For such a long and hard journey, it is a masterpiece decorating Chinese culture and history. Also, it is rented as a key opening the communication from all over the world. How it was maintained? How it reached such a great effect? Today, Let us walk close to it and research carefully!

Maintaining the Road

Even at the height of its prosperity, the Silk Road was not a single track, except where it was forced through narrow defiles such as the Iron Gates at Tiemenguan near Korla and its namesake at the rather wider Buzgala Gorge in Uzbekistan, or across narrow passes in the Pamirs or Tian Shan. Rather, it was an interconnecting network of tracks, established over the centuries and familiar only in parts to experienced caravaneers who knew and understood the terrain. In sections and at times of imperial strength it was well maintained, for example the Persian Royal Road under the Achaemenids and the Hexi Corridor under the Han and Tang dynasties.

Construction on the Silk Road

With this road is enlarging, great empires and rulers of vision who appreciated the value of trade ordered the construction of garriors and caravanserais at regular intervals, for example in the west under the Abbasids and Ottomans, in the East, again, under the great Tang Dynasty. At other times imperial control collapsed and chaos ensured, with caravans threatened by bandits and natural hazards. Only under the Mongols in the 13th and early 14th centuries was entire length of the Silk Road briefly united under a single, efficient system, best exemplified by the Mongol shuudan or postal relay service, in which fast horses were maintained in prime condition at regular stations, ready to speed military orders and political news from one end of the empire to the other.

Transportation Appeared in Silk Road
With the development of this road, most caravan transport was carried by road, but there were instances when bats, ferries or rafts were either necessary. Elsewhere river transport could be a useful and economic way of transporting goods through difficult terrain where roads were poor or dangerous, for example eastwards on the Wei River or the Huang He in Gansu, where rafts of inflated goatskins are still used today or westwards on the Oxus in the region of Termez.

Silk Road is hard but brings too much surprise to the world development!