Silk Road Talk

In the second episode, we talk about the opening of the Maritime Silk Road in Hepu, an ancient trading port in Southern China. This port rose to importance during the Han dynasty. Join us in exploring the numerous tombs of this port and the fascinating assortment of overseas goods they contain. More info: Article :  Hepu and the Opening of the Han Dynasty's Maritime Silk Road Object :  Persian Ceramic Pot

The Persian Ceramic Pot ( 波斯陶壶 ) Eastern Han Dynasty (25 - 220 AD) Ceramic with Turquoise Glaze/ 34.4 centimeter high Excavated in 2008 from the Liaowei Tomb no. 13B, Hepu County, Guangxi Autonomous Region Hepu District Museum, Hepu, China This beautiful pot has been discovered in one of the many Han-period tombs of the Hepu burial site in the Guangxi Autonomous region. So far, only one of these pots has been found. The pot has an elongated round body and a single handle. It has a smooth surface that is covered by a cracked turquoise-colored glaze. Analysis of this glaze has revealed a chemical composition that is very different from formulas commonly used during the Han Dynasty. Furthermore, the pot’s shape and production method resemble ceramic traditions from the Parthian empire and indicate a Persian root (Xiong 2015). A pot, discovered at the Seleucia site in modern Iraq, in particular, looks very similar. Other ceramics that bear a resemblance have b...

Hepu and the Opening of the Han Dynasty's Maritime Silk Road   Today, many Chinese scholars believe that China’s first turn to the sea was during the Han Dynasty and took place in Southern China. To explore this theory, we have to travel to the most southern coastal regions of China bordering the South China Sea. This area, historically called Lingnan, roughly corresponds to the present-day provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong. When looking at a map of China, these two provinces are at the most southern point of China. According to Chinese historians this region is the cradle of the maritime silk road in China and there are two reasons why they think so: first, in Lingnan they have discovered the remains of two Han-period ports that are mentioned in an early historical text; and secondly also in this region they have found a large number of so-called ‘oversea goods’ in Han-dynasty tombs. Historical Evidence: The Book of Han Let’s first have a look at this historical text, whic...

The Silk Road(s): A Short Introduction Defining the Silk Roads Ferdinand von Richthofen  (1833 - 1905) The term Silk Road was coined in 1877 by the German geographer and historian Ferdinand von Richthofen. The singular “Die Seidenstraße” (Silk Road) or plural “Seidenstraßen” (Silk Roads) were first used by Richthofen in one of his lectures, but only in the twentieth century these terms became more commonly mentioned by scholars. Since then, the Silk Road has come to mean many things beyond its original usage. You can think of the Silk Road as the original globalisation before the rise of modern globalisation. It is, in a nutshell, the intercultural movement of goods and ideas. Besides, the well-known overland silk road, there also exists a network of maritime routes, called the Maritime Silk Road. Sometimes referred to as “the Spice Routes” or “Ceramic Routes”, these maritime routes also played a major role in the intercultural interactions between regions in Eurasi...