Traveling the Silk Road · Grades 6–7

The passage and its 7 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Imagine a bolt of silk woven in China around the year 700. Before it reaches a buyer in
• Persia or Constantinople, it may change hands many times. A merchant in Chang'an, the
• Tang capital, sells it to traders heading west. They carry it by camel to an oasis town, where another merchant buys it and takes it farther. Very few people ever traveled the whole distance. Goods moved along in stages, like a relay race that lasted for months.
• That web of routes is now called the Silk Road, although no one used the name at the time. A German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, made the term popular in the
• 1870s. In fact, there was never a single road. Tracks wound across deserts, over mountain passes and between oasis cities, while sea routes linked ports from China to
• East Africa.
• Silk was only one of many goods. Traders carried spices, horses, glass, jade, paper, cotton cloth and silver. At roadside inns called caravanserais, travelers rested their animals, swapped news and stored their goods behind thick walls.
• The most important cargo may have been invisible. Ideas traveled with the merchants.
• Buddhism spread from India into Central Asia and China, carried by monks and traders.
• The Chinese monk Xuanzang walked to India in the 600s and returned with hundreds of
• Buddhist texts. Papermaking moved west from China, while new crops, music and styles of art moved in many directions. At Dunhuang, a desert town on China's western edge, painted cave temples show Buddhas, merchants and musicians from many lands.
• Not everything that traveled was welcome. Diseases could spread along trade routes, and journeys were risky because of bandits, sandstorms and bitter mountain cold. Yet for well over a thousand years the routes kept drawing people, linking places that knew each other mainly through the goods and stories passing between them.
• 1. What is the central idea of the passage?
• 2. Why did very few merchants travel the whole route?
• 3. How did trade along the routes help Buddhism spread into China?
• 4. In paragraph 3, what is a 'caravanserai'? Which clues help you?
• 5. Why does the author say the most important cargo 'may have been invisible'?
• 6. Copy the sentence that shows the traders themselves did not use the name 'Silk
• Road.'
• 7. What question does the passage leave unanswered? How could you find out?