1. Mongol Trade Corporation
khubi in Mongolian, entitling each member of the royal family to a portion of the tribute from every part ( Although the empire was founded on some eight decades of military conquest from roughly 1210 until 1290, it was sustained for the adjacent hundred by department of commerce along the Silk Route. In many ways, the Mongol Empire became the Mongol Corporation because of an unusual economic organization introduced by Chinggis Khan after his conquest of the Silk Route. Rather than merely dividing territory among family members, the stallion Altan Urug ( Golden Lineage ) owned the entire empire in coarse. To make sure that they all derived benefit from the whole empire, each received the equivalent of modern corporate shares, calledin Mongolian, entitling each member of the imperial kin to a share of the tribute from every depart ( Weatherford 2004, p. 290 ). therefore, the Mongols in China received shipments of furs, ash grey, amber, and soldiers from Russia ; steel, medicines, musical instruments, jewels, spices, and gold embroidered damask from Persia ; and high-quality wallpaper, otter skins, and horses, from Korea. In turn, the Mongols in China sent the Golden Horde of Russia and the Ilkhanate of Persia ample supplies of silks, porcelains, almanac, wallpaper money, medicines, and other chinese luxuries. The Mongol Ilkhan of Persia claimed the produce of 25,000 households of silk workers in China, which was ruled by his brother Khubilai.
Reading: The Silk Route from Land to Sea
The shares included not merely deal goods but besides a claim on the labor of a specified number of craftsmen of diverse types. The Ilkhan besides owned valleys in Tibet, and he had a claim on a parcel of the furs and falcons of the northerly steppes, and, of course, he had pastures, horses, and men assigned to him in the fatherland of Mongolia itself. Each ancestry in the Mongol ruling family demanded its appropriate share of astronomers, doctors, weavers, miners, and acrobats. Khubilai Khan owned farms in Persia and Iraq, american samoa well as herds of camels, horses, sheep, and goats. An army of clerics traveled throughout the conglomerate check on the goods in one place and verifying accounts in another. This strange form of corporate ownership demanded the constant quick and authentic conveyance of products and people throughout the year. The unprecedented menstruate of goods being transported via the Silk Route gave it an importance surpassing all previous eras. The Silk Route was not suited for a massive increase in trade. The movement of such quantities of materials required radical reform of the Silk Route. Since the Roman times, a fundamental system of deal existed along the Silk Road as goods moved from one oasis to another, from one city to another, from one kingdom to another. The goods frequently changed hands, which made the process not only slow but besides expensive since every politics entity extorted its own tariffs from the merchants and often required a change of personnel, merchants, and transport animals to benefit its own community. Chinggis Khan did not invent this trade wind network ; in fact, he followed many of these routes on his conquest because they led from one major city to another. Through a series of structural reforms, Chinggis Khan transformed this maze of local routes into a super highway in which goods, people, and information traveled at unprecedented travel rapidly and quantity. First, he and his successors improved the infrastructure. They dug wells, built bridges, made roads, and, possibly, most importantly, created a serial of stations where merchants could obtain horses, guides, food, lodge, and exchange their money or cherished metals for Mongol composition money, which could be easily transported and guaranteed for use throughout the empire. To maintain these posts and the approximately 400 horses assigned to each one, Marco Polo says that the khans built villages around them for the people to live and grow foods to support the system. With possibly a small more enthusiasm than accuracy, he describes them as not merely “ beautiful ” and “ palatial ” but with “ silk sheets and every other lavishness suitable for a king. ” To promote trade along these routes, Mongol authorities distributed an early character of a combined passport and credit circuit board. The Mongol
gerege
( normally known in the West by its iranian name
paiza
) was an egg-shaped tablet of amber, eloquent, or wood larger than a man ’ south handwriting, and it would be worn on a chain around the neck or attached to the clothe. Depending on which metallic was used and the symbols such as tigers or gyrfalcons, illiterate people could ascertain the importance of the traveler and thereby render the appropriate level of service. The
gerege
allowed the holder to travel throughout the empire and be assured of protection, accommodations, fare, bank services, porters, bracing horses, and exemption from local taxes or duties. He simplified the maze of trails and roads into a few major routes, and, in some cases, this required the destruction of unharmed cities that he considered parasites on the craft of the Silk Route. He massacred or dispersed the population and destroy cities such as Merv, located in modern Turkmenistan, so that they could no long divert dealings, harass it, or tax it. The Mongol destruction of these parasitic cities and their irrigation systems required fantastic administration and labor, and was not something undertake merely for retaliation or peasant ignorance without a strategic determination. Removing these barriers to trade, Chinggis Khan made the Silk Route flying and more efficient and provided pastures for the animals needed in this improved trade system. By basically altering the structure of the Silk Route, the Mongol emperors from Chinggis Khan to Khubilai Khan changed the commercial and economic social organization of Eurasia. In addition to introducing bank and newspaper currency, they abolished tariffs and all forms of local taxes on commerce. They formally raised the condition of merchants from the lowest classify to a position equal to that of confucian scholars and guaranteed them protection and exempt passage throughout the empire. They granted envoys the lapp privilege and auspices even if the Mongols were at war with their home state. Merchants, missionaries, and ambassadors traveled these roads frequently as part of large caravans transporting trade goods and tribute. To encourage this practice, Ogodei Khan, son and successor of Chinggis Khan, often paid up to ten times the asking price merely as a form of ad to entice merchants from lands beyond Mongol control to deliver even more types of goods along the route ( Juvaini 1958 ). For the first clock time, not alone merchandise flowed along the Silk Route, but individuals could make the integral travel from Europe to China and home again without concern of robbery, harassment, or capture. The franciscan monk Giovanni district attorney Pian del Carpine of Italy and Benedict of Poland traveled this path from Italy to Mongolia between 1242 and 1247 ( Sinor 1957 ). In 1253, William of Rubruck of Flanders set out on the lapp travel, representing King Louis IX of France ( Jackson 2009 ). Kings and sultans from across Central Asia traveled the well-guarded routes to the Mongol court at Karakorum in Central Mongolia. In 1241, after the Mongols annihilated the european knighthood in Poland and Hungary, they moved several thousand Saxon miners along the Silk Route to work in mines and make weapons in northern Asia ( Allsen 2014 ). Later that class, the speed with which the Silk Route operated under Mongol control condition was demonstrated when Ogodei Khan died in December, and the news traveled to Hungary by the end of January 1242. The riders covered about 4700 miles in six weeks, at the rate of about one hundred miles a sidereal day. That focal ratio of data moving over such a distance was not achieved again until the go around of the telegraph and dragoon in the nineteenth hundred. This reformed and more effective constitution allowed Marco Polo to travel the Silk Route from Venice to Khanbalik and to return home under Mongol protection and without intervention. Thousands of other explorers, adventurers, mystics, pilgrims, kings, and envoys followed, not merely from Europe but from southern Asia and the Muslim Middle East as well. Near the end of the Mongol Empire, Arab explorer Ibn Battuta arrived in China in 1345 and traveled to the Mongol capital ( Dunn 2012 ). Silk Route traffic constantly moved two ways. In summation to the european merchants and ambassadors who traveled from Europe to the Mongol motor hotel, the Mongols besides dispatched representatives along the Silk Route to meet the Pope and rulers of France, England, Byzantium, and the city states of Italy in pursuit of alliances and trade. The most celebrated was Rabban Bar Sauma, a christian priest from China, sent by Khubilai Khan, who traveled to the independent courts of Europe in 1287–1289 ( Montgomery 2006 ). The fourteenth hundred, known as the
Pax Mongolica,
was described, with obvious hyperbole, as so peaceful and effective that a pure could walk from Russia to China with a pot of aureate on her capitulum without fearing damage .
2. Maritime Silk Route
Khubilai Khan perceived clearly that products could be moved more easily, in greater quantities, and cheaper by water quite than across nation. He restored chinese canals, and he expanded the practice of rivers in a major strategic extension of the Silk Route. In 1281, he launched a major expedition to discover and map the source of the Yellow River, which the Mongols called the Black River. Scholars used the information to make a detail map of the river. The expedition opened a route from China into Tibet, and the Mongols used this as a mean of including Tibet and the Himalayan area in the Mongol Post system and thereby in the expanded Silk Route. Pratica della Mercatura ( rehearse of Marketing), a commercial handbook published in 1340, the Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti stresses that the routes to Mongol Cathay are “perfectly safe, whether by day or by night ( The increase importance of water routes extended beyond the chinese rivers. To reach the markets of Europe more immediately, without the drawn-out detour through the southerly Muslim countries, the Mongols encouraged foreigners to tie directly into the traditional land-based Silk Route by creating trading posts on the edges of the empire along the Black Sea. Although the Mongols had initially raided the trade posts, deoxyadenosine monophosphate early as 1226, during the reign of Chinggis Khan, they allowed the Genoese to maintain a trading station at the port of Kaffa in the Crimea, and late added another at Tana ( Ciocîltan 2012 ). similar policies included water routes across the Caspian and Aral seas ampere well as a kind of rivers. To protect these stations, on domain and water, the Mongols hunted down pirates and robbers. In the ), a commercial handbook published in 1340, the Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti stresses that the routes to Mongol Cathay are “ absolutely safe, whether by day or by night ( Pegolotti 2012 ). ” gradually, the steppe-bound, horse-mounted Mongols began to see the importance of water system department of transportation as an adjunct to the land routes. The greatest change in Mongol Silk Route policy came with the interminably dull seduction of the Southern Song dynasty ( 1127–1279 ) that clung to power in the confederacy of China. At the clock of the Mongol conquest, the Southern Song Dynasty had already developed an extensive trade net, but since commerce was beneath the dignity of educated chinese Mandarins, the business was left largely in the hands of Arab, Persian, and indian merchants. For the Southern Song emperors, ships were not for commerce but as defense mechanism against the Mongols in a Maritime Great Wall of ports, canals, ship yards, and supply chains, which delayed the Mongol victory in the south for half a hundred. arsenic late as 1250, the Mongols still used rafts and hyperbolic sheep skins to cross rivers. however, within twenty years, Khubilai Khan incorporated the most sophisticate naval techniques and had a large, basically chinese, dark blue under the command of Mongol officers. Unlike the defensive united states navy of the Song, the Mongol navy combined a variety of chinese tactics with Mongol war strategy to create a knock-down, aggressive united states navy including many smaller but more agile craft. After another closely two decades of constant Song get the better of in naval battles and their retreat southerly toward Vietnam, the Mongols finally defeated the remnants of the Song dark blue in 1279 and incorporated its ships and sailors into their own military ( Lo 2012 ).
Chinggis Khan had built the greatest land power in history, but by the clock Khubilai Khan formally joined China in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most mighty navy in the world, and he decided to use it, as the Mongols had used all their prior resources, for conquest. A few of the sea invasions proved successful such as the seduction of the sparsely populate and not well-developed Sakhalin Island and the mouthpiece of the Amur River ( Walker 2006, p. 133 ). Despite assembling the greatest armada to set ocean prior to World War II in the twentieth hundred, most of the expeditions ended not merely in failure but in calamity. entirely the hard-fought sea invasions of Sakhalin Island, which began in 1264, and Jeju Island, completed in 1273, proved successful, but they were slowly conquests. however, these victories encouraged planning for more ocean invasions. After his failure to conquer Japan in 1274 and 1281, Vietnam three times between 1258 and 1288, and Java in 1293, Khubilai Khan ’ s ministers became increasingly doubting of the possibility or the aim of these alien invasions. When the aged emperor contemplated yet another set of invasions of coastal India and Thailand, some of his ministers pointed out the obvious : “ These are little and distant countries. Of what benefit would their seduction be to us ? To launch a war would risk the lives of our people for no utilitarian purpose. It would be better to send envoys to advise them ( Lo 2012, p. 286 ) ”. late in life, Khubilai Khan seemed to realize that, if he could be master of the sea, he did not need to expend money and men invading to occupy distant lands. By controlling their sea commerce, he ruled them. In assembling the largest united states navy in history, he had created a massive infrastructure to build and supply ships and to transport men, grain, weapons, and other goods over huge distances. China ruled the Silk Route of the Sea, but it did not yet control its rich resources. Unlike the Song resistance to commerce, under Khubilai Khan, trade, based on the Mongol bodied arrangement of shares, was a politics monopoly, oversee and controlled by officials at every horizontal surface. While initially weakening the power and wealth of the merchants, the policy created a much stronger and extensive fiscal and economic system, as illustrated most distinctly by the introduction of a single system of taiwanese alloy coins and newspaper money across South Asia. chinese and foreign merchants inactive profited, but they did indeed under the master of politics and not as secret enterprises. Mongol hegemony in Asia had the same impingement on the sea lanes as on the Silk Route on land. Prior to the Yuan dynasty, oceanic department of commerce proceeded slowly from port to port, constantly changing hands with local anesthetic merchants along the means and much paying excessive taxes. Under such a organization, merely lavishness goods could be transported, and their cost was greatly inflated by the repeat transactions, making them available to only the most privilege contribution of the elect. As the Mongol royal kin, stretched over such a large area, grew from a small congress of racial equality of closely relate individuals into an nobility of several thousand, the book of goods needing remove besides grew at the lapp rate. To meet this growing demand, they first made war on the pirates to make the routes safe. They built marine bases on respective small islands, organized large fleets for protection, and they used pigeons to communicate between ships. With safer seas, the chinese dark blue reduced the number of ports needed and the total of times goods had to be exchanged or taxed. The system worked faster. The Mongols protected the ocean path from the southerly ports of China to the interface of Hormuz in Iran and on to the Arabian coast for pilgrimage to Mecca. The sea lanes functioned not thus much as an alternative to the domain path but as a massive and singular extension of it. The southern path was the most important, but another route stretched past Korea and as far north as Siberia and included Japan and Okinawa, although they had not surrendered to the Mongols. Between the beginning of Marco Polo ’ sulfur overland travel to China in 1271 and his return to Venice by sea in 1295, China suddenly became history ’ sulfur beginning naval world power. Twenty-four years after the beginning of his journey eastbound, Marco Polo was able to travel home under the protection of a chinese evanesce of fourteen ships that sailed from Zaitun in southerly China to Hormuz in southerly Persia. The Polos had travelled four years to reach China over the Silk Route on down, but alone two years to return by the Maritime Silk Route. On the way home, they spent two years exploring the lands of newly declared vassals of the Great Khan along the route across the South China Sea and indian Ocean from China to Iran. After unifying China, the Mongols began shipping grain by sea from the south to the union, and by 1329, this had grown to hundreds of thousand tons annually, far greater than the down roads of the Silk Routes ( Needham 1971, p. 478 ). Marco Polo described the Mongol ships as bombastic four-masted junks with up to 300 crewmen and american samoa many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying assorted wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tub in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger sea-going junks to carry arduous loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the circumnavigate in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. Though the vietnamese kingdoms of Dai Viet and Champa had repulsed the Mongol naval invasions on land, they recognized that they could not compete with Mongol power at ocean. To be at war with Khubilai Khan was to be deny access to sea commerce ; they voluntarily, but normally only formally and nominally, submitted to Khubilai and became Chinese feeder vassals but without accepting Mongol officials to rule over them as had been demanded on the nation Silk Route. Their submission meant that they joined the Mongol maritime monopoly and could participate in its huge network of trade, not alone with China, but throughout the region. One by one, kingdom after kingdom across the South China Sea and deoxyadenosine monophosphate far as the slide of India did the same—the Khmer Empire of Cambodia, Sukhothai Kingdom and Chiang Mai of Thailand, and smaller states from the Malay Peninsula to Ceylon and the easterly coast of India. Within the span of Marco Polo ’ s seventeen-year sojourn, China, by means of barter and operate of the seas, became history ’ s inaugural nautical super office. The earned run average of chinese naval hegemony produced an plosion in trade that rivaled and then far surpassed the celebrated Silk Route of caravans across the inside of Asia. Ships carried far more than camels could, and much more cheaply. The new vessels ’ unprecedented size soon flooded the imperial court in Beijing with alien and extravagant goods. In addition to the array of luxuries such as silk, jewels, and precious metals transported on the traditional Silk Route, ships brought an huge diversity of majority commodities such as dates, saffron, peaches, carpets, porcelains, spices, ivory, musk, velvet, wax, batik, pearl, coral, tiger skins, turtle plate, rhinoceros horn, crocodile leather, peacock feathers, aroma, sandalwood, agarwood, ambergris, tin, field glass, damask, swords, dyes, books, and sacred relics of the Buddha, including one of his tooth. flush know elephants, rhinoceroses, parrots, and other alien animals of the south began to arrive at the chinese motor hotel. In plow, China sent a smaller variety show of items—principally silks, satins, porcelains, lacquer study, manuscripts, and jade—but they produced them in unprecedented quantities. Some of them were traded arsenic army for the liberation of rwanda as Europe and Africa .
3. Riverine Silk Routes
After the death of Khubilai Khan in 1294, his successor Temür Öljeytü Khan radically changed the function of the powerful Mongol navy. In a major and more effective division of british labour party, he ended his grandfather ’ second government monopoly and allowed more freedom for merchants, Chinese equally well as extraneous under protection of the now very external Chinese navy. He besides abandoned the military ambitions of the earlier Mongol emperors and replaced it with taxonomic deployment of diplomatic missions designed to propagate a more passive sight of the Mongol conglomerate, specifically by stimulating and expanding the ocean deal into more outback inland areas. Temür Khan far initiated the new policy to extend the Silk Route from the ocean, up the rivers near the Mongol routes. After only one class in agency, he dispatched several trade expeditions. While many such expeditions are mentioned in the historic records, few are described in detail. only the excursion up the Mekong River to the court of the aging, but still important, Khmer Empire was recorded in detail, but it provides extensive information on how such missions were organized. After sailing from South China, a mission of Mongol military officers and diplomats led a group of officials more than four hundred miles up the Mekong and then the Tonle Sap rivers to reach the court of Khmer Emperor Indravarman III in Yashodharapura, better known today as Angkor Thom, located union of the more celebrated Angkor Wat. The Chinese clerk who accompanied them, Zhou Daguan, produced an extensive report of their year-long stay from 1296–1297 ( Zhou 2007 ). Zhou Daguan proved an astute observer of architectural specifics and data about dress, theater styles, and public life. History abounds in political, diplomatic, and religious text, but rarely do we have a document that makes the daily life of a distant era come alive—the glittering gold towers, fluttering banners, decorated performing elephants, buzzing flies, dancing
apsara
, wafting incense, masons chipping aside at stones, the bustle of the grocery store, slaves working the fields, fishermen casting their nets, monks chanting, and children frolicking in the river. Most importantly, he reported on the types of products available and how the markets operated. In contrast to Chinese and Muslim ports where men controlled the markets, in the Khmer Empire, they were controlled wholly by women. Their products originated abstruse in the jungles and provided even more variety show to the littoral products. These included rosewood, beeswax, gamboge resin, dried pisces, lac, chaulmoogra oil, kingfisher feathers, hops, tung tree anoint, grasscloth, and a variety of medicines. Zhou Daguan included detailed information on the ship of such products and how a lot could be transported in one junk. The trade in goods and technology was surpassed entirely by the big movement in population and attendant cultural influences. Until this time, Southeast Asia had been primarily a cultural colony of India with people following Hindu, and in some cases Buddhist, religions, kings taking Hindu names, and writing in Sanskrit or in new alphabets derived from it. The changes induced by the quickly expanding Mongol sea empire produced a loanblend Sino-Indian culture in the countries now known as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, finally giving rise to its western designation of this area as Indo-China. The fundamental effect of the inclusion of these hitherto inside and rather isolate kingdoms into the Silk Route craft network can most clearly be seen in their change of focus from agriculture to commerce. The Khmer Empire moved its capital respective times downriver ever closer to the ocean routes before finally settling permanently at Phnom Penh at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap, a finish easily reached by ocean-going taiwanese junks. similarly, in the coming years, early agriculturally based kingdoms in the north of Thailand and Burma shifted their focus to the ocean as the old kingdoms such as Sukhothai, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, and Pagan, were replaced by the less fat areas more commercially commodious and closer to the sea such as Bangkok, and Yangon ( Weatherford 2017 ) .
4. Decline of Silk Route
initially, opening the Maritime Silk Route expanded and augmented the land routes, but soon they began to rival and then choke off the traditional Silk route. Caravan size was constantly limited by the number of pack animals and by the handiness of cannon fodder ; frankincense, trade moved according to the whims of weather. still national to weather, ships faced fewer limitations and had no necessity to carry fodder for animals. As the Maritime Silk Route increased steadily in volume and importance, the caravan routes from China to the Middle East and Europe declined in importance and gradually reverted to a stunt network of local routes connecting the inland cities, while department of commerce from Europe to China moved aside from the continental interior toward newly thriving sea ports. The expand Mongol Silk Route had produced the new world order of the Maritime Era. As the Mongol rulers stretched over the width of Eurasia became ever richer, they became indolent, devolve, and weak. distant cousins who shared the lapp lineage but had never met began to compete with one another. The Mongols of the Golden Horde in Russia formed closer craft alliances with the Mamelukes of Egypt than with their relatives in the Ilkhanate of Persia. The Ilkhanate gravitated more toward India than China, which had formed close ties in Southeast Asia and displaced the Indians. As on the spur of the moment as the Mongol Empire exploded onto the worldly concern scene in the thirteenth century, it imploded wholly before the end of the fourteenth. Without the military might of the army on the land route and the united states navy on the ocean route, the Mongols ’ bang-up craft network collapsed. The Silk Route on kingdom and ocean dissolved like water poured onto backbone. The newfangled Ming dynasty that expelled the Mongol rulers from China in 1368 initially sought to reassert its control of the sea through a serial of major expeditions, the most celebrated of which were commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 ( Levathes 1997 ). The Ming maritime revival brought the Chinese craft system to its zenith under the Yongle emperor who reigned from 1402 to 1424, but it proved to be only temp. impressive as Zheng He ’ randomness giant flotilla was, no great naval power backed it. The dragon fleet was no more than a paper dragon. It had proven vastly expensive, and the Mongols in the north remained a changeless threat for which the Ming emperors needed the money in order to build the Great Wall. Mongols and other Turkic tribes reasserted control over the nation Silk Route. Having failed to recreate the Mongol naval empire, the chinese emperors after Yongle ’ s death turned their nation in the opposite direction. They closed the shipbuilding centers, withdrew all Chinese in alien lands, destroyed the ships, closed the ports to all private barter, burned seafaring charts, banned interaction with foreigners or the consumption of foreign products ( Lo 1958, p. 168 ). They sought to return to a wholly isolated and sealed Middle Kingdom. By 1433, China had become a close state about wholly self-sufficient and desiring about nothing from any foreign nation .
5. European Attempt to Revive the Maritime Silk Route
history, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The lift of the Ming Dynasty brought the chinese Maritime Silk Route to an end, but, having been created, the Maritime Silk Route shrank drastically but would not disappear so quickly. The mercantile networks created under the Mongols could not be wholly undo by the Ming close of China. Although chinese control collapsed, the nautical network survived, and early rising worldly concern powers immediately vied to replace the taiwanese united states navy in the vacuum. At first Indians, Arabs, and Persians returned to their dominant function in trade, but no one of them asserted full dominance. Europe had become dependent on asian spices and early goods, and without the Maritime Silk Route, the flow of goods declined dramatically. The absence of chinese ships at ocean and Mongol armies on land forced the Europeans out of their isolation in a request to revitalize the sea connections and thereby increase their run of asian goods. A great scramble began to assert manipulate over the abandoned trade routes. Soon, sultans, maharaja, emirs, and warlords competed with Portuguese and spanish explorers, Dutch, French, and british merchants, and pirates of all nationalities to control the trade of the indian Ocean and South China seas, the most authoritative ship channels on earth.
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When Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492 to reach the islands of the Indies and the court of Cathay, he carried as his guide his heavily annotated replicate of Marco Polo ’ mho adventures and voyages in Asia. unfortunately, he never knew that the Mongol empire had collapsed and no longer controlled China. In addition, the continental american english landmass blocked his way, and he never reached his passionately desire goal of the rich spiciness islands of the Indies and fabled bazaars of Cathay. Despite centuries of contest for maritime commercial control, no one state proved able to reassert hegemony over the solid of the taiwanese net or match the naval baron of the chinese united states navy under the Yuan and Ming dynasties. ineffective to replace or replicate the now defunct hegemony of China over the seas, the european countries began to carve it up into spheres of charm. Spain took the area around the Philippines and tried to invade Cambodia. Portugal claimed smaller outposts from India and the Malay Peninsula to East Timor and Macao. Great Britain annex India and Burma. France took Indo-China, and the Dutch claimed the spiciness islands of Indonesia. The nationalist rival among the powers did more to disrupt the Silk Route on land and sea than the Mongol collapse. however, the Silk Route never quite died. The importance of the Maritime Sea Route has continued for closely eight centuries, and the movement of cargo container ships across the oceans today is the direct descendant of the ancient Silk Route. Railroads have replaced camel caravans and ox trains, and China is leading the quest to renew the erstwhile Silk Route across Eurasia. The future chapter in the history of the Silk Route is yet to be written. once again, China may well be the one to write it .
