The name, The Great Silk Road, was first proposed in 1870 by the German resercher of Asia, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, the uncle of the Red Baron.
The reason that Baron Ferdinand proposed this name is: the route from China to Europe is almost 10000 (ten thousand) kilometes, the most precious good that was brought from China to Europe was Silk.

While trade in silk gave the Silk Road its name, silk was only one of the things carried on it. Ideas travelled along with the commercial goods, making the Silk Road one of the great channels for interaction among societies. It was in fact not a single road but, as historians identified, a number of lands and sea routes bridging the East and the West of the Eurasian continent, whose prominence changed and fluctuated in the course of history.

One of the first European who wrote about the Great Silk Road was Marco Polo, when he was put in gaol, he began to write about his travels: he wrote about the countries he saw, about the peoples he met, about the traditions... along the Great Silk Road... for Europeans it was like untruth to hear what he said and many people thought of him a charlatan, and for much of his life he struggled to bring the truth to light. On his deathbed when he was ased to recount his lies, Marco Polo said: "I have not told even half of what I saw".

The History of the Great Silk Road spans atleast 2000 years, from around 500 BC until its decline as a commercial thoroughfare by the 16th century.

As mentioned earlier, this "longest road" on Earth - over 10000 kilometers, stretching across Turkey, the Central Asian States, Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, India and China - passes through legendary caravan cities - Bukhara, Samarkand and Kashgar - through Central Asia's sun scorched steppes - and through snow choked mountain passes in the great Tian Shan and mighty Karakoram ranges. It has been treaded by merchants of the like Marco Polo, the armies of Alexander The Great, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and many others.

Highways thet shaped history, the Silk Roads were conduits for conversion as well as for commerce and conquest: Two of the world's most wide spread religions, Buddhism and Islam were disseminated by way of the Silk Road by monks in saffron robes and by pious Arab merchants.

Craftsmen, scholar, entertainers and official emissaries from far-off lands travelled the Silk Road too, and many languages were spoken, many cultures blended, in the glittering cities that grew up along them. Inevitably these routes formed a cultural causeway carrying new ideas, new philosophies, new artistic style over vast distance.

Great conquering armies of the Persians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, the Mongols and the Chinese fought many a battle on these routes and in the wake each of them left behind an indelible impression on the literature and art of the regions.

In the late 15th century, the Portuguese discovery of the Sea Route around the Cape of Good Hope to India very quickly led to direct sea trade between Europe and the Far East.

Central Asia was no longer the cross roads of the world. Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, the once great cities of the Silk road preserved only the romance of their names and the vague memory that once, long ago, they had somehow been important.