Home · The Route

You have walked the Silk Road already

Perhaps it was a school trip to the Red Fort, a honeymoon in Srinagar or a long weekend in Kochi. You took the photographs, bought the saffron and came home, quite unaware that you had been walking one of the oldest roads in the world. This page walks it again with you, and it begins where the road itself gathered: in India.

See the road on the map

Nine parts, from India at the centre to the queens and their rituals.

01

Before the cities

India was the centre of the road.

Most maps of the Silk Road draw a line across the top, through China, Samarkand and Iran, and India seems to sit off to one side. The real road came down into India and stayed. By land it came in through Gandhara, in today's north-west Pakistan. By sea it ran on the monsoon, with sailors riding its winds straight across the open ocean.

India mattered long before the famous cities did, because so much of what the world wanted either grew here or was made here. A Greek merchant's sailing guide from the first century, the Periplus, lists what left Indian ports. Here is some of it, with a few things from later centuries.

What India grew and sent

  • PepperBlack pepper from the Kerala coast. The guide says large ships were sent for it, because there was so much to carry.
  • CottonCotton cloth of every kind, from everyday weaves to the fine muslins the guide calls Indian.
  • IndigoThe deep blue dye, shipped from the mouth of the Indus.
  • Dyes and rootsColoured lac for reds, and the fragrant roots jatamansi and kuth, used in perfume and medicine.

What Indian hands made

  • Block printed textilesCotton printed by hand in Gujarat has been dug up in old Cairo, in Egypt, and dated to the 1000s.
  • CarpetsEmperor Akbar set up royal carpet workshops at Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Lahore, where Persian design slowly took on Indian flowers.
  • JewelleryAgate and carnelian, the striped and red stones of Gujarat, left from the port of Bharuch.
  • MetalworkIndian iron and steel were good enough to be shipped across the sea to Africa.
  • Perfumery and attarIn Kannauj, flowers are still distilled into attar, a perfume oil, in copper pots called degs. The craft is more than four hundred years old.

India sent ideas along with the cargo. Nalanda, in Bihar, taught students from across Asia for centuries. So India was far more than a stop along the way. Trade gathered here the way water gathers, and a little of India went with everything that moved on.

SourcesPeriplus of the Erythraean Sea, trans. Wilfred H. Schoff, Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington·Ashmolean Museum, Jameel Centre, Newberry Collection·UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Nalanda Mahavihara·The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carpets from the Islamic World, 1600 to 1800·National Geographic, How did Kannauj become the perfume capital of India?

02

The map

The road, drawn to scale

Every city on this map sits where it really stood, and the deserts and mountains are drawn at their true size. Drag the map to move around and zoom in to look closer. Pick a journey and the map carries you along it in about two minutes. The first one follows Snow Mushroom, the main ingredient in our serum, from the far eastern end of the road all the way to Bengaluru.

  • DunhuangWhere our Snow Mushroom is traced to
  • Ferghana ValleyWhere our hemp is traced to
  • GandharaWhere six scripts were written side by side
  • BharuchThe Gujarat port the monsoon built
  • BengaluruWhere Silk Route is based

Drag to move · scroll or pinch to zoom · pick a journey to follow it

Our Snow Mushroom is traced to the Dunhuang Oasis in western China, and our hemp to the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia. Silk Route is based in Bengaluru, and the serum is made in India.

03

The places

Eight stops you may have stood on

Each card is a place you know from a holiday. Open it to read what it was when the caravans and the ships came through.

  • You know it as

    Delhi

    Once: a city of the Mughal court

    The Red Fort on a school trip, then kebabs in Old Delhi.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    Inside the walls of the Red Fort stands a royal hammam of white marble, the steam bath of the Mughal court. For years it lay hidden under creepers and weeds, and it was only uncovered in 2019.

    How Babur changed the bath for Indian heat

  • You know it as

    Kochi and the Kerala coast

    Once: the shore of Muziris, the pepper port

    Backwaters, a houseboat, and appam with stew.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    Two thousand years ago, Roman ships sailed to this coast with gold and sailed home with black pepper. A Tamil poet described the trade from the Indian shore, while in Rome the writer Pliny grumbled that India was draining the empire of its gold.

    Why India sat at the centre of the road

  • You know it as

    Srinagar and Leh

    Once: the gateway for Central Asian caravans

    A shikara on Dal Lake, and saffron from Pampore for the family.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    Caravans from Yarkand, in Central Asia, came down into India through Leh, over some of the highest passes on the whole road. The saffron you carried home from Pampore holds a Geographical Indication of its own, as a treasure of that valley should.

    The year the road was cut

  • You know it as

    Kutch

    Once: a coast of merchant ships

    The white Rann under a full moon, and a bandhani dupatta.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    In the 1700s, the merchants of Mandvi, in Kutch, owned some four hundred ships and traded with East Africa, the Malabar coast and the Gulf. Walk down to the water today and you may still find boat builders making wooden dhows by hand.

    How the monsoon made Bharuch a world port

  • You know it as

    Muscat and Dubai

    Once: the frankincense coast

    A stopover, a drive into the dunes, a souk that smells of oud.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    Oman's history is written on the sea. The old port of Sohar claims Sindbad the Sailor as its own, and the frankincense trail of Dhofar is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    Follow the sea road on the map

  • You know it as

    Istanbul

    Once: Constantinople, the western gate

    The Grand Bazaar, a hammam, and a great deal of tea.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    Caravans reached the Bosphorus by a chain of caravanserais, roadside inns where traders and their animals could rest. Sultan Han, built in 1229, became the model for them all.

    Look closer: a bath pail from Isfahan

  • You know it as

    Samarkand and Bukhara

    Once: the cities of the Sogdian merchants

    Blue domes at sunset, and a silk scarf to bring home.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    The Sogdians of Samarkand ran many of the road's caravans, and a bundle of their letters, lost around 313 CE, was found in a watchtower near Dunhuang in 1907. In Bukhara, a medieval bathhouse still ends each visit with ginger and honey pressed into warm skin.

    The kingdoms, and what they gave your skin

  • You know it as

    Xi'an

    Once: Chang'an, where the road began

    The Terracotta Warriors, and a bicycle ride along the city wall.

    Go back in time: read what happened here

    Chang'an, today's Xi'an, was the eastern end of the road. From its gates the caravans set out west into the desert, towards the oasis of Dunhuang.

    Meet the royal women of the road
04

Look closer

What travelled with the traders

Pepper and silk filled the saddlebags, yet the lighter things travelled furthest: alphabets, melodies, and a few lovely objects made for the bath.

  • Berenike, a Roman port in Egypt · 1st century

    Tamil-Brahmi

    Tamil sailors scratched their names, Kanan and Catan, onto pots at a port on the Red Sea, in the early script of Tamil. Two thousand years before the selfie, Indian travellers were already leaving their names behind.

  • Rabatak, Afghanistan

    Bactrian

    The Kushan king Kanishka listed Pataliputra, today's Patna, among the Indian cities he ruled. He wrote it in Bactrian, a language of Afghanistan set down in Greek letters, on a stone found in 1993.

  • Herat, Afghanistan

    Nastaliq

    نستعلیق

    The flowing, gently sloping hand in which Urdu is still written was perfected in Herat.

05

The kingdoms

Six kingdoms, and what they gave your skin

Empires rose and fell along the road with great regularity, and yet a surprising number of them found the time to think about baths, herbs and perfume.

  1. 322 to 185 BCE

    Maurya

    India and Afghanistan

    Ashoka's second rock edict promises medicinal herbs, planted and brought from afar, for people and for animals alike.

  2. 30 to 375 CE

    Kushan

    Bactria to the Ganges

    Tradition places Charaka, whose book lists herbs for the complexion, at the court of King Kanishka.

    As tradition tells it

  3. 848 to 1279

    Chola

    South India and the Bay of Bengal

    Its great temples bathed the deity each day in milk, sandal paste and turmeric, a ritual still performed at Thanjavur.

  4. 750 to 1258

    Abbasid

    Baghdad to Central Asia

    Baghdad's scholars translated India's medical classics, by Charaka and Sushruta, into Arabic, and so Indian skin knowledge travelled west.

  5. 1370 to 1507

    Timurid

    Samarkand and Herat

    Babur, a descendant of Timur, wrote that India had no hot baths, and his family set about putting that right.

  6. 1526 to 1857

    Mughal

    North India to the Deccan

    Rose water and attar at court, and bathing raised to a palace ritual.

06

The trade

How much really moved

Figures from so long ago are scarce, which makes the few that survive all the more delightful to read.

  • 771talents

    The value a papyrus in Vienna puts on a single ship's cargo of pepper from the Kerala coast. One talent was a fortune in its own right.

  • 15centuries

    The age of the monsoon trade by the time Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut in 1498. Europe, it seems, arrived rather late.

  • 22,000tonnes a year

    The rose water Iran still makes today, much of it distilled from Damask roses near Kashan every May.

  • 52,000hakims

    Practitioners of Unani medicine in India today, heirs to the books that travelled to Baghdad and Bukhara and came home again.

07

The queens

Royal women and their rituals

In every age, a woman of consequence has had decided opinions about her skin. Eight queens of the road are our muses, each paired with an ingredient we have made or are shaping, and their rituals are what Silk Route sets out to bring back.

  • Empress Dowager Cixi seated at court, photographed by Yu Xunling around 1903
    The Empress Dowager Cixi, photographed at court by Yu Xunling around 1903. Freer and Sackler Archives, Smithsonian. Public domain.

    Qing China

    Empress Dowager Cixi

    She held power at the Qing court for nearly half a century, one of the most formidable women in Chinese history.

    Court legend says she prized Snow Mushroom for skin that stayed supple and bright.

    Our muse for Snow Mushroom, in the Dew of Dunhuang

    Told as a legend

    The Serum
  • The Ashokan pillar at Prayagraj that carries the Queen's Edict, photographed around 1870
    No portrait of Karuvaki exists. This is the pillar at Prayagraj that carries her edict, photographed by Thomas Rust around 1870. Leiden University Library, KITLV. Public domain.

    Mauryan India

    Queen Karuvaki

    A queen of Emperor Ashoka, and the only one named in his edicts: a pillar inscription records her gifts of mango groves, gardens and rest houses.

    Our muse for Moringa, for our coming face cleanser

  • Nur Jahan in profile, a detail from a Mughal court painting of around 1627
    Detail of Nur Jahan holding a portrait of Jahangir, a Mughal court painting attributed to Bishandas, around 1627. The Cleveland Museum of Art. CC0.

    Mughal India

    Empress Nur Jahan

    The most powerful woman at the Mughal court, whose name was struck on the coins of the empire.

    Her mother, Asmat Begam, made the attar of roses that Emperor Jahangir wrote could scent a whole gathering from a single drop.

    Our muse for Manjistha, for the Body Milk that comes next

  • A gold drinking vessel ending in a lion, Achaemenid Persia, fifth century BCE
    No likeness of Atossa survives. This gold drinking vessel comes from the Achaemenid court of her era, fifth century BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

    Achaemenid Persia

    Queen Atossa

    A daughter of Cyrus the Great, wife of Darius and mother of Xerxes, as the Greek historian Herodotus tells it.

    Our muse for Galbanum, the Persian resin Ibn Sina prescribed for the skin

  • Khusrau catches sight of Shirin bathing, a Persian miniature painted in Herat in 1524 to 1525
    Khusrau catches sight of Shirin bathing, from a Khamsa of Nizami painted in Herat by Shaikh Zada, 1524 to 1525. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

    Sasanian Persia

    Queen Shirin

    The beloved queen of King Khosrow II, whose romance the poet Nizami turned into one of Persia's most cherished love stories.

    Our muse for Rosehip, for a face milk we are shaping

  • The mosque of Gawhar Shad at Herat, an engraving from 1863
    No portrait of Gawhar Shad exists. This is her mosque at Herat, drawn for the Illustrated London News in 1863, before it was pulled down in 1885. Public domain.

    Timurid Herat

    Queen Gawhar Shad

    A Timurid queen and a great builder, who founded the mosque that still bears her name at Mashhad, and another at Herat, her capital.

    Our muse for Oshaq, a desert resin, for a hair cleanser we are shaping

  • The Bibi Khanym Mosque in Samarkand, an early colour photograph of around 1907
    No portrait survives. This is the Bibi Khanym Mosque in Samarkand, which bears her name, in a colour photograph by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, around 1907. Library of Congress. Public domain.

    Timurid Samarkand

    Empress Saray Mulk Khanum

    The chief wife of Timur. The great Bibi Khanym mosque in Samarkand carries her name.

    Our muse for Silk protein, for a conditioner we are shaping

  • A later imagined portrait of Empress Wu Zetian, from an 18th century Chinese album
    A later imagined portrait of Wu Zetian, painted about a thousand years after her death, from an 18th century Chinese album of emperors. The British Library. Public domain.

    Tang China

    Empress Wu Zetian

    The only woman ever to rule China as emperor in her own right.

    Her court at Chang'an is remembered for pearl powder, brushed on as a final touch.

    Our muse for Pearl powder, for a radiance mask we are shaping

Where a real portrait survives, we show it. Where none exists, we show a place or an object from her court and say so. Each queen is our muse for an ingredient; where a ritual survives only as legend, we say so.

08

The stories

Ten stories from the road

Longer reads for an unhurried evening: the beauty India wrote down, seven tales behind the map, the year the road was cut, and a few lines of poetry. Choose one, and it opens below.

A rose water sprinkler, called a gulab pash
Rose water sprinkler (gulab pash), late 18th century. The Met, public domain.
02

Beauty, the Indian way

Indian face care is older than the road

India was writing about face care in Sanskrit almost two thousand years ago, and caring for the face long before that. Beauty here was a kind of knowledge, and like all knowledge, it travelled.

Charaka, an early Indian physician, grouped certain herbs as varnya, the ones that bring out the skin's natural colour. Sushruta described mukha lepa, a face paste, and even noted which paste suits which season. At Mohenjo-daro, archaeologists have found bronze mirrors, ivory combs and small dressing tables. The ubtan applied before an Indian wedding comes from this same long line.

Then beauty moved along the road. Kohl, the same idea as kajal and surma, spread everywhere and never left. Henna was already colouring hands in ancient Babylon, and it still colours them at every mehendi. In Persia, people learned to distil roses with heat, and the art found its way to the Mughal court.

Silk Route stands at the newest end of that long line: Snow Mushroom traced to the Dunhuang Oasis, hemp seed oil traced to the Ferghana Valley, made in India and formulated over eighteen months for Indian skin biology. The oldest beauty question on the road is still the one we ask: what works, and where does it grow?

SourcesKumar et al., History of Indian Concept of Cosmetology·Dr Ruchika Arora, Mughal Hammams, Sahapedia·Science Museum Group, surma·Natural History Museum, the henna plant·Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, trans. Rogers and Beveridge, Internet Archive

02

Scripts

The script that ran right to left

Gandhara · 33.74° N · 72.78° E

Gandhara sat where Pakistan and Afghanistan meet today, and two thousand years ago it was one of the busiest crossroads on the road. People there wrote in Kharosthi, a script that ran right to left, the way Urdu does. Merchants kept their accounts in it and monks copied their texts in it. Then trade moved on, and in time nobody wrote it at all. One place it survives is a small relic box made for a prince named Indravarma, around 15 CE.

Along this one stretch of road, six scripts were in use: Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian, Bactrian, Chinese and Aramaic. Brahmi is the ancestor of Devanagari, Tamil and most Indian scripts. Gandhara also sent Buddhism, and some of the first stone statues of the Buddha, east into China.

Old recipes survived the same way, copied out by hand for the next reader. We keep ours in the open too: all twenty ingredients in the serum, in order, on the product page.

Sources Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington, Buddhism on the Silk Routes· The Met, reliquary of Prince Indravarma

03

Songs

Why Urdu poetry has a Persian beat

Persian Plateau · 32.65° N · 51.67° E

Anyone who has felt the rhythm of a ghazal has heard the Silk Road. Urdu poetry still follows metres, the fixed beats of a line, that came from Persian poetry. They travelled here with traders and poets, the same way spices and cloth did.

Caravans moved about thirty kilometres a day and stopped before dark, so evenings were for music. A setar, a Persian lute, has four strings, is played with one fingernail, and was small enough to carry on a camel.

In 1947, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz used those same Persian metres to write Subh-e-Azadi, The Dawn of Freedom, about the pain of the new border.

An evening ritual keeps that same slow hour: the day done, and three to four drops of serum pressed into the skin.

Sources Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Dawn of Freedom, trans. Agha Shahid Ali, Annual of Urdu Studies 11 (1996)· The Met, setar, Iran, 19th century

Interior of the hammam at the Red Fort, Delhi, about the 1830s
Interior of the hammam at the Red Fort, Delhi, about the 1830s. The Met, public domain.
04

The hammam

How Babur changed the bath for Indian heat

Delhi · 28.66° N · 77.24° E

The hammam, a public steam bath, reached Delhi from Central Asia by the 1300s. The Mughal emperor Babur had it redesigned for Indian heat, and every busy town on the road had one.

A visit took hours: a hot room, then a warm room, then a cool room, with steam to soften the skin, a scrub, oil, and then rest. The marble hammam at Delhi's Red Fort, with water running through it and light falling from the roof, was painted in the 1830s. It is one of the few royal hammams still standing.

Skincare follows the same order: soften first, then apply, then seal. That is why three to four drops of serum go onto damp skin, never dry skin.

Sources Dr Ruchika Arora, Mughal Hammams, Sahapedia· The Met, interior of the hammam at the Red Fort, about the 1830s

05

The sea

How the monsoon made Bharuch a world port

Gujarat coast · 21.70° N · 72.99° E

Bharuch, on the Gujarat coast, was one of the great ports of the ancient world. A Greek merchant who wrote a sailing guide called the Periplus, in the first century, knew it as Barygaza. He listed what left its docks: jatamansi and kuth, fragrant roots used in perfume and medicine, agate, carnelian, and cotton cloth of all kinds.

The ships ran on the monsoon. Sailors learned to ride its winds straight across the open sea, and the Greeks named that wind Hippalus. Hand block-printed cotton from Gujarat has been dug up in old Cairo, in Egypt, dated to the 1000s. Most people picture the Silk Road on land, with camels. A huge share of the trade went by water, with India at the centre.

Silk Route sits at that centre: based in Bengaluru, with the serum made in India.

Sources Periplus of the Erythraean Sea §49, trans. Wilfred H. Schoff, University of Washington· Ashmolean Museum, Jameel Centre, Newberry Collection

06

The countries

The road that brought wool to Kashmir

Herat · 34.34° N · 62.20° E

For centuries, wool from Central Asia, including the fine wool that became Kashmiri shawls, came down into Kashmir with dry fruit, along a land route through Herat in today's Afghanistan. That route kept working until the roads and railways were cut after 1947.

Herat was also a city of painters and gardens. For a while, some of the finest illustrated books in the world were made there: written in Persian, made for Central Asian rulers, and painted with ideas the artists had picked up from India and China.

Forty countries claim this road today, and none of them is wrong. It was never one road, and no single country owns its story.

We only name the origins we can trace: Dunhuang for our Snow Mushroom, the Ferghana Valley for our hemp, and Bengaluru for Silk Route.

Sources Jahan, B. and Ahmad, P., Impact of the International Crises on the External Trade of Kashmir (1870-1947), Open Journal of Social Sciences 8(10), 2020· The Met, painting from Herat

Scene from the Tuti-nama, Mughal India, about 1560
Scene from the Tuti-nama, Mughal India, about 1560. Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.
07

The garden

Khusrau's India, where spring never ends

Delhi · 28.66° N · 77.24° E

Amir Khusrau was a poet in Delhi, and his songs are still sung as qawwali at the Nizamuddin dargah, seven hundred years on. In 1318 he wrote that India has spring all year round, and so it is always full of fragrant flowers. For him, the gardens were proof of how special the country was.

Around 1560, painters in a Mughal workshop illustrated the Tuti-nama, a book of stories told by a parrot. Its pictures show working gardens planted beside rest stops, so that travelling caravans could feed themselves on the way.

Plants still do real work in our serum. Alfalfa extract is in it because it is naturally rich in Vitamins A, B, C, D and E.

Sources Amir Khusrau, Nuh Sipihr, in The Idea of India in Amir Khusrau, Internet Archive· Cleveland Museum of Art, Tuti-nama, about 1560

Page from Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine
Page from Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0.
08

The book

Where the old recipes were written down

Persian Plateau · 32.65° N · 51.67° E

Ibn Sina, a Persian scholar born near Bukhara, finished the Canon of Medicine around 1025. It ran to five books and described around eight hundred natural substances, and European universities were still teaching from it six hundred years later.

The knowledge moved east as well as west. By 1388, Shahab Abdul Karim Nagauri was writing Tibb-e-Shahabi in India, bringing together the basics of Unani medicine and Ayurveda. The road's medicine was now being written down on Indian soil.

What these books insisted on was simple: write down what a substance is, where it comes from, what it does, and how much to use. Nothing kept secret.

We follow the same rule. Everything we claim for the serum is written on this site, and we claim nothing beyond it.

Sources Parveen, A. et al., The traditional system of Unani medicine, its origin, evolution and Indianisation, Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge 21(3), 2022· Wellcome Collection, page from Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine

10

Partition

1947

For about fifteen centuries, the land routes through South Asia kept moving without asking anyone's permission. In August 1947, a border was drawn across them, and they stopped.

The people come first. Around 17.9 million people left their homes. Estimates of how many died in the ten months from March 1947 run from 180,000 to one million.

Then the trade broke. For centuries, Kashmir had traded shawls, pashmina and dry fruit with Yarkand in Central Asia, through Ladakh. After Partition, its road and rail links were cut. In Srinagar, the Yarkand Sarai, an inn built for Silk Road merchants, was left with no purpose. Amritsar and Lahore, which had worked like two halves of one market, woke up in different countries. The historian Ian Talbot called his book about them Divided Cities. The Grand Trunk Road, which Sher Shah Suri rebuilt from Bengal to Kabul, got a border gate at Wagah.

In Kannauj, in Uttar Pradesh, the attar makers kept distilling in their copper degs and bhapkas. Many were already mixing in cheaper synthetics to survive, and their buyers on the other side of the new border were gone.

When a border cuts through a trade, the trade shrinks. It gets quieter, and much harder to trace. Part of what Silk Route does is trace it again, one ingredient at a time.

SourcesVoxDev, Drawing the line·Jahan, B. and Ahmad, P., on the external trade of Kashmir, 1870 to 1947·Marouf Gazi, Free Press Kashmir, on the Yarkand Sarai at Safakadal·Lanzillo and Kumar, The Wire, on attar and the perfume workers of colonial India·The 1947 Partition Archive·Citizens Archive of Pakistan·Partition Museum, Amritsar

11

In their own words

The road, in its own words

Five short lines written on the road or about it. Each names the writer, the translator where there is one, and links to the full text. A line under each says what it means.

  1. “Wait till we empty one more cup,
    West of Yang Gate there'll be no old friends.”

    Wang Wei (699-759)A Song at Weicheng, translated by Witter Bynner

    Yang Gate is Yangguan, a mountain pass near Dunhuang. Beyond it lay the road west, so this is two friends saying goodbye.

    Read it at the Chinese Text Initiative, University of Virginia
  2. “There is the spring season all the year round in India.”

    Amir Khusrau (1253-1325)Nuh Sipihr, 1318

    Khusrau, the Delhi poet, is saying that India's gardens bloom all year, so the country is always full of flowers.

    Read it at the Internet Archive
  3. “It is of such strength in perfume that if one drop be rubbed on the palm of the hand it scents a whole assembly.”

    Jahangir (1569-1627)Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, translated by Rogers and Beveridge

    The Mughal emperor Jahangir is describing attar of roses, made at his court by Nur Jahan's mother.

    Read it at the Internet Archive
  4. “These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light, ”

    Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984)Subh-e-Azadi, The Dawn of Freedom, 1947, translated by Agha Shahid Ali

    Faiz wrote this in 1947 about the dawn of independence, and the grief of Partition that came with it.

    Read it at the Annual of Urdu Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  5. “cotton cloth of all kinds”

    Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (c. 40-70 CE)A Greek merchant's guide to the sea route, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff

    A Greek sailing guide listing what left India's ports. Cotton from Gujarat, in every kind, was high on the list.

    Read it at Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington

Where Silk Route begins

Every one of these rituals was a small piece of knowledge, kept by the women who used it and very nearly lost when the road fell quiet. Silk Route began by going in search of them. Our Story tells what we found, and what we made of it.

Read Our StoryThe Serum
09

Sources

Where all of this comes from

Everything on this page comes from historians, museums and libraries. Every source is listed here with a link, so the original is always one tap away.

Primary texts

  • Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, c. 40-70 CE, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff. Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington.
  • Wang Wei, A Song at Weicheng, translated by Witter Bynner. Chinese Text Initiative, University of Virginia.
  • Amir Khusrau, Nuh Sipihr, 1318, in The Idea of India in Amir Khusrau. Internet Archive.
  • Jahangir, Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, translated by Rogers and Beveridge. Internet Archive.
  • Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Subh-e-Azadi, The Dawn of Freedom, 1947, translated by Agha Shahid Ali. Annual of Urdu Studies 11 (1996), University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Collections and institutions

Scholarship

Writing and reporting

Memory

The queens

The queens, images

What we do not claim

Some things cannot be proved, and we say so. The story linking Snow Mushroom to Empress Dowager Cixi is a court legend, and we tell it as a legend, because we have not found it in any historian's work. Where the Buddha was first shown in human form, Gandhara or Mathura, is still debated by experts, and we do not take a side.