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<p>The Silk Road traversed diverse and challenging landscapes, with one of its most characteristic stretches spanning the extremely arid Tarim Basin. The meandering paths of trade routes gradually developed from ancient corridors of diffusion into organised and government-regulated commerce by roughly two millennia ago, institutions that remained in use until the sixteenth century. Our understanding of what caused the reduction of Silk Road trade remains limited. Conventional theories tend to take socioeconomic perspectives, particularly relying on political transformations in the Eurasian heartland and a redirection towards maritime routes. Here, we examined a potential role for hydro-environmental factors in the fall of the long-distance trade networks by compiling a unique landscape-scale dataset, comprising 164 radiocarbon dates of <i>in situ</i> plant remains from along palaeochannels and 254 recruitment ages of living trees in the Tarim Basin. Using Bayesian modelling, we produce a novel proxy for the time that the rivers dried up with high spatiotemporal resolution, and integrate it with palaeohydrological records from adjacent regions. Given the hyper-aridity, riparian forests became desiccated across the region as their glacial-melt streams stopped flowing, leaving a direct record of the death of river branches. We conclude that the decline of core routes of the Silk Road coincided with significant decreases in streamflow across northwest China, especially during a low-flow period around 1500 to 1650 CE in the Tarim Basin. We suggest that this dry phase was significant enough to cause the abandonment of many central trading routes, contributing to what may have been a complex set of compounding variables.</p>

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Reduction of Silk Road Exchange Corresponds with a Decrease in Hydraulic Output of Major Dryland Rivers in Northwest China

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月11日

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  • Kangkang Li,
  • Zhiqiang Yin,
  • Lei Zhang,
  • Robert Spengler,
  • Yiming V. Wang,
  • Xiaoguang Qin,
  • Bing Xu,
  • Zhaoyan Gu,
  • Guijin Mu,
  • Yong Wu,
  • Xiaohong Tian,
  • Dong Wei,
  • Chunxue Wang,
  • Huiqiu Shao,
  • Hongjuan Jia,
  • Wen Li,
  • Jing Feng,
  • Gill Plunkett,
  • Jiaqi Liu

摘要

The Silk Road traversed diverse and challenging landscapes, with one of its most characteristic stretches spanning the extremely arid Tarim Basin. The meandering paths of trade routes gradually developed from ancient corridors of diffusion into organised and government-regulated commerce by roughly two millennia ago, institutions that remained in use until the sixteenth century. Our understanding of what caused the reduction of Silk Road trade remains limited. Conventional theories tend to take socioeconomic perspectives, particularly relying on political transformations in the Eurasian heartland and a redirection towards maritime routes. Here, we examined a potential role for hydro-environmental factors in the fall of the long-distance trade networks by compiling a unique landscape-scale dataset, comprising 164 radiocarbon dates of in situ plant remains from along palaeochannels and 254 recruitment ages of living trees in the Tarim Basin. Using Bayesian modelling, we produce a novel proxy for the time that the rivers dried up with high spatiotemporal resolution, and integrate it with palaeohydrological records from adjacent regions. Given the hyper-aridity, riparian forests became desiccated across the region as their glacial-melt streams stopped flowing, leaving a direct record of the death of river branches. We conclude that the decline of core routes of the Silk Road coincided with significant decreases in streamflow across northwest China, especially during a low-flow period around 1500 to 1650 CE in the Tarim Basin. We suggest that this dry phase was significant enough to cause the abandonment of many central trading routes, contributing to what may have been a complex set of compounding variables.