纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 050传丝公主画版（4）（在线收听）

"The term 'Silk Road' was coined by a German geographer called Ferdinand von Richthoven as late as 1887. It was never called the Silk Road before then, and then of course that fed into it all the romance of silk itself, its beauty, its luxury.

"I think the place of the Silk Road in the western imagination, the romance that it has, is actually quite a recent thing. Obviously certain products on the Silk Road gathered a kind of mystique, particularly when they came from a long way away. Not just a great cost, but also a strangeness, because people perhaps did not know the civilisations that had produced them."

As Colin Thubron implies, mysteries often generate stories to explain them, and since silk was by far the most important product travelling along this route, it inevitably inspired - in fact it needed - its own myth. Luxurious, beautiful and enduring, silk is almost synonymous with the land that first produced it over four thousand years ago and monopolised it for so long - ancient China. Long before the Roman Empire appeared, silk was already cultivated in China and exported on an industrial scale. The mysteries of its production were a highly protected secret; but secrets as profitable as this one never last, and Khotan was one of the beneficiaries.