Silk Road

The Silk Road was a 4,000-mile caravan route beginning in Chang’an, China, and stretching west along the Great Wall of China, over the Pamir Mountains, across Afghanistan, and ending at the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Used as early as 1000 BCE, the Silk Road was the most important pre-modern trade route in human history, providing merchants access to an extensive cultural and commercial network spanning China, central Asia, and Europe. Taking its name from early shipments of Chinese cloth, the road enabled a constant flow of goods, jade, gold, silver, wool, and spices from west to east, and inland to the sea. The Silk Road came about not from a desire for extensive trade, but when Chinese Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty sent a court representative to central Asia to seek allies in his campaign against warring Mongolian nomads who had besieged his empire. Unfortunately, the very Mongolian nomads he was hoping to subdue captured the court representative and imprisoned him for ten years. Upon his escape, he continued to central Asia to pursue his original goal, but success eluded him. Despite this, his journey west made the people of central Asia and the Chinese aware of each other. Soon the inhabitants of central Asia sought goods from China, and vice versa. Over its 1,500 years of use, the Silk Road route reached its heyday in the thirteenth century, when the Mongol conquests encouraged trade and travel between East and West. European artisans, ambassadors, missionaries, and merchants, including Marco Polo, ventured eastward as far as China, fostering the demand for Asian goods in the West. However, this interest in foreign trade ultimately led to the route’s decline. In the fifteenth century, European leaders began seeking a way to get from Europe to Asia by sea, and the discovery of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope route rendered the Silk Road obsolete.

From the game's History encyclopedia, AoE3: DE 100.19.18309.