The Silk Road Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ferdinand von Richtofen

Ferdinand von Richtofen (1833-1905) was a German geographer who published a map of Asia in 1877; the map showed the "Seidenstrasse" as a red line cutting across Asia from east to west. Ferdinand's nephew, Manfred, was also partial to the color red, but that's another question for another quiz.

Hedin (who had been Richtofen's student) and Stein both explored portions of the Silk Road at the beginning of the 20th century.

Answer: Pliny the Elder

Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23-79) is probably best known for his encyclopedic "Natural History."

But it's not at all clear that the silk was actually coming all the way from China. It may have been made from broken cocoons of wild silkworm moths on the Aegean island of Cos. The earliest confidently datable silks definitely of Chinese origin that have been recovered by archaeologists in the Roman world were found at Palmyra (today's Syria) and date from the third century AD.

Answer: glass wares

Up through the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907), the only kind of glass made in China was opaque. Translucent glass had long been made in the Western world and was prized in China. To the extent that Chinese were aware of the Byzantine Empire at all, they thought of it as the legendary land of crystal stemware.

Lapis lazuli did move eastward along the Silk Road, but it originated in Badakshan (Afghanistan) rather than the Mediterranean basin.

Curiously, very few Roman or Byzantine coins have ever been found in China.

Answer: Sogdians

The Sogdians spoke an Iranian language and came from the area around Samarkand in today's Uzbekistan. Étienne de la Vaissière has written a fine book about them that's now available in an English translation: "Sogdian Traders: A History" (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

Answer: Greek, Latin, German, and the Celtic languages

Yes, Tocharian was found to be on the European side of the Indo-European divide. What is more, the well-preserved Xinjiang mummies show us that the inhabitants of the region circa 1000 BC liked to dress in plaids. What will be discovered next, golf clubs?

Answer: Chang'an

At its height around AD 700, Chang'an had about a million people living inside the walls and another million in the suburbs. The city's huge Western Market was filled with foreign traders and exotic goods.

Answer: Shinto

Manicheism and Islam could also be added to the list of Silk Road religions.

Shinto never spread beyond Japan, except to the extent that it was imposed on conquered territories (such as Korea) in the early 20th century.

Answer: His pilgrimage to bring Buddhist scriptures back from India

Xuanzang (ca. 602-664) was a Chinese Buddhist monk whose Silk Road travels and studies in South Asia covered the years 629 to 645. After his return to China he wrote an account of his travels, which later inspired the fantastical Ming-dynasty novel "Journey to the West" ("Xi you ji").

Answer: Inside a hollow cane

The story is in chapter XL of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," page 1271 in the Modern Library edition.

The monks would appear to have been Nestorian Christians from Persia.

Answer: True

The popular image of the Silk Road as a sort of camel-caravan superhighway carrying large quantities of merchandise from China to Rome is, well, more than a little bit off. Surviving documents and other archaeological finds indicate that most traders were not much more than peddlers and did not range very widely.

This point is strongly emphasized by Yale professor Valerie Hansen, a leading authority on the subject: "The Silk Road was one of the least traveled routes in human history and possibly not worth studying -- if tonnage carried, traffic, or the number of travelers at any time were the sole measures of a given route's significance." ("The Silk Road: A New History," p. 235).