Tamara Chin - Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
By most accounts, 1877 marks the year when Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term die Seidenstrasse (Silk Road). Little has been written about what Richthofen had in mind in 1877 but his neologism generally bookmarks a division between pre-modern Silk Road history, and modern Silk Road re-discovery and studies. This paper explores Richthofen’s conception from the twin perspectives of classics and cartography - of nineteenth century studies of antiquity, and a symbolic “field” of German precolonial geography of China and Central Asia. In Richthofen’s juxtaposition of classical Chinese and Greek texts, the Silk Road represented a concrete distance for which Han dynasty records provided new data. Through Richthofen’s adoption of a Han dynasty worldview, his Silk Road comes to figure the limits of Greek geographical knowledge in mapping both the ancient and the modern world.