The Ingenious Engineering of Silk: How the 2,000-Year-Old Pattern Loom Powered the Silk Road and the Wealth of Ancient China

The Silk Road’s long period of high activity spanned the second century BC and the fifteenth century AD, but its name wasn’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Scholars have argued it practically ever since, given that the referent wasn’t just one road but a vast and ever-changing network of them, and that […]