The Silk Road in Uzbekistan: how the world's first world market ran through Samarkand

The name is a 19th-century coinage: the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen called it die Seidenstrasse (the Silk Road) in 1877. Before that, the network was known by hundreds of local names or not named at all. It began to function seriously in the 2nd century BCE, when the Han Chinese diplomat Zhang Qian returned from a mission to the west and reported the existence of large civilisations beyond the Pamirs.

For most of its history, the Silk Road did not move goods end-to-end. Caravans and merchants moved regionally, exchanging cargoes at hub cities. Silk that left Chang'an might reach Rome only after seven or eight relay journeys — and would gain roughly a hundredfold in price on the way.

The land that is now Uzbekistan sits at the exact geographical hinge between China, India, Iran, and the Eurasian steppe. Caravans from Chang'an that had crossed the Taklamakan and the Pamirs arrived exhausted at the Zeravshan Valley — the fertile band of oases where Samarkand and Bukhara sat. Merchants heading east from Baghdad or Constantinople crossed Iran and Khorasan and arrived at the same oases from the other side. Khiva, further north-west in the Khorezm oasis on the Amu Darya, served the branch that ran up to Astrakhan and the Volga.

The oases were not just resting points. They were also political-military powers strong enough to guarantee safety, and cultural centres sophisticated enough to add value to whatever passed through — dyes, glass, textiles, paper, and knowledge.

For roughly a thousand years, from the 3rd century BCE to the 9th century CE, the dominant merchants on the Silk Road were the Sogdians — the Iranian-speaking people of the Zeravshan Valley. Sogdian was the trade lingua franca of Central Asia in the way that Latin was the ecclesiastical lingua franca of medieval Europe. Sogdian letters, seals, and account books have been recovered from as far east as Dunhuang in China and as far west as the Byzantine frontier.

The Sogdians ran diaspora colonies from Xi'an to the Crimea. When they arrived in a foreign city they stayed together, negotiated collective tax rates with the local ruler, and — over time — hybridised. The 'Sogdians' of Chang'an by the 8th century were largely Sinicised; the 'Sogdians' of Tashkent by the 10th century were largely Turkicised.

The obvious cargoes were silk (west from China), horses (east and west from the steppe), spices (west from India), and gold (east from the Mediterranean). Less obvious but far more consequential: paper, invented in Han China, made its slow way west through Samarkand — the Battle of Talas in 751 CE captured Chinese papermakers who then set up shops in Samarkand, from where paper spread to Baghdad by the 790s and to Europe centuries later.

Gunpowder, printing, and porcelain travelled west. Glassblowing, cotton cultivation, and precious-stone lapidary techniques travelled east. So did religions: Buddhism moved west into Central Asia and displaced Zoroastrianism in Bactria before Islam displaced both. Manichaeism travelled east into Uyghur territory. Nestorian Christianity established communities across the region. So did diseases — the Black Death of 1347 almost certainly moved east to west along the caravan routes.

The Silk Road did not die in a single moment. Three long forces killed it. The Mongol destruction of 1220 depopulated many oases. The rise of maritime trade routes from the 15th century — Portuguese, then Dutch, then British — made sea shipment of Chinese and Indian goods dramatically cheaper. And finally, the Russian and British imperial closures of the 19th century turned Central Asia into a strategic backwater.

The 21st century has seen the road revived in three forms. China's Belt and Road Initiative (launched 2013) has invested tens of billions in Central Asian rail and road infrastructure. UNESCO has inscribed the Silk Road corridors as a serial World Heritage property (2014, jointly with China and Kazakhstan). And most simply, tourism has returned to the oasis cities — 11.7 million foreign trips in 2025 is more than the estimated population of the entire Silk Road region a thousand years ago.