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3D Silk Road
Lesson Plan:
Creating Three-Dimensional Timeline (grades 6 - 10)
A Silk Roads Encounters Project
Description
Through the creation of a three-dimensional timeline, students are asked to bring
together information from the extended history of the Silk Roads that covers
people, places, events, and cultural landmarks. Four major periods of Silk Road
history are highlighted for this activity, and students are encouraged to combine
written information with visual images. It may be easier to conduct this activity
after each group has read about and studied the history, culture, people, and
products of the Silk Roads.
Objectives/Skills
These timelines provide the students with the opportunity to develop their skills
in sequencing, writing, creating models, and oral presentation. Specifically,
students will

gather and order historical evidence surrounding the Silk Roads

identify key people, places, and events in the history of the Silk Roads

gain an understanding of the rich diversity of peoples and places found along the
Silk Roads
Assessment
Students will generate a three-dimensional timeline of the Silk Roads and offer
an oral presentation to the class.
Questions
How did the Silk Roads change over time? Why?
Procedure
1.
Assign groups of three to five students. Review Silk Road history (based on the
linked Historical Background of the Silk Roads essay) as well as project
requirements as found on Student Assignment Sheet. Brainstorm ideas to be
included on the timelines.
2.
Begin building the timeline by deciding on a scale, stressing that equal time
periods must be of equal length. The timeline of the Silk Roads will run from
approximately the 2nd century BCE to the present, focusing on four periods of
highest activity:
3.
o
the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE;
o
the 7th to 10th century;
o
the 12th to 14th century; and
o
the 19th century to the present
Measure and cut oak tag or poster board into eight-inch-wide strips for each time
period. Carefully fold the strips in half along their length so that when opened they
will stand freely in an A-frame shape. Using pencil and rulers have students mark
the length of each strip to represent a time period. (Note: They will not be of equal
lengths because the time periods vary slightly.) This works well as a portable
timeline frame, although ambitious students may also choose to construct their
timelines of other materials. Information can be put directly on the frame, or
documents and artifacts can be attached or placed in front of the appropriate time
interval on display.
4.
Allow students to research, write, and create visuals for required elements, as
noted on the Student Assignment Sheet. At the end of each workday, it is helpful to
take a few minutes for the groups to evaluate their progress and set goals for the
following day.
5.
On the final day of the project, have groups make oral presentations of the
timelines to the class.
Extension
Have students write a position paper on what they consider to be one of the most
important events in the history of the Silk Roads. This could include the invention of
a particular product, the development of technology, the rise (or fall) of an empire,
or the transmission of a religious belief. Share the results in class.
Background Essay:
Historical Background of the Silk Roads
A Silk Road Encounters Reading
Description
The history of human settlement, migration, and cultural interaction in Eurasia is
a history of displacement of hunter-gatherers by farmers and pastoralists, and
then of a combination of both conflict and cooperation (including trade) between
agrarian “civilization” and pastoral “barbarism.” The history of the Silk Road
threads its way through the context of these large-scale cultural interactions. The
Silk Road itself is a relatively late phenomenon, pioneering in the late first
millennium BCE and established as a regular trade route sometime near the end
of that millennium.
Content
Since the Neolithic Revolution (8,000 to 4,000 BCE in Eurasia, and later
elsewhere in the world), agriculturalists and pastoralists have always expanded
into territories suitable for their own pursuits, in the process displacing,
absorbing, or exterminating neighboring peoples who practice the older lifestyle
of hunting and gathering. Agriculturalists and pastoralists then compete for
marginal lands, the former seeking to expand the region under agricultural
cultivation, the latter seeking to maintain unplowed and unsown grasslands to
provide pasture for flocks and herds of animals.
The ability of agriculturalists to produce wealth in the form of surplus calories
that can support long-term population growth tends to out-compete pastoralists
wherever farming is made feasible by climate, soil, and available technology.
This agricultural way of life produced concomitant phenomena of urbanization,
class structure, the proliferation of material goods and the techniques to make
and improve them—in short, the full panoply of consequences of food production
and population growth that we refer to as civilization.
The history of human settlement, migration, and cultural interaction in Eurasia is
a history of displacement of hunter-gatherers by farmers and pastoralists, and
then of a combination of both conflict and cooperation (including trade) between
agrarian “civilization” and pastoral “barbarism.” The history of the Silk Road
threads its way through the context of these large-scale cultural interactions. The
Silk Road itself is a relatively late phenomenon, pioneered during the mid-1st
millennium BCE and established as a regular trade route near the end of that
millennium. The history of the Silk Road has its beginnings in the prior history of
long-distance travel, trade, and population movements across the trans-Eurasian
steppe belt.
While the agricultural revolution was underway in several different parts of
Eurasia (earlier in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later in China), hunting peoples
in the steppe belt were learning to manage herds of wild horses. Horses, both as
managed wild animals and in the early stages of domestication, were a
significant element of the steppe diet long before they were used for
transportation. Gradually, they came to be put in harness to draw the heavywheeled carts that became the first key to mobility on the steppe. Nomads of the
steppes who followed their herds with wheeled vehicles—Scythians, Sarmatians,
and others—formed part of a steppe culture that soon stretched all the way
across Asia. The distinctive art of these steppe peoples, characterized by bronze
weapons and ornamental goods decorated with depictions of stylized animals, is
found everywhere from Europe near the Black Sea to northern China. This was
not just the result of trade; peoples, too, were on the move.
As early as 2,000 BCE people who were genetically closely related to the Celtic
peoples of Europe, and who spoke an Indo-European language, had moved into
eastern Central Asia in regions that are now part of the Chinese territory of
Xinjiang. We know this because their burial practices, combined with the dryness
and saline soil of the region, preserved many of their dead as mummies that
have yielded much valuable information through DNA studies, and because their
textiles have shown close linkages to textile traditions of western Eurasia. We
can further infer it because three innovations— a light, horse-drawn military
chariot, wheat, and domestic sheep and goats—reached China through the
intermediation of these people during the 13th century BCE.
Horseback riding, as opposed to the use of horses to draw wheeled vehicles,
became common on the steppes during the second millennium BCE. This final
step in the development of full-scale, pastoral nomadism in the steppelands
further facilitated the long-range movement of peoples across the steppe belt. It
also set up the dynamic of competition for land—for agriculture or pasture—on
the borderlands of China. For hundreds, even thousands of years to come, the
enduring problem of Chinese foreign policy would be how to deal with mounted
nomads on its northern frontier. Eventually, the Chinese looked to the Gansu
Corridor and the Silk Road as an alternative to leaving their long-distance
overland trade in the hands of steppe nomads.
Just as the domestication of the horse made steppe pastoralism possible, the
domestication of the camel (around 800 BCE) made trade possible on the Silk
Road. Deserts of Central Asia are impassable to carts and chariots, and horses
are not hardy enough to carry pack cargo through the dryness, with lack of
edible grass. With the domestication of the camel, generally used as a pack
animal rather than for riding, caravan trade along these desert tracks began.
Caravan trade offered China a shorter route to the oasis emporia of Central Asia
and the Middle East. But the steppe trade never disappeared entirely.
Along both the steppe belt and the newly developing Silk Road, trade was still
irregular and small-scale. It did succeed in carrying goods over long distances,
however, as Chinese silk was known in the Middle East, Greece, and Egypt by
the mid-first millennium BCE. The Greeks, and the Romans who followed them,
understood that it came from a land called Serica (“Land of Silk”), but nothing
was known about that distant place. A later name for the same mysterious
country was Sina, a name apparently derived from Qin, the name of the
northwestern Chinese kingdom that engineered the unification of China under an
imperial monarchy in 221 BCE.
Around the time of the Qin dynasty, a confederation of northern nomadic tribes,
collectively known as the Xiongnu, greatly increased the political and military
threat of the steppe peoples to China’s northern frontier. Under the Han dynasty
(206 BCE–7 CE, and as the Latter Han, 25–220 CE), rulers dealt with the
Xiongnu with a combination of military pressure and appeasement by bribes of
silk, cash, and other goods, and by intermarriage with princess brides to Xiongnu
chieftains.
In 138 BCE, the Han emperor sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, to what the Chinese
called “the western regions” to scout out the territory and to form an anti-Xiongnu
alliance with a western people, the Yuezhi. The latter goal failed, but Zhang
Qian, who traveled for years and went as far as the Pamir Mountains, brought
back much valuable intelligence about trade routes and local products, as well
as military intelligence. The Chinese inflicted a severe military defeat on the
Xiongnu in 121 BCE, and spent the next sixty years trying to consolidate control
of the western regions. By 60 BCE, Chinese control extended far along the Silk
Road to approach the Tarim Basin, and state-sponsored trade had begun on a
regular basis. Thus began the first great era of trade along the Silk Road.
The Chinese government was especially eager to buy good horses for military
use, and the best horses in the world, it was thought, were bred in the Ferghana
Valley, just north of what is now Afghanistan. To obtain them, government
procurement agents, traveling with military escorts, went as far as Ferghana on
caravans laden with silk (silk was collected by the Chinese government from the
peasantry, in payment of land taxes) via the Silk Road as far as Ferghana. The
return trip was made as quickly as possible, yet even with fodder and water for
the horses carried by camels, losses of horses were sometimes heavy. The
security provided for the silk caravans inspired private merchants to tag along,
and both state and private Silk Road trade flourished. The Chinese exported
mainly silk textiles, but also medicinal herbs, carved jade, and a wide variety of
luxury goods; they imported not only horses, but also glassware, raw jade, gold
and silver, and other luxury goods from the western regions of Eurasia. Anything
that had a high value-to-weight-and-bulk ratio and would satisfy a craving for
unusual and luxurious goods was fair game for the caravan trade.
The early trade on the Silk Road followed a pattern that was to hold throughout
the era of caravan trade, which was that trade was carried out mainly by
intermediaries, and goods changed hands several times during the course of a
journey between China and the Middle East. Caravan drivers and their animals
customarily traveled back and forth over one particular segment of the route,
perhaps loading goods in one oasis and unloading them again at the next before
heading back in the other direction with new goods. Each time an item changed
hands its value rose, so that goods were very expensive indeed by the time they
reached their .nal destination. The oasis merchants who served as
intermediaries in this down-the-line trade, as it is called, were careful to
discourage longer-distance trade by exaggerating the distances and dangers
involved, and they suppressed detailed accounts of distant lands, treating such
information as trade secrets. One odd result of this is that the two greatest
empires of the classical world, Rome and Han China, were in regular trade
contact but were still almost entirely ignorant of each other. As far as we know,
no Chinese merchant ever visited the Rome of the Caesars, and no Roman ever
crossed the Silk Road to the Chinese capital at Chang’an. If there were any
such, in either direction, they left no clear record of their feat, though during the
Latter Han dynasty (25 CE–220 CE), two Middle Eastern merchants arrived in
China via the maritime route, claiming to be envoys from the Roman emperor
Marcus Aurelius.
The period of political disunion that followed the fall of the Latter Han dynasty in
220 CE, lasting until the reunification of China under the Sui dynasty in 586 CE,
mark a watershed in the history of China. During this period northern China was
ruled by a succession of (sometimes overlapping) non-Chinese dynasties of
various ethnic origins and affiliations. The breakdown of imperial rule had
important consequences. No longer did rulers look solely to the historic “high
culture” of China for models, but instead became more open to influences from
outside. These influences were both secular and sacred, as nomads, merchants,
emissaries, and missionaries flooded into China, bringing new customs,
purveying exotic wares, and propagating new religious beliefs. Foremost among
these was Buddhism, born in India, but which now took root in China. Its
influence on China was profound and pervasive, offering a new spirituality to
both the elite and the poor, fostering the establishment of many temples, and
inspiring the creation of new art forms.
The period from the Han defeat of the Xiongnu, in the 1st century BCE, through
the post-Han period of disunion (usually known in Chinese history as the age of
Northern and Southern Dynasties), marks the first great era of Silk Road trade.
In part this contradicts the usual rule that Silk Road trade tended to decline
during periods of political weakness and disunity in China. The reason for this
exception to the rule is that during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period,
northern China (ruled by non-Chinese “conquest dynasties”) was part of a great
Central Asian and East Asian Buddhist cultural zone that extended from the
eastern margins of Persia to the East China Sea. Though the strong military
protection of trade routes customarily provided at times of Chinese dynastic
strength was lacking, this defect was more than overcome by the impulses for
trade and cultural contact within this great area where Buddhism flourished,
partly blurring or erasing political and military frontiers.
The next great era of Silk Road trade began not long after China was reunified
under the short-lived Sui dynasty (586–618), and continued under its successor,
the Tang (618–907). The Tang, often regarded as the most powerful and
glorious dynasty in all of Chinese history, was also to some extent a “conquest
dynasty” partly of non-Chinese descent, as some ancestors of the Northern
Zhou dynasty, western Tang ruling family were Turks. Tang power extended far
into Central Asia, almost to the Pamirs, and that power was used to encourage
and defend the Silk Road trade. Tang China was open to foreign goods and
ideas to an unprecedented extent. Trade brought new fashions (tight, longsleeved jackets for women), recreations (polo), music (many new instruments
and new musical styles), furniture (chairs replaced floor mats), and many other
innovations to China from Turkish and Persian culture areas.
Buddhism remained very important in China for most of the Tang period. Under
the Tang, China’s most famous Buddhist pilgrim, Xuanzang, went to India in
search of authentic copies of the Buddhist scriptures. After a trip filled with
adventures and hardships, he returned to China and became a revered figure in
Chinese Buddhism, and the subject of many later stories and legends.
Tang power in northwestern China waned abruptly after 751, when Chinese and
Arab armies fought a battle at the Talas River in western Turkestan. This battle
between expanding Arab-Islamic forces and Chinese troops (stretched thin at
the end of a long supply line) ended in a sharp defeat and rapid military
withdrawal for China. The situation worsened for the Tang when a military
rebellion in 755 to 763 shook the dynasty to its roots. Even after the rebellion
was put down, Tang power never recovered. The resulting political weakness
and fragmentation led to a decline in trade along the Silk Road.
Ruling power in China eventually passed to the Song dynasty (Northern Song,
960–1127; Southern Song, 1127–1279). Having flourished exceedingly under
the Tang, the Silk Road in Song times began to play a diminished role in
Eurasian trade, as the Song state lost control over the Central Asian trade
routes. Even northwestern and northeastern China were in non-Chinese hands.
During the time since the Silk Road had been established during the Han
dynasty, the dynamics of trade had remained relatively stable. As a general rule,
when large polities of the Silk Road—China, Persia, Byzantium, and later the
Arab-Islamic world—were strong and stable, trade flourished. These great
powers had far-flung influence that helped suppress banditry (in some sense, a
manifestation of the old hostility between agriculturalists and mounted nomads
who raided their settlements) and extortionate intermediary taxes and transit
fees levied by rulers of oasis city-states along the way. When trade conditions
were stable and the prospects of trade attractive, the oasis cities themselves
prospered, becoming small kingdoms that expanded into the surrounding desert
and further protected trade. In the oases, increasing wealth enabled agriculture
to flourish as qanats, Persian-style underground irrigation systems, were
maintained and extended. Some oases became famous among travelers for
their excellent dates, grapes, and melons. Increasing wealth also enabled more
trade goods to remain in the oasis cities rather than simply passing through,
enhancing the lifestyles of the oasis-dwellers. Conversely, a decrease or
collapse of trade left the oasis cities vulnerable to economic decline and turned
once-prosperous trading centers into ghost towns.
Trade on the Silk Road declined after the early 12th century. The Song dynasty’s
loss of North China to Jurchen invaders from Manchuria led its rulers to
concentrate long-distance trade on maritime routes. The conquest of most of
Eurasia in the 13th century by Genghis Khan and his successors resulted in
severe damage to a number of oasis cities. Mongol conquerors typically laid
waste to any city that had the temerity to resist their attack. Thus although the
end result of the Mongol conquest was an era of peace across much of
Eurasia—the Pax Mongolica—and a temporary revival of trans-Eurasian trade,
some infrastructure of the Silk Road was permanently damaged by the
conquest.
Nevertheless, trade did flourish under the Mongols, ushering in the third great
age of Silk Road trade. This was the era of the extraordinary trip of Marco Polo
from Italy to China (and back by the maritime route), and many others who
traversed the Silk Road from end to end. Envoys from France and from the
Papal Palace at Rome came to Mongolia seeking an alliance with the
successors of Chinggis Khan in a crusade against the Arabs in the Holy Land—
an invitation the Mongols politely declined. A Nestorian Christian Turk from
northeastern China named Rabban Sauma visited Paris as an ambassador of
the Mongol Empire. Rabban Sauma’s journey was complicated. Kublai Khan
.nanced the journey, but his mission to Paris was officially an embassy from the
Mongol Ilkannate of Persia. The safety of both the steppe belt route and the Silk
Road under the Pax Mongolica made them busy with trade.
The Mongol Empire began to collapse in disunity even before the generation of
Chinggis’s grandsons had ended. In the 14th century, the conqueror Timur Leng
(Tamerlane) re-established part of the empire, with its capital at the oasis city of
Samarkand. His ferocious campaigns against other oasis cities completed, in
many cases, the damage done by Chinggis Khan. Cities were depopulated,
fields and orchards dried up, and the Silk Road trade never recovered.
The Ottoman Empire, which took control of most of the Byzantine and ArabIslamic worlds in the 15th century, did not succeed in extending its control into
Central Asia. China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644) adopted a policy of
appeasement toward the Mongol and other nomads of the northern frontier, and
stressed maritime trade before turning its official back on foreign trade
altogether. By the 16th century, long-distance trade between western and
eastern Eurasia began to shift to maritime routes, which introduced new players
in the game. European nations began taking that trade into their own hands, as
they pioneered new maritime trade routes.
Decline and Transition
When thinking of the Silk Road, one must keep in mind that Silk Road trade was
only part of a much larger network of trade routes that extended throughout
Eurasia. Goods that came east on the Silk Road might continue on to Korea and
Japan via the maritime trade in the seas of Northeast Asia. Silk from China
brought to Byzantium might cross the Black Sea and travel up the Danube to
northern Europe; Baltic amber purchased in trade for the silk might eventually
.nd its way back to China. The port cities of the Levant dispatched Chinese and
Central Asian goods westward throughout the Mediterranean world, and in turn
collected goods from that world for trade to the east. And always the maritime
route between the Mediterranean and East Asia, via the Indian Ocean and
Southeast Asia, was potentially available as a rival to or substitute for the Silk
Road if overland travel became impaired.
It is essential to keep this larger picture in mind to understand how and why the
European “Age of Exploration” began, and how long-distance trade between
Europe and East Asia came to be concentrated in European hands. What was
the impulse that led the emerging nation-states of Europe to pioneer these new
trade routes?
The old maritime trade from East Asia to Europe was, like the Silk Road trade,
handled by intermediaries—Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Arab seafarers, who
usually carried goods for only part of the total journey. Aden, near the mouth of
the Red Sea, usually marked the .nal stop on the maritime route. Some trade
continued by boat up that narrow body of water. More often, goods were
offloaded and taken by caravan (or, in ancient times, by ox-cart over wellmaintained roads that were neglected after the decline of the Roman Empire) to
a Mediterranean port, such as Acre or Antioch. Particularly after the fall of
Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the burgeoning Italian city-states of
Genoa and Venice acted as intermediaries to transport the goods from the
eastern Mediterranean to the rest of Europe. By the time silk cloth, porcelain,
sandalwood, and other luxury items reached their .nal destinations from East
Asia, Southeast Asia, and India, they were extremely expensive.
Some western European monarchs, notably Prince Henry the Navigator of
Portugal, understood that if they could .nd a direct sea route to the east, the cost
of these same goods would be dramatically less, and the profits from the sale of
those goods could be kept under the control of the owners of the ships that
transported them. With this in mind, the Portuguese persevered in exploring a
sea route around Africa in the 15th century, eventually succeeding in
establishing direct routes to India and points east. That is why at the end of the
century Spain employed Columbus to .nd a westward transoceanic route to the
same destinations. Because he thought the world was much smaller than it
really is, he believed to the end of his life that his ships had made it all the way to
Asia.
It is often noted that the Portuguese missed by just three decades meeting
Chinese ships coming across the Indian Ocean in the other direction.
Technologically the Chinese ships were far more impressive than their
Portuguese counterparts. China’s famous “treasure fleet” voyages between 1405
and 1433 reached India and even the eastern coast of Africa. As instruments of
state policy designed to spread the prestige of the Ming, these voyages were not
motivated by trade and economic gain, and they had few lasting consequences.
The Ming soon abandoned the fleets as a useless extravagance, and
suppressed maritime trade. The Portuguese, on the other hand, were motivated
by a well-founded expectation of economic rewards rather than by imperial
curiosity and egotism, and so it was the Portuguese and other Europeans who
gained.
Spain, realizing .nally that it had found a new world rather than an unknown part
of the old one, took advantage of trans-Atlantic trade to develop a new route to
Asia, sailing to Cuba, transporting goods across Mexico, and sailing on to Manila
in their newly-conquered Spanish colony of the Philippines. England and the
Netherlands, having failed to .nd an Arctic sea route to East Asia, challenged the
Portuguese on their circum-African route. These powers contended for trading
monopolies in India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Maritime commerce on
the old route via Aden and the Levant dwindled. While the new maritime powers
of western Europe prospered, Venice and Genoa lost much of their economic
base, and the Silk Road was largely abandoned except for smaller-scale,
limited-distance trade.
Opportunity to revive the Silk Road seemingly appeared when the Qing dynasty
(1644–1912) was established. Using both conquest and diplomacy, these
invaders from Manchuria assembled an empire that went far beyond China’s
borders. The empire included the northeast up to the Amur River (with Korea as
a loyal subordinate state), Mongolia, Tibet (incorporated as a protectorate), and
a large part of Central Asia. But while goods were carried far and wide by
caravan, cart, and boat within this far-flung empire, the Silk Road could not be
revived to compete with the newly established maritime routes.
The final chapter in the history of the Silk Road was not one of trade, but of a
struggle for control of the region by newly expanding empires. By the 19th
century, the Qing dynasty had to contend with ambitions of foreign powers.
Russia and England became rivals in the “Great Game” for control of Central
Asia. England sought hegemony in Afghanistan and Tibet to protect its vital
empire in India. Russia maneuvered to incorporate the Central Asian oases into
its own expanding empire, as a way of curbing British and Chinese expansion or
influence in the region, and in hopes of establishing land access through Persia
to the Indian Ocean. European demands for trade concessions cost China its
administrative control over many of its coastal cities during the 19th century.
China also lost substantial territories to Russia, including the Ili Valley in the far
northwest, and the trans-Amur and trans- Ussuri regions of Siberia in the far
northeast. Russia, and its successor the Soviet Union, conquered and
incorporated much of the Central Asian desert and oasis zone through which the
Silk Road had passed. (Much of this territory is once again under local rule, as
the post-Soviet Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan).
The completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1905 turned the Boreal
Forest—traditionally one of the least traversable Eurasian subregions, after the
Arctic Littoral—into the principal route of overland travel between Europe and
easternmost Eurasia. Long-distance trade across the steppe belt or by caravan
along the Silk Road became a thing of the past. European explorers played a
role in uncovering Silk Road history. The English explorer Sir Aurel Stein, the
French scholar Paul Pelliot, the Swedish archaeologist Sven Hedin, and others
rediscovered the Buddhist cave temples at Dunhuang and elsewhere, and
explored evidence of caravan routes in places like Turfan and Loulan. The
Europeans helped themselves to thousands of Buddhist manuscripts, works of
art, and other cultural materials which they took back to museums and libraries.
Europeans at the time thought nothing of taking such materials from their original
locations; today we regard such action as theft, cultural vandalism, and
imperialist arrogance. Faults aside, these explorers and scholars brought to light
important aspects of the forgotten history of the Silk Road.
The Silk Road cannot disappear entirely. Peoples of the Silk Road today are
heirs to a heritage of trade and exchange that still enriches their cultures. The
caravans are gone forever. New issues of national identity, competing roles of
religion and the secular state, regional and international relations, and fitting
traditions together with modernity occupy the peoples of the Silk Road today.