Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-25 0

A bolt of Chinese silk could pay a soldier's wages in a desert fort, change hands for a horse, cross the Pamirs on a camel's back and end its days wrapping a saint's bones in a Byzantine church, all without one person ever traveling the whole way. The Silk Roads worked like that: a web of oasis towns, mountain passes and monsoon harbors where goods, gods, alphabets and germs moved from hand to hand for two thousand years.

You will meet Han generals hunting for war horses, Sogdian merchants and the wife one of them abandoned, monks smuggling scriptures past border guards, sailors in ships sewn together with rope, and the explorers who carried off Dunhuang's hidden library. Along the way you will learn to question the romance, test vivid numbers against evidence, and see how much every culture on the map borrowed from strangers it never met.

Levels

  1. 1 1. A Web of Roads Across Asia 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. Han Horses and Roman Silk 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. Merchants, Goods and Paper Trails 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Faiths on the Move 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Tang Chang'an and the Caves of Dunhuang 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. The Maritime Silk Road 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Mongol Roads and the Great Plague 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Decline, Rediscovery and Legacy 5-question quiz

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