The all-water route

The gifts of the self-appointed emissaries from Andun that were so cavalierly rejected by the court in Luoyang consisted of ivory, rhinoceros horn, and tortoise shell. The Chinese considered these to be valuable goods, but they suspected, quite correctly, that they came from nearby Southeast Asia. If Romans had really come bearing gifts, they needed to be more exotic than this. In the West, Southeast Asia was referred to as Chryse. The Periplus

describes it as “the furthest part of the mainland toward the east” and in a later passage as “an island in the ocean, the furthest extremity towards the east of the inhabited world, lying under the rising sun itself.” This begs the question: was it part of the mainland, say Burma (Myanmar), or perhaps the entire Southeast Asian peninsula, or was it an island, probably Sumatra or perhaps the entire Sunda chain of islands (Sumatra, Java, Bali, Timor) or something in between such as the Malay peninsula? As for products, “it supplies the finest tortoise shell of all the places in the Erythreaean Sea.” Since Westerners often associated places with their signature products, the name of this place should have had something to do with turtles. But Chryse is from the Greek for “gold” and was also known as the “Golden Chersonese.” In Indian literature it was Suvarnadvipa in Sanskrit and Suvannabhumi in Pali, both variations of “Golden Land.” As the Indians learned more about this country, they began to specify local areas with names reflecting more realistic expectations, including “Camphor Land,” “Cardamom Land,” and “Coconut Land.” Claudius Ptolemy’s account of Southeast Asia is more extensive than the

Periplus even if much of his information is problematic. He specifies that Southeast Asia is a peninsula but makes it huge, several times larger than India, extending indefinitely southward, as he does with Africa, to enclose the Indian Ocean. The real Southeast Asia also has islands, large and small, lying to the south and east of the peninsula, and Ptolemy has islands, too, but they are scattered along both sides of the coast. He divides peninsular Southeast Asia into two parts, a western, which he calls “India Beyond the Ganges,” and an eastern, referred to as “Sinae.” North of both lay Scythia and

Serica. India Beyond the Ganges extended from the Bay of Bengal to the Magnus Sinus (“Great Bay”), which must refer to the region where the peninsula ends and the islands begin, around the Straits of Malacca. The best cinnamon came from here, and some places had much gold. India Beyond the Ganges lay on the Indian Ocean, but past the Magnus

Sinus the land turned and ran south to north along what is now the South China Sea to Ptolemy’s Sinae with its port of Kattigata. This was the edge of the world. Ptolemy draws a clear distinction between Sinae and Serica, and although geographically he has them as neighbors, there does not seem to have been any contact between them. Coming from the west, a traveler went to Serica by land and Sinae by sea. Herodotus knew nothing about the Seres, but Roman authors did: it was the land of the Silk people. According to both Pliny and the Periplus, north of the Black and Caspian Seas and the Himalayan Mountains was an ocean covering what is actually Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria. The Seres could be reached by following its shoreline beyond a land of raging snowstorms, tribes of cannibals, and deserts thronging with wild beasts. The Seres, according to Pliny, had red hair and blue eyes, and “though mild in character, yet resemble wild animals.” Exactly which term, “Sinae” or “Serica,” equates to the modern China is a bit muddled. Sinae could refer to eastern peninsular Southeast Asia or southern China or both whereas Serica could refer to northern China or Xinjiang and eastern Central Asia or both. At least some Roman Empire merchants must have visited both India

Beyond the Ganges and Sinae, but the frequency, volume, and value of their trade were probably slight. By the time they got there, the Southeast Asians had been engaged in long-distance exchange for many centuries. The earliest involved highland foragers swapping with lowland farmers in reciprocal systems or between inland and coastal peoples, using rivers that flowed from the interior. Exchange was done by barter between communities, and neither specialized traders nor profit-driven trade was involved. They appeared with the arrival of seaborne traders who sought inland and forest products such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, and bird feathers. Trade also developed in the interior in places such as central Thailand that

were endowed with natural resources, particularly copper and tin. In the second millennium BCE exchange involving raw materials and exotic items such as marine shells, marble, volcanic stone, and precious stones was being transacted probably through down-the-line systems. The Iron Age, which began in Southeast Asia in c. 500 BCE, greatly stimulated economic growth. Villages of specialized craftsmen began producing products that were marketed at fairs and religious festivals, and soon towns developed as centers for local and long-distance trade. Mortuary goods included precious stones, gold, and glass beads from outside Southeast Asia, and bulk products such as iron along with luxury items such as pearls and coral were traded along the coast. One interesting characteristic of Southeast Asian commerce that likely went

far back into the past was the importance of women in trade. In later periods Chinese and Arab observers noted this with surprise and sometimes disdain. Women controlled retail markets in many places and sometimes were key players in wholesale and long-distance commerce. Out at sea the lanes were dominated from at least the first millennium BCE

by the Malays, a term that may refer specifically to the inhabitants of the Malay peninsula but is often applied in a larger, more generic sense to various seafaring peoples who spoke Austronesian languages and lived in parts of Sumatra, Borneo, and other islands as well as on the peninsula. Malay sailors were the earliest long-distance traders in the modern countries of Malaysia and Indonesia, and their activities reached from the South China Sea to the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean. They were skilled mariners with their own advanced nautical technology who may have independently invented the sail. Long before Greek and Roman merchants stepped into Indian Ocean trade, the Malays created commercial networks extending from the Philippines and New Guinea to the east coast of Africa. Southeast Asia provides an excellent example of what can and cannot be

gleaned about early trade routes from tracing artifacts when no written evidence is available. In the seventh century BCE the Dongson culture emerged in the valley of the Red River in northern Vietnam and over the next half millennium developed an advanced bronze-making society that was seaoriented. Artifacts representative of the Dongson style have been found far beyond Vietnam, the most outstanding of which is known today as Heger I type drums cast in one piece by the lost wax method. They are large, sometimes weighing over 200 pounds and standing 3 feet tall, and squat in shape with a broad flat top, rounded sides, and splayed feet. And they are exquisitely decorated with friezes depicting people engaged in various activities. Heger I drums appear to have been made from the fifth century BCE to the

third century CE. Over 200, some whole, others in fragments, have been recovered in a distribution range extending from Yunnan in south China down the Malay peninsula to Sumatra and across the Sunda Islands to the western tip of New Guinea. Some drums came back into trade networks long after they were first made and exchanged, a process that scattered them farther afield. Chinese observers noted that the people of Southeast Asia used drums as symbols of power and status, and doubtless the function of Heger I drums was ritual or ceremonial. Although they were not likely made and sent out originally with profit in mind, Heger I drums do provide irrefutable evidence of extensive distribution networks extending over thousands of miles prior to the establishment of systems originating in India and China. This funneled not only ceremonial drums but copper, bronze, and iron ornaments and more functional products like tools as well as exotic materials such as glass and beads to the border of the Pacific world. Eventually trade did come from both India and China, tying Southeast

Asia into the larger Eurasian system. For a long time the trade with India

was more important than that with China. The motive for such contact usually given in Indian texts is commercial gain: the Indians were out to make a profit, although once goods arrived in Southeast Asia and the initial exchange was made, they were often distributed internally through some mechanism other than strictly commercial-driven trade. The Indians were likely searching for a new source of gold after the Siberian route became defunct, as witnessed by the name they gave to the place. Significant gold deposits existed in central Sumatra, where it was mined in the hills or sieved from river sands, and Champa in central Vietnam, a few places on the southern part of the Malay peninsula, and the island of Sulawesi also had gold although it is difficult to determine how much was being extracted at this time. People of status in the region were noted for wearing jewelry made from a very pure, soft gold. However, Southeast Asia was not the pot at the end of the rainbow, and the early perception of finding a bonanza at the edge of the world was mostly wishful thinking. Nevertheless, once there, the gold seekers found other products, and the trade was on. Another possibility sees India’s link to Southeast Asia as a spin-off of

India’s tie to the Roman Empire. Southeast Asia contained many of the products the Romans sought in India, including spices, aromatic woods, and resins, and could serve as a reservoir for augmenting Indian supplies. A third possibility also sees the trade as resulting from spin-off but this time from the India-to-China trade in silk. Southeast Asia was a place Indian and Chinese merchants had to pass through to get to each other, and eventually they discovered that it contained valuable commodities and could be developed in its own right as a market for their products. Probably all three proposals played some role although it should be noted that both the second and third suffer to varying degrees from the problem of backward projection, that is, taking the consequence of a historical action and making it the cause. To use proposal three as an example, it is true that what came to be known as the maritime silk route through Southeast Asia eventually became important. But quite a lot of silk was already arriving overland from China into India at the time Indians were venturing into Southeast Asia, and there is no evidence that they were searching for a water passage to China. Indians may have begun arriving as early as the mid-first millennium BCE.

Excavations at an ancient cemetery in western Thailand from a fourth century BCE context have recovered over 3,000 beads, mostly glass, which were made in India for the export market. Six hundred were drilled carnelian and agate beads, including 50 of the etched variety. Other Indian imports were decorated bronze ritual bowls and a carved carnelian lion. Similar products have also been found in sites in coastal Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia. Excavations on the north coast of Bali have unearthed large quantities of Indian goods, including pottery shards from Poduca. Farther afield etched agate beads of a Bengali type have been found in the Philippines, but an even more interesting find from a jar burial in a cave in the Talaud islands in

far northeastern Indonesia includes banded agate beads and black beads etched in white, reflecting a style that originated with the Harappans. The introduction of international trade to an area that had been largely

self-contained did have profound social and political impacts not unlike it did in Central and Northern Europe. Some of the societies of Southeast Asia, particularly those that were already producing substantial rice surpluses and were well advanced in metal production, were already on a trajectory leading to stratified class systems, urbanization, and statehood. Large-scale longdistance trade greatly enhanced this process. In other areas where this was not already under way, trade became a primary factor in generating it. Largescale trade required organization to produce the commodities foreign traders wanted, a function undertaken by traditional leaders. A range of new products became available to elites who used them to enhance their status and power, reinforcing their interest in perpetuating the system. Chiefs, in the process of becoming kings, orchestrated the flow of goods into and out of the areas they controlled. As local areas became absorbed into market networks and their rulers assumed more control over the material wealth it generated, they were able to exercise more power over their people. States emerged. The earliest states in Southeast Asia developed at strategic commercial

locations, one of the most favored being on the northern section of the Malay peninsula at the Isthmus of Kra, the narrowest point on the peninsula at only 35 miles wide. Commercial communities were located here, and valuable resources were nearby, including tin and forest products. As the trade network connection to India took shape, Kra became its linchpin for a while. On the west coast of Kra, cargo was offloaded and shipped by land portage to the Gulf of Thailand, where it was reloaded onto new ships and sent out into the South China Sea. The monsoons determined the schedule. When northeast winds were blowing, ships could sail from India or China to Southeast Asia, where they had to lay over until the winds shifted and the southwest monsoon took them home. Thus ships arrived from both directions at the same time and departed at the same time. The earliest state in Southeast Asia for which any substantive information

is available is known to history by the name the Chinese gave it, Funan. It was not on the Isthmus of Kra but across the Gulf of Thailand on the southern coast of Vietnam in the Mekong delta and upriver in southeastern Cambodia. Nor was it a little city state like those at Kra but rather a country with at least two major cities, a port and a capital. Or at least that is what Chinese sources relate. Modern historians are not so sure, and current speculation is more inclined to see this region as consisting of a series of small, competing principalities scattered along the coast and up the river, with Funan referring either to one particular place that made an impression on the Chinese or to the area in general. Funan’s advantage over Kra was that it contained extensive rice lands whereas Kra had mostly forest. Thus Funan could feed without difficulty its own population and the merchants and

sailors who had to lay over sometimes up to five months waiting for the monsoons to shift. Chinese reports on Funan began with the visit of two imperial emissaries

who arrived there between 225 and 250 CE likely sent to investigate the opening of an official maritime silk route to India. However, the report they made on their return, or at least what has come down to us, contains relatively little about Funan’s trade except that customs taxes were paid in gold, silver, pearls, and perfumes. Other Chinese emissaries followed over the next four centuries as did Funanese embassies to China, conveniently recorded in Chinese imperial archives. The information they convey has been greatly augmented by archaeological excavations carried out at a site in Vietnam called Oc Eo, which must be the place Chinese observers described as Funan’s principal port. Oc Eo is a few miles from the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, to which it was linked by a network of canals that also extended to the Mekong River. Cargoes were landed from India bringing carnelian and agate, bronze jewelry and seals, cotton fabrics, pepper, and at least one Buddha head from Gandhara in northwestern India. The same ships carried Roman Empire products, including glassware, gold and silver jewelry, and gold coins, one of which with the likeness of the emperor Antoninus Pius (138-61 CE) was made into a pendant. From China came silk and finely made products such as mirrors and, from closer to home, tin from the Malay peninsula and copper from Thailand. Over the years Southeast Asian merchants were successful in introducing

substitute products at reduced costs for goods passing between Mediterranean and Indian and Chinese markets. Benzoin, a balsamic resin from Sumatra, for example, could be used as a treatment for skin irritations, as a fixative in perfumes, and as incense; it proved to be a good substitute for myrrh. The woods and bark of the camphor tree, also from Sumatra, produced another resin used for incense and as a stimulant in medicines. Agalloch, or aloeswood, from the Malay peninsula, Cambodia, and the highlands of Vietnam was a soft, resinous wood burnt as incense whereas sandalwood, a fragrant, yellowish wood from a parasitic tree found on Timor 1,800 miles east of Funan, was used for furniture, carvings, and containers such as chests and boxes. New spices – cloves, nutmeg, and mace – joined pepper and cinnamon although in much smaller quantities and at much higher prices. Oc Eo was more than just an entrepot; it was also a manufacturing center, at least for jewelry. A range of gems and precious stones, from malachite, jade, and olivine to amethyst, beryl, and rubies, was used along with gold and silver by specialist craftsmen who borrowed Indian and sometimes Roman motifs and styles. Chinese travelers picked up secondhand information on other trading

states located down the Malay peninsula and around the Gulf of Thailand. Referring to the countries of this region, one Chinese report maintains “all the countries beyond the [Chinese] frontier come and go in pursuit of trade,”

and with regard to one particular Malay port, notes “East and West meet together so that every day great crowds gather there. Precious goods and rare merchandise – these are all there.” Ports developed in the Sunda Straits region between the islands of Sumatra and Java, where the king of a place called Zhiayang was said to be importing horses from the Kushan Empire in the mid-third century CE. Thailand was another hotspot of trade. At Khuan Lukpad (“Bead Mound”) glass beads were found similar to those of Poduca along with a mutilated Roman coin and two carnelian intaglios done in Roman motifs, one showing the goddess Tyche. Etched beads and other jewelry have also been found in Malaysian sites, including a gold ring with a Hindu design and a carnelian seal with Sanskrit writing. In return for such manufactured products, the people of both areas likely offered tin. One of the most interesting places to emerge in the early first millennium

CE was the kingdom of Champa located up the coast from Funan in what is today central Vietnam. The Cham coast should have been a good place for ships going and coming from China to stop for cargo. The region offered desirable products, which the Chams obtained from trade with the peoples of the interior highlands who needed salt from the coast. These included the usual ivory and rhino horn along with such rare woods as ebony, sandalwood, camphor, aloeswood, and lakawood, a form of black bamboo. Cinnamon, cardamom, lacquer, and kingfisher, peacock, and other rare feathers were also available as were tortoise shell and pearls from the coast. Cham ports were also known to be major slave markets, and herein lay the problem with Cham commerce. Cham kings exercised only loose control over much of their long coastline,

which led to a chronic problem with piracy. The Cham kings themselves did not have a rich agricultural hinterland to tax as did the Funanese to the south and the Vietnamese to the north, so they came to depend on plunder as a major source of state revenue. In the long run such a society was doomed to extinction, which finally came at the hands of the Vietnamese in the fifteenth century. In the shorter run it meant that ships often detoured around the Cham coast, decreasing Cham income from peaceful commerce and further increasing the need to rely on plunder. Champa, which should have been a major partner in Southeast Asian trade, was relegated to a secondary position, which it enjoyed only during more tranquil times. Champa and Funan were geographically much closer to China than to

India, a short sail across the South China Sea, which, however, can be a very turbulent body of water, notorious for its typhoons. Some speculation has put the Chinese on the Malaya peninsula as early as the mid-fourth century BCE and Chinese merchants in India on a limited basis by the first century CE. Third century CE Chinese documentary sources allude to direct sea trade with India, and later in that century contact was said to have been established between the Chinese and a kingdom in the Ganges delta called Tan-Mei (probably Tamralipti). Commercial negotiations may have been carried on in

neutral Funan, after which the Indians sent an ambassador to China although Chinese records do not mention this. Notable quantities of artifacts dating from the Han dynasty have started turning up in scattered locations in Thailand, and pottery from the same period has been found in southern Sumatra and Java. Nevertheless, the archaeological record for Chinese contacts with Southeast Asia beyond northern Vietnam is surprisingly meager just as the literary record is vague. In the fifth century CE silk began to be sent in more significant amounts by sea, and stoneware jars made in China appeared as far away as the Persian Gulf, but even for this time the quantity of artifacts is not impressive and would remain so until the Song dynasty at the end of the millennium. The Chinese were interested in much the same exotic luxury products as

the Romans. The Han Shu chronicle notes that in the second century BCE China had become so prosperous “rarities such as luminous pearls, striped shells, lined rhinoceros horn, and kingfisher feathers [were seen] in plenty in the empress’s palace.” Rhino horn became so popular among Chinese men as an aphrodisiac that rhinoceroses were driven to extinction in Southeast Asia. Birds, especially kingfishers, peacocks, and parrots, were in great demand as were their feathers, which made rather striking fashion statements as witnessed by another passage from the Han Shu describing the emperor “with his back against a screen figured in black and white decked in a coverlet of kingfisher plumes.” The Chinese also imported quantities of resins, aromatics, incense, drugs, and spices. Some frankincense and myrrh made it all the way from Arabia, but for the most part the substitute products of Southeast Asia were successfully integrated into the Chinese market. Pepper, cloves, and nutmeg were used more as ingredients in medicine than as flavoring for food. Official trade was carried on through the tribute system, a form of high-level royal gift exchange the Chinese chose to interpret as foreign states sending tribute in token of their submission, for which the Chinese emperor in return bestowed gifts in gracious magnanimity, a conceit the Chinese shared with the pharaonic Egyptians. Records show that the rulers of Funan dispatched 25 missions to China between 226 and 649 CE. Both Funan and Champa sent live elephants – the Cham kings did this a reported 14 times – and Funan also sent a live rhinoceros. In one instance, the Funanese sent a troupe of trained elephants that Chinese authorities considered to be too dangerous and returned. The Chinese presence was most apparent in northern Vietnam since this

was the one place in Southeast Asia that was conquered by an outside power, a process that began in the second century BCE. The class of ChineseVietnamese who came to rule over this most distant province of the Han Empire proved to be less interested in setting up an elaborate system of government than in taking advantage of local commercial opportunities. The Vietnamese coast became the passageway between Southeast Asia and south China, offering excellent opportunities for trade, smuggling, and piracy.

Officials were said to have normally extorted from merchants between 20 and 30 percent of goods passing through. During the first half of the third century CE the Han dynasty fell, and

China became divided into north and south. To the west, the Parthian Empire was conquered a few years later, and soon thereafter the Kushan Empire was also invaded and subsequently collapsed. In the far west the Roman Empire struggled into the fourth century with much of its energy sapped. These events profoundly shook the Eurasian overland trading network collectively referred to as the Silk Road and the various arteries that fed into it. Long-distance overland travel became less secure as nomadic peoples moved into the power vacuums created by the fall of the great states. As Chinese trade to the northwest dried up, Chinese trade to the south increased. If overall this was not a good time for long-distance trade, problems on the northern overland route did create opportunities on the southern maritime route. From the third century CE on, direct Roman commercial activity on the

international scene began to recede. In the southeast, focus became increasingly confined to the Red Sea area itself, beyond which Roman commercial contact became more indirect. This had an impact on India, where some cities in the north and west declined. Others, however, prospered as trade shifted rather than collapsed, with the beneficiaries being those cities that were plugged into the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asian, and Chinese trades. Eventually the Byzantine Empire would replace the Roman, at least for the eastern Mediterranean, and more quickly the Sassanian Empire replaced the Parthian as consumers at the western end of the maritime route. At the eastern end, Southeast Asia seemed to be in the proverbial catbird’s seat; with direct links to two systems, it could adjust upward or downward, depending on which side was expanding or contracting. It could also reap the maximum benefit at optimal times when both sides were expanding. Beginning in the fourth century CE, the highway through Southeast Asia

changed, becoming more efficient in response to increased market pressures. Ships began using a new route through the Straits of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra or through the Straits of Sunda between the islands of Sumatra and Java instead of drudging across the overland portage on the Isthmus of Kra. In nautical miles this was a longer trip, but it was all water, making it faster and cheaper. In theory, a ship could leave southeastern India or Ceylon and not touch land until Canton (Guangzhou) in south China although most ships would continue to lay over in Southeast Asia to await the change in winds but now at ports in Sumatra, Java, Borneo, or on the tip of the Malay peninsula rather than at Kra or Funan. Malay sailors are usually credited with engineering this shift, which was gradual if irreversible. A major factor in the shift to the all-water route was the continued success

of substitute products, many of which, like camphor and benzoin, came from

the Sumatran forests. Sumatra also became known for its pepper, as did Java, where a new variety with a distinct taste somewhat like allspice was reputed to be effective in treating respiratory problems. The most profitable of these new products, however, came from islands 2,000 miles east of the Malacca Straits. Whereas pepper and cinnamon were available in various places, the so-called “fine spices” – cloves, nutmeg, and mace – came only from a few islands in the Molucca and Banda seas, often referred to collectively as the Spice Islands. If today these spices have been relegated to the back of the spice rack in most kitchens, in the past they were in great demand by those who could afford to pay premium prices. Cloves are sun dried unopened flower buds from the evergreen clove tree. It is a strong spice with a hottish flavor and perfume-like scent. In Europe it was used to flavor meats and sauces while clove oil was used as an anesthetic and breath freshener. Nutmeg and mace are different parts of the same product. Nutmeg is the kernel of the fruit of another evergreen tree used in sweet and savory dishes and considered to be an aid to digestion. It was especially popular in northern India and was later used to flavor beer in Europe. The nutmeg seed is wrapped in a membrane, basically a rind, from which mace is produced. Its flavor is a subtle combination of nutmeg, pepper, and cinnamon, and it was often used in sauces. The fine spices appear to have entered the long-distance trade network in

detectable quantities in the late first millennium BCE. Cloves were being used in China by the third century BCE and reached Rome in time for Pliny to include a discussion on them. The island of Java, more than 1,000 miles from the Molucca and Banda islands, proved crucial to this trade. Javanese ships brought staples, especially rice, which could be grown in abundance on Java, to the Spice Islanders to trade for their valuable products. On the return voyage Javanese ships sailed west on the same winds that took Indian and Chinese ships from Java to their home ports. When winds changed, everyone would go in the opposite direction, meaning that the ships taking these spices to their ultimate destinations were never in Javanese ports at the same time as the ships bringing the spices from the places they originated. Consequently, everyone outside of Java assumed that the spices were produced in Java. On the Spice Islands, large-scale production catapulted the people of these societies from hunter-gatherers into trade states that were soon building their own micro-empires. With the center of long-distance trade in Southeast Asia shifting south-

ward, new polities arose, intent on protecting, taxing, and controlling the trade. In the seventh century CE a group of ports centering on the city of Palembang in southeastern Sumatra came together to form what was probably a trade-based confederation (although it is often referred to as an “empire”) known as Srivijaya. The key to its success was the co-opting of local pirates whose notoriety was a major reason that ships had earlier preferred the Kra portage. The pirates agreed to protect rather than plunder passing ships in return for a cut of the tariff fees. Srivijaya, at times in

alliance with a major rice-producing state in Java, dominated long-distance trade in Southeast Asia for the next seven centuries. The big losers in the shift to an all-water route were the Kra and Mekong delta ports and particularly Funan, whose fragile economy depended on ships that no longer arrived by the sixth century CE. When ships going between the Straits and China did stop along the coast, it was to take on products of the hinterland, which could be obtained more cheaply and in larger quantities on the Cham coast provided the local pirates were under control. Eventually Oc Eo was abandoned, and the local center of power moved up the Mekong River into the Cambodian interior. By the first millennium CE northern Europe was linked to the islands of

eastern Indonesia by a series of interconnected routes secured by emporiums all along the way. The Eurasian world had become a unified commercial zone dwarfing all earlier exchange systems. If there was anything that could be considered as the center of the maritime portion of this zone, it was India with the Mediterranean and China anchoring each end. But maritime trade was only half the system; the other half went overland across deserts, mountains, valleys, rivers, steppelands, and forests, in and out of cities, countries, and badlands. The backbone of this overland system was the great Silk Road.