A Failed Mission, a World-Changing Road
Zhang Qian’s military mission all but wholly failed: he could not win the Yuezhi as allies, and was held by the Xiongnu for over a decade. But the knowledge of the West he brought back let the Han know, for the first time, that far to the west lay so many states, goods, and markets. Thereafter caravans came and went along the road he had walked, and the Silk Road took shape — a failed diplomacy that unexpectedly opened a thousand years of trade and exchange between East and West.