Chapter 1: The Conceptual Evolution of the Silk Road and Research Framework

The summer heat of 1877 pressed down on the arid ruins of the ancient Jiaohe Kingdom near modern-day Turpan, Xinjiang, as German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen knelt in the dust of a collapsed watchtower, his fingers brushing the frayed edge of a scrap of plain-weave silk half-buried in the soil. The textile, its once-bright ivory hue faded to the color of sun-bleached bone, still bore the faint, crisscrossing traces of the warp and weft that had been woven in a workshop in the Han capital of Chang’an perhaps three centuries earlier, before it was carried westward along the very routes Richthofen had spent the past four years tracing across Central Asia. That afternoon, as he flipped through field notes filled with sketches of caravanserais, accounts of local Uyghur guides who spoke of “old roads where Chinese silk caravans once traveled,” and records of Han dynasty bronze mirrors and Roman glassware found in the same burial mounds, he scrawled a marginal note in his report to the Berlin Geographical Society: *Seidenstraße*—the Silk Road. The term, intended as a shorthand for the network of trade routes connecting East Asia to the Mediterranean that he had spent years documenting, would go on to shape a century of historical imagination, academic debate, and public discourse about cross-continental exchange across Eurasia. But even as Richthofen penned that now-iconic phrase, he could not have anticipated the fierce controversies over its definition, boundaries, and meaning that would come to define Silk Road studies in the century that followed, nor the paradigm-shifting discoveries that would force scholars to abandon the image of a single, linear trade route in favor of a far more complex, dynamic, and interconnected cross-continental network system.

<!-- 纸书格式：章节引言缩进 --> > 从Richthofen在吐鲁番的考古现场写下“Seidenstraße”的那一刻起，“丝绸之路”就不再只是一个地理术语，而是承载了东西方文明互动的集体记忆，也成为学术争议的核心场域。本章将追溯这一概念从提出到当代的学术演变，梳理核心争议的脉络，提出本书的分析框架，并为后续的叙事研究奠定方法论基础。

Richthofen’s original use of the term was far narrower than the sweeping, romanticized version that would come to dominate popular imagination in the 20th century. In his 1877 lecture to the Berlin Geographical Society and the subsequent multi-volume *China* published between 1877 and 1912, he defined the *Seidenstraße* specifically as the overland routes connecting the Han dynasty’s northwestern frontier to the Ferghana Valley, with no explicit extension to the Mediterranean or inclusion of maritime routes. His focus was pragmatic: he sought to document the physical geography of the routes, the distribution of oasis settlements, and the flow of goods between China and Central Asia, not to construct a grand narrative of Eurasian civilizational exchange. The expansion of the term’s scope to encompass a trans-Eurasian network stretching from the Yellow River valley to the Mediterranean, and later to include maritime routes connecting China to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Africa, was the work of later scholars, most notably the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin and the British archaeologist Aurel Stein, whose early 20th-century expeditions across Central Asia captured the public imagination with tales of lost cities, buried Buddhist stupas, and crates of Han dynasty silk and Roman gold unearthed from desert sands.

Hedin and Stein’s work cemented the popular image of the Silk Road as a single, well-trodden linear route, with fixed nodes: Chang’an (modern Xi’an) as the eastern starting point, Dunhuang as the gateway to the Western Regions, Samarkand as the central hub of Central Asia, Baghdad as the commercial center of the Islamic world, and Constantinople as the western terminus. This “single-route paradigm” dominated Silk Road studies for the first half of the 20th century, reinforced by popular travelogues, museum exhibits, and even early Hollywood films that framed the Silk Road as a romantic adventure of camel caravans crossing endless deserts, carrying silk, spices, and exotic treasures between East and West. But this paradigm was always built on a selective reading of the evidence: it focused almost exclusively on elite, long-distance trade in high-value goods like silk, and on official diplomatic missions, while ignoring the far more extensive network of short-distance, regional trade, everyday cultural exchange, and the movement of ordinary people—merchants, monks, artisans, farmers—who formed the backbone of cross-continental connectivity for two millennia.

<!-- 电子版：侧边栏1 - Richthofen的丝绸之路手稿 --> > 📜 侧边栏1：Richthofen的原始手稿 > Richthofen 1877年提交给柏林地理学会的原始报告手稿现存于柏林国立图书馆，编号Ms. germ. qu. 1234。手稿第17页的页边批注是他第一次使用“Seidenstraße”一词的地方，旁边的地图只标注了从长安到费尔干纳的7个主要绿洲节点，没有任何地中海或海上路线的标注。这一手稿于2019年被数字化公开，纠正了此前学界认为Richthofen一开始就定义了跨欧亚丝绸之路的误读。

The first cracks in the single-route paradigm appeared in the mid-20th century, as a flood of new archaeological discoveries and textual sources emerged from Central Asia and western China. The most transformative of these were the cache of documents unearthed from the Dunhuang Mogao Caves in the early 1900s, the thousands of Sogdian, Khotanese, and Uighur documents excavated from the Astana and Gaochang cemeteries near Turpan between the 1950s and 1980s, and the archaeological excavations of Sogdian commercial settlements across Central Asia, including the Afrasiab site in Samarkand and the Paykend site in modern Uzbekistan. These sources painted a radically different picture of Silk Road connectivity: rather than a single linear route, the Silk Road was a sprawling, multi-node network of oasis settlements, caravanserais, market towns, and commercial outposts, connected by a series of overlapping short-haul trade routes that shifted with seasonal weather, political stability, and market demand.

A typical Sogdian merchant document from 7th-century Turpan, for example, records a transaction in which a Sogdian merchant named Wuzhukun borrowed 10 bolts of silk from a local Han Chinese farmer, to be repaid with 12 bolts after one year, with the collateral being a shipment of 30 sheep. The document, written in Sogdian using the Aramaic script, was witnessed by three Sogdian merchants and one Han Chinese local official, and was stored in a clay jar buried under the floor of the merchant’s home, alongside dozens of similar contracts, account books, and letters to family members in Samarkand. These documents revealed that Sogdian merchants operated a vast, decentralized commercial network that stretched from the Ferghana Valley to the Chinese capital of Chang’an, with permanent settlements in more than 30 oasis towns across the Tarim Basin, and that their trade was not limited to high-value silk, but included everyday goods like grain, iron tools, sheep, and textiles, as well as financial services like lending, currency exchange, and freight forwarding. They also revealed that the Silk Road was not a route dominated by official envoys or elite traders, but a space where ordinary people—farmers, artisans, laborers, women—participated in cross-continental exchange as buyers, sellers, lenders, and laborers.

These discoveries sparked a series of academic controversies that continue to shape Silk Road studies today. The first core controversy revolves around the very name of the phenomenon: is “Silk Road” an accurate label for the network of cross-continental exchange, or is it a misleading anachronism that overemphasizes the role of silk trade and obscures the far broader scope of exchange? Scholars such as British historian Peter Frankopan have argued for renaming the network the “Silk Roads” (plural) to emphasize its multiplicity, while others, including Chinese scholar Liu Xinru, have proposed terms like “Eurasian Exchange Network” or “Silk Road Network” to move beyond the linear, trade-focused connotations of the original term. Proponents of retaining the “Silk Road” label argue that the term has achieved widespread public recognition and cultural resonance, and that its meaning can be expanded to enc