The Silk Road and Foreign Trade in Imperial China

For most of imperial history, China was the largest single economy in the world, and the goods, people, and ideas of Chinese civilization moved along two great trade corridors into the wider world. The first was an overland network through Central Asia that historians collectively call the Silk Road; the second was a maritime network through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean that linked China to Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and, after the late fifteenth century, Africa and Europe. Together, these routes made China a central node in a Eurasian trading system that stretched, at its peak, from Japan to the Atlantic.

This page surveys both networks and the long arc of their development. The first section examines the overland Silk Road, from the Han missions of Zhang Qian to the Mongol pax of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the gradual decline of the overland routes in the Ming and Qing. The second section examines maritime trade: the rise of Chinese shipping in the Tang and Song, the great ports of Quanzhou and Guangzhou, and the Ming maritime expeditions of Zheng He. The third section examines the goods that moved along the routes — silk, porcelain, tea, spices, precious metals, glass, horses, and ideas. The fuller treatments of what was actually traded on the Silk Road and the importance of maritime trade take up these themes in detail. The broader economic context, including agriculture, currency, and internal trade, is set in the overview of the imperial Chinese economy.

The Overland Silk Road: From Han to Mongol

The term “Silk Road” (German Seidenstraße) was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, but the network it describes was built up gradually over many centuries. The earliest long-distance routes connected the Chinese heartland with the steppe and with Central Asia, and the political instability of the Warring States and early imperial periods meant that Chinese goods reached the West indirectly, through the hands of steppe nomads and Central Asian middlemen. Sustained, direct Chinese contact with the states of Central Asia began in the second century BCE with the missions of Zhang Qian, and it became the foundation of a Silk Road system that would last, in different forms, for nearly two thousand years.

The Han Opening and Zhang Qian

The Han emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) faced a serious strategic problem: the Xiongnu confederation, a powerful nomadic empire that controlled the steppe north of the Han, was a constant threat to the northern frontier. In 138 BCE, the emperor sent the courtier Zhang Qian westward on a mission to seek an alliance with the Yuezha, a people who had been driven westward by the Xiongnu and were reportedly settled in the Ferghana valley. Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu and held for ten years; he eventually escaped, reached the Ferghana and Bactria, and returned to Chang’an in 126 BCE. Although the alliance with the Yuezha did not materialize, Zhang Qian’s reports opened a new era in Chinese knowledge of the western regions.

The Han state followed up with military expeditions into the Tarim Basin, the establishment of the Protectorate of the Western Regions in 60 BCE, and the extension of Chinese influence as far as the Pamirs and Ferghana. Silk became a major export — by the first century CE, Roman aristocrats were complaining about the drain of gold to pay for it — and Chinese influence reached as far as the Parthian empire and the Indian subcontinent. The ancient imperial period that produced this opening set the stage, and the Buddhism that entered China along these routes became one of the great religious inheritances of the imperial period.

The Tang Network and Sogdian Merchants

The Tang Dynasty (618–907) presided over the second great flourishing of the overland Silk Road. Tang armies restored Chinese influence over the Tarim Basin and reached the Pamirs, Ferghana, and even the Oxus. The capital at Chang’an, the largest city in the world in the eighth century, hosted a Sogdian merchant community with its own temples, the famous Nestorian Christian monument of 781 was erected in Chang’an, and the monk Xuanzang traveled overland to India in the seventh century to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763 devastated the north and disrupted the overland routes. The later Tang, the Five Dynasties, and the early Song saw a partial revival of overland trade, but the gradual loss of the Tarim Basin to the Tibetans and (later) the Uighurs reduced Chinese political control of the routes.

The actual overland trade in the Tang and Song was carried out less by Chinese merchants than by Central Asian middlemen. The Sogdians of Transoxiana were the great mercantile people of the period: Sogdian merchants operated in every major city of Eurasia, from Chang’an to Samarkand to the Volga bend, and they spoke and wrote a common commercial language (Sogdian, written in a script derived from Aramaic). The history of what was actually traded on the Silk Road reflects this multi-directional commerce: silk moved west, but Sogdian silver, Persian silverware, Indian textiles, and Central Asian horses moved east in much greater volume than the silk traffic alone would suggest.

The Mongol Pax and the Thirteenth-Century Boom

The Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century was the third great moment in the history of the overland routes. Chinggis Khan and his successors unified, for the first and only time, the entire land mass from the Pacific to the Black Sea, and the resulting Pax Mongolica gave the overland routes an unprecedented security. Italian, Byzantine, Persian, and Armenian merchants traveled freely to the Mongol capital at Karakorum and, after 1260, to Khanbaliq (Beijing). The Polos, Marco and his relatives, were only the most famous of these travelers. Christian missions, including the famous journey of John of Montecorvino, reached China. The Chinese traveler Rabban Bar Sauma, a Nestorian Mongol, traveled west as far as Rome and Bordeaux in the 1280s.

The Mongol period saw a temporary transfer of technological and scientific knowledge that, transmitted westward, helped lay the groundwork for the European Renaissance. Paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass began their long westward migration. The Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, anxious to disrupt the Mongol-led trade, was a major reason that the maritime routes around the Cape of Good Hope were explored by Vasco da Gama in 1497–1498, opening the era of European seaborne empires.

The Ming and Qing Retreat

The fall of the Yuan (1368) and the early Ming policies of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors began a long retreat of the overland routes. The Ming attempted to manage the Central Asian frontier through a tributary system rather than a protectorate, and the early Ming also sponsored the great maritime expeditions of Zheng He, discussed below. The gradual rise of the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires transformed Central Asia, and the overland trade was reduced to a fraction of its former volume. The Qing, after extending their power into Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet, and Central Asia in the eighteenth century, reasserted a degree of control over the northern routes, but the overland trade was no longer the principal artery of Chinese foreign commerce. By the eighteenth century, the maritime trade had become dominant, and the silver that entered China came from the Americas rather than from Central Asia.

Maritime Trade and the South China Sea

Maritime trade was never unimportant in the imperial Chinese economy, but its relative weight grew steadily from the Tang to the Qing. The Han had coastal trade and contacts with Southeast Asia, but the great era of Chinese maritime commerce began with the Tang and reached its first peak in the Song, when Chinese junks dominated the South China Sea and the maritime Silk Road carried Chinese goods to every port of maritime Asia. The late Ming saw the extraordinary maritime expeditions of Zheng He, and the early Qing, despite restrictions, hosted a major maritime trade that ultimately reshaped the global economy.

The Tang Foundations

The Tang Dynasty inherited a Chinese maritime tradition that was already centuries old. Chinese ships had plied the South China Sea since the Han, and by the Tang they were sailing regularly to Champa (Vietnam), Srivijaya (in modern Sumatra), Java, the Malay Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. The great Tang port of Guangzhou, which had a Sogdian and Arab merchant quarter as early as the seventh century, was the principal Chinese gateway to the maritime world. The Yangzhou massacre of 760, in which Chinese soldiers killed several thousand foreign merchants, and the earlier suppression of foreign commerce during the An Lushan Rebellion, were temporary setbacks. By the late Tang, the maritime trade was recovering, and the Song inherited an active and expanding maritime commerce.

The Song Boom and the Rise of Chinese Shipping

The Song Dynasty (960–1279) was the first great era of Chinese maritime commerce. The Northern Song capital at Kaifeng was connected to the sea by a network of canals and rivers, and the Southern Song capital at Hangzhou, near the mouth of the Qiantang River, was closer still. Chinese shipbuilding reached a high point in the Song: the great seagoing junks of the Fujian and Guangdong coasts were multi-masted vessels with watertight bulkheads (a Chinese invention), the magnetic compass, the sternpost rudder, and complex sail rigs. Marco Polo, exaggerating but not inventing, described the great junks of southern China as the largest vessels in the world.

The Song government, faced with a fiscal crisis after losing the north to the Jurchen Jin in 1127, came to depend on maritime customs revenue. The customs office at Quanzhou, the great Fujian port, was among the largest revenue-producing offices in the empire. Quanzhou, in the words of the contemporary inscription on the church of the Augustinian friar Andreas de Perusia, was one of the greatest ports in the world. Song Chinese merchants and sailors operated in every port of maritime Asia; Song coins have been found as far away as East Africa. The history of maritime trade in imperial China takes up the Song foundations in greater detail.

The Ming Maritime Expeditions and the Sea Ban

The Ming Dynasty, in the early fifteenth century, conducted the largest organized maritime expeditions in the preindustrial world. The Yongle emperor (r. 1402–1424) sent the eunuch admiral Zheng He, a Muslim from Yunnan, on seven great voyages between 1405 and 1433. The treasure fleets were enormous: the first expedition included 317 ships and perhaps 28,000 crew, and the largest ships were the biggest wooden vessels ever built, more than 120 meters long by some reconstructions. The expeditions reached as far as the Swahili coast in East Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf; they established Chinese presence in the Strait of Malacca, the Indian subcontinent, and the Horn of Africa; and they projected the Yongle emperor’s prestige across maritime Asia. The court chroniclers record gifts of giraffes, zebras, and ostriches; the practical effects on trade are more debated.

The Ming abruptly ended the maritime expeditions in 1433. The succeeding emperors, anxious about the cost and suspicious of the officials and merchants who had profited from the trade, imposed a series of sea bans (haijin) that restricted or forbade private maritime commerce. The bans were enforced unevenly, and smuggling was widespread, but the effect was to constrain the growth of Chinese maritime power and to allow the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch to enter the East Asian maritime world in the sixteenth century. The eventual relaxation of the sea ban in 1567 and the late Ming fiscal reforms (especially the single-whip reform) opened the way for a major revival of Chinese maritime trade in the late Ming and early Qing.

The Late Ming and Qing Maritime Trade

The late Ming and early Qing saw a new peak of Chinese maritime commerce. The Hokkien and Teochew merchant diasporas established communities throughout Southeast Asia; the Spanish galleon trade at Manila (1565–1815) carried Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea across the Pacific in exchange for American silver; the Dutch East India Company (VOC) became the largest European trading organization in East Asia; and Chinese junks dominated the intra-Asian trade. The early Qing, after 1683, attempted to manage the maritime frontier through the canton system, restricting European trade to the single port of Guangzhou and requiring all foreign merchants to deal with the official merchant guild (the Cohong). The breakdown of the canton system in the nineteenth century, under British pressure to permit the opium trade, was a major step on the road to the fall of imperial China.

The Goods of the Silk Road and the Maritime Trade

The exchanges that took place along the overland and maritime routes were never one-way. Silk, porcelain, tea, and manufactured goods moved outward; spices, precious metals, glass, precious stones, horses, and ideas moved inward. The deeper treatment of what was actually traded on the Silk Road shows that the multi-directional nature of the trade was a feature from the beginning, and that the Chinese economy was both a supplier and a consumer in the Eurasian system.

Outward: Silk, Porcelain, Tea, and Manufactures

Silk was the iconic export of imperial China, and it remained important for two millennia. Chinese silk, especially the fine silks of the Jiangnan region, were prized in Rome, Byzantium, Persia, the Arab world, and (eventually) Europe. Porcelain, another signature export, was produced in massive quantities at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi from the Tang onward. Ming and Qing blue-and-white porcelain has been found on archaeological sites from East Africa to the Philippines to the Americas. Tea, which became a major export only in the Ming and Qing, drove the late-imperial maritime trade: the British East India Company’s tea shipments were a central feature of the global trade of the eighteenth century, and the tea-and-silver circuit of the late Qing was one of the great financial flows of the early modern world. Other Chinese exports included lacquerware, books, paper, iron goods, and processed foods.

Inward: Spices, Metals, Horses, and Luxuries

The imports were as varied as the exports. Spices — pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon — were the great luxury trade of maritime Asia, and they entered China through the ports of the south. Precious metals were crucial: silver from the Americas via the Spanish Philippines, gold from Southeast Asia, and earlier (in the Tang and Song) Sogdian silver from Central Asia. The late imperial silver influx, on which the single-whip tax reform depended, was the largest such import in the world. Horses, especially the “blood-sweating” Ferghana horses of Central Asia, were a major Chinese import from the Han to the Song; the Song military weakness in the face of steppe cavalry was in part a consequence of its inability to acquire high-quality horses once the northern frontier was lost. Other imports included precious stones, ivory, rhinoceros horn, aromatic woods, glassware, and a range of high-status luxuries from the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.

Ideas: Buddhism, Islam, and the Migration of Knowledge

Ideas moved along the trade routes as freely as goods. Buddhism, originally an Indian religion, entered China over the Silk Road in the Han period and by the Tang was the dominant religious and philosophical current of the empire; Chinese Buddhism in turn spread to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, and Zoroastrianism arrived in Tang China and left small but significant communities. Islam entered China by the Tang, both overland and by sea, and by the Song and Yuan the Muslim communities of Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Yangzhou, and the northwestern frontier were large and well-established. The Mongol period saw an unprecedented exchange of technology: paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, and a range of mechanical and medical knowledge migrated westward. The history of Chinese philosophy and religion treats the religious and intellectual consequences of these exchanges in greater depth.