"The Silk Road, or Roads," begins Frances Wood in this fascinating book, have only been known this way since the late 19th century, when a German explorer came up with the romantic name. She offers a couple of necessary qualifications to the standard image of a route for caravans bearing precious silk from Asia into Europe. One is that the "road" was in fact a network of different routes, linking oases to the north and south of the central desert region, and branching off at either end.
The other point Wood makes is that the products that were borne and traded were much more varied than we usually imagine: From China went "silk, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls and rhubarb," in the words of one historical account. By the 18th century the last item, valued as a purgative, was already being grown in English gardens. The exchange the other way included not only grapes, but a number of food items that are now essential to cooking in the East: "Sesame, peas, coriander from Bactria (northeast Afghanistan) and cucumber were all introduced to China from the West."
We tend to think, rather simply, of paper and fireworks and Marco Polo, when we consider the exchanges between the West and China. Wood has written before on Marco Polo, and casts doubts here on some of his more improbable reports. As both a sinologist (she is in charge of the Chinese section at the British Library in London), and the author of a guide to China, she is well positioned to disentangle fact from myth. So we are told exactly why the Chinese wanted horses, and informed that the "blood-sweating horses" once legendary there were probably diseased.