ABSTRACT
The Silk Road has enriched Europe’s Renaissance and given the West Yersina pestis, the plague bacterium that caused the ‘Black Death’. It has been a pathway for trades, migration and human DNA, religions and ideas, and a stage for conquest from both Asia and Europe. It has changed the dynamics of geopolitical ambition. To this day it continues to be a projection screen of romantic fantasies about a supposedly ‘exotic’ Asia. Tourism continues to thrive on this concept. In its subtitle, a recent publication on Travelling the Silk Road by the US Museum of Natural History (Norell et al., 2011) refers to the Silk Road as an ancient pathway to the modern world.
