How the Silk Road Remade the Ancient World

How did a road with no name, one that almost no one travelled from end to end, change the ancient world? Tonight we follow the caravans across the heart of Asia. We cross the Taklamakan Desert and the snowbound passes of the Pamirs, past oasis towns and watchtowers, from the court of Han China to the markets of Rome. For more than 2,000 years, silk, horses, faiths, secrets and sickness moved along these routes, handed from stranger to stranger, and no one gave the road a name. This is the story beneath the legend. Why did a Chinese emperor go to war over horses? How did Rome come to crave a cloth it could not explain? Who were the merchants who held the road together? And how did a sickness from a Central Asian valley reach the far edge of Europe? You'll discover: The jade and lapis lazuli trade that crossed Asia long before silk Zhang Qian's mission west in 138 BC, and his ten years as a captive of the Xiongnu The war for the heavenly horses of Ferghana The Han watchtowers and walls of the Gansu Corridor Rome's craze for silk, and Pliny's complaint about its cost The Sogdians, the merchant people who carried the Silk Road Buddhism's journey into China, and the monk Xuanzang's 16-year pilgrimage to India The silkworm eggs smuggled to Byzantium inside hollow canes A night inside a desert caravanserai around 700 AD How paper travelled west and changed the world of books The Black Death and the routes it followed in the 1340s The sea route around Africa that left the old roads behind The German geographer who finally named the Silk Road in 1877 This documentary covers Han China, the Xiongnu, Parthia, Rome, the Sogdians, the Tang dynasty, the Abbasid caliphate, the Mongol Empire and the Portuguese voyages. It is told calmly and clearly, without myth or exaggeration. #SilkRoad #AncientHistory #HistoryDocumentary #ChineseHistory #CentralAsia #AncientChina #MedievalHistory #EducationalContent