The German traveller and geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthoften (1833–1905) travelled as part of the Eulenberg Expedition from Prussia ...
The German traveller and geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthoften (1833–1905) travelled as part of the Eulenberg Expedition from Prussia to Asia, publishing his findings from 1877 to 1912 in five volumes. Richthofen and Sven Hedin were creatures of their time, moulded in the age of high imperialism when the competitive colonialism of the European powers raised the status of geography, cartography, and exploration.
Hedin and his counterparts garnered much of the fame that these expeditions brought, but it was Richthofen who first coined the term Seidenstrassen (Silk Roads) to describe and give meaning to the latitudinal string of sites found under the deserts of Inner Asia, thereby leaving a semantic legacy that has endured. Richthofen’s legacy has not gone unchallenged, and scholars have sought to clarify and critique the concept of “Silk Roads”.
In the first place, the Silk Road was neither a single road nor a static set of routes but an unstable and shifting bundle of connections subject to the vicissitudes of ecological change and political power. The latitudinal artery across Eurasia that is commonly taken to constitute the Silk Road proper also branched off longitudinally north and south, bringing spices, cotton cloth, and other goods from across the subcontinent and...
