Best Books on Han China and the Original Silk Road

The Han dynasty ran from 206 BCE to 220 CE and produced one of the most consequential periods in Chinese history. The civil service examination system, the consolidation of Confucianism as state ideology, the mass production of iron tools and weapons, the invention of paper, and the opening of the Silk Road trade routes all belong to this period. Han China was, at its height, the largest economy in the world, and the Silk Road it established connected Central Asia, Persia, the Roman Empire, and the Indian subcontinent through a network of overland and later maritime trade routes that persisted for a millennium. The books below are the best guides to this period for readers coming from outside sinology. ## The Silk Road's Actual History The phrase "Silk Road" was coined by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877. The Han did not use that name, and the route was never a single road. It was a series of overlapping and competing routes through different ecological zones, maintained by different populations of merchants, nomads, and city-state rulers, most of whom had no direct contact with either the Chinese or Roman endpoints. Silk moved along these routes, but so did glassware, spices, horses, ideas, religions, and diseases. Buddhism entered China via the Silk Road. So did the Antonine Plague that killed perhaps five million Romans in the 160s CE. ## Top Picks ### The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen Hansen, a Yale medievalist, is the most thorough English-language historian of the Silk Road, and this book is the best place to start. Her argument, supported by manuscript and archaeological evidence from Central Asian oasis cities, is that the Silk Road was not primarily a commercial highway but a route kept open by diplomatic and military need, along which merchants traveled as a secondary benefit. She works from the Dunhuang manuscripts, documents preserved in a sealed cave complex for nearly a millennium, that show the actual daily life of Silk Road communities in unprecedented detail. ### The First Silk Roads by Susan Whitfield Whitfield's approach is biographical: she reconstructs the Silk Road through the lives of specific people, a merchant, a soldier, a widow, a monk, using documentary sources to create composites. The technique makes the period accessible without sacrificing accuracy. Strong on what it actually felt like to travel these routes and what the economics of the trade looked like from the merchant's perspective rather than the emperor's. ### China: A History by John Keay The single best survey of Chinese history in English for general readers. Keay covers the Han dynasty in the depth it deserves, with attention to the military campaigns against the Xiongnu that drove the initial westward exploration, Zhang Qian's two missions to Central Asia in the second century BCE, and the internal political dynamics of the Han court. If you are coming to Han China cold, this is the book to read first. ## Zhang Qian and the Opening of the West The Silk Road's opening is conventionally dated to the missions of Zhang Qian, a court official sent by Emperor Wu in 138 BCE to find the Yuezhi people and recruit them as allies against the Xiongnu nomads on China's northern border. Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu and held for ten years before escaping and completing his mission. He returned with intelligence about Central Asian states, Bactria, and Parthia, and his reports convinced Emperor Wu that the western routes were worth developing. A second mission followed in 119 BCE. The Silk Road trade was a consequence of military strategy, not a commercial project. Merchants followed routes that the Han military had opened and the Han diplomatic network had made partially safe. ## The Xiongnu Problem The Xiongnu confederacy on China's northern steppe was the defining security problem of the early Han period. The dynasty's first emperor, Gaozu, was defeated by Xiongnu forces in 200 BCE and was forced into a humiliating tributary relationship. Subsequent emperors alternated between tribute payments and military campaigns. Emperor Wu, who ruled from 141 to 87 BCE, launched the largest military campaigns against the Xiongnu in Chinese history and pushed them westward, eventually destabilizing the entire Central Asian political order and contributing to the movement of nomadic peoples that reached Europe centuries later. ## What Connected Rome and China Direct contact between Han China and the Roman Empire was minimal. The trade was intermediated by Parthia in the west and various Central Asian kingdoms in the middle. Roman sources mention Seres, the "silk people," but describe them vaguely. Chinese sources mention Daqin, almost certainly Rome, with equal vagueness. What connected the two empires was the chain of merchants, not direct diplomacy, and the goods that traveled the chain changed hands dozens of times before reaching their final markets. ## Further Reading For more books on ancient Chinese history and the Silk Road, browse the [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.