The Silk Road Opens Under the Han

The event

Around 138 BC, Emperor Wu sent the envoy Zhang Qian west to seek allies against the Xiongnu. Zhang Qian was captured and held for roughly a decade before escaping and completing an extraordinary journey through Central Asia, returning years later with the first detailed Chinese knowledge of the kingdoms of Central Asia, Persia, and, by report, lands further west still.

His reports opened the way for regular trade caravans carrying Chinese silk west and bringing horses, glassware, and other goods east, along a network of routes that a nineteenth-century German geographer would later name the 'Silk Road.' Over the following centuries this network would stretch, market to market and hand to hand, all the way to the Roman Mediterranean, even though few individual travelers ever crossed its entire length.

The Silk Road's slow linking of Han China to the Mediterranean world unfolded in the same broad centuries in which God, through the political unification of the Roman Empire, the spread of Greek as a common language, and relative peace along the trade routes, was preparing the world for the coming of Christ 'when the fullness of time had come' (Galatians 4:4). Even the farthest reaches of the ancient world — China included — existed under the same sovereign, patient providence that was orchestrating the center of salvation history.

Dating

138 BC is the firm anchor: the year Emperor Wu dispatched the envoy Zhang Qian westward (he returned in 126 BC after years in Xiongnu captivity; a second mission followed c. 119–115 BC). Regular through-trade only developed gradually as Han armies secured the Hexi corridor and the Tarim Basin toward the end of the second century BC — hence the open-ended c. 138–100 BC range. 'Silk Road' itself is a modern label, coined by the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877; no ancient source uses the term.