.

The British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition (2015) and the Smithsonian’s Travelers and Trade (2019) are the two most recent large Anglo-American museum treatments, and both are worth a visit if the reader gets the chance. The Chinese National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, on the western shore of West Lake, is the obvious destination for those who can travel in China; the building itself, opened in 1992, is worth a look even if the textile collection is closed.

A personal note

The best treatment of Chinese silk is Dieter Kuhn’s Chinese Silks (2012); the best treatment of Byzantine silk is Anthony Cutler’s Late Antique and Byzantine Silk (2020, posthumous); the best treatment of the Islamic silk industry is missing — there is no easy single source, and you will have to triangulate from articles. The field is uneven.

Further reading

If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
• Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
• Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
• The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.

Related pages

Chinese silk production · The secret of Chinese silk · Silk Road trade, goods, and economy · The Han dynasty and the Silk Road · and the rest under the main guide.