# THE ROAD THAT NOBODY TRAVELLED *The Supply Chain as a Line of Faith* Author: Elveander Welfendorff · Category: Risk · Date: 2026-10-15 · Place: Warsaw · EW Journal Source: https://ewbyew.com/the-road-that-nobody-travelled/ --- The envelope said Samarkand. It was a coarse cloth wrapper with the instructions for delivery written on it, and inside lay the letter itself, folded in a second wrapper of brown silk, as carefully protected as anything a merchant could send. In 1907 Aurel Stein picked it out of a ruined Chinese watch-tower west of the Jade Gate, beyond Dunhuang, in a bundle that looks like the contents of a mailbag lost or confiscated on its way. The letter had been written in about the year 313. It seems never to have left China. Its author was Nanai-vandak, a Sogdian, one of the people of Samarkand who handled so much of the trade between China and the west that their language became the common tongue of the road, and who held that trade, on one reckoning, from the second century before Christ to the tenth after it. He wrote probably from Jincheng, which is Lanzhou today, to two partners at home, and the news he had to give was that the world they traded in had come apart. The emperor had fled Luoyang in a famine, and the palace and the city had been burned. Luoyang was no more, and Ye was no more. The Huns, who only yesterday had been the emperor’s subjects, were said to hold the country as far as Ye, and the Sogdians who had stayed in Luoyang had all died of starvation. He could not say how the rest had fared, since it was three years since a Sogdian had come out from inside China, and three years since he had had a reply from there. Then he turned to business. There was money on deposit with a man named Pesakk, which was not to be transferred, and which his partners were to count, keep sealed, and either add to the capital with interest or pass to someone else; for ready cash they might draw one thousand staters or two. There was an orphan boy, Takhsich-vandak, who lived on the income, and who was to be given a wife when he was grown and never sent away from the house. Thirty-two vesicles of musk had gone to Dunhuang to be divided into five shares. Linen was moving from Dunhuang to Jincheng, and was selling well, the translator adds, with a question mark. A man writes that the capital of an empire has burned, and a paragraph later he is anxious that somebody should count the money with care. Other letters lay in the same bag, and they show what the relay cost the people strung along it. A woman named Miwnay wrote from Dunhuang to her mother that she was living wretchedly, without clothing and without money, that the officials would not help her home, and that a priest was keeping her alive. She wrote again, to her husband, that she had been in Dunhuang three years and had become without hope towards him. A trader at Guzang wrote to his chief merchant about four bundles of a white substance, probably white lead, a great many measures of pepper and a dispute over twenty staters of silver, of which four and a half had been delivered. Hardly anyone travelled the route from end to end. A caravan took a cargo for one stretch between oasis towns and handed it to another man for the next, and the silk that left a Chinese loom passed through dozens of hands and several languages before it reached a buyer, none of the hands holding the whole journey. The name for the thing arrived late. In 1877 a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, put the word Seidenstrasse into his book on China for the route described in the account of Marinus of Tyre, and later writers stretched it over everything. The merchants would not have recognised a road. They knew the next man. Reputation held the relay together, and the Chinese, who saw a good deal of Sogdians, recorded it in a Tang history: they were good at trading and loved profit, and when a boy was born his mouth was given honey and his palms glue, so that he would speak sweet words and grasp gems. I should like to think that families really did it. The saying is accurate about the trade in any case, in which a merchant’s whole capital was what the men on either side of him thought of him, and a deposit of staters sat safe in Pesakk’s keeping because Pesakk had to go on living among the same people. Trust moved down the line as the silk did, one pair of hands at a time, and nobody was ever asked to trust the whole route. Their colonies ran from Samarkand into Gansu, Turfan, Luoyang and Chang’an, and the headmen of the settlements, called sabao, were taken into the Chinese official ranks. A tax record from Turfan under the Tang shows how closely the network was woven, with twenty-nine of its thirty-five recorded transactions involving Sogdian merchants and thirteen of them with Sogdians on both sides. A reputation of that kind could also be taken away. In the middle of the eighth century many Sogdians in China backed a rebellion against the Tang, and afterwards many were killed and many more changed their names. One of them, An Chongzhang, petitioned to be known as Li Baoyu, which put a few strokes of the brush between himself and the rebel who shared his surname. Rome saw only the far end of it. Pliny the Elder put the drain on the empire’s purse at some hundred million sesterces a year for the trade with the east, a figure often thought an exaggeration, though it becomes believable if it measures the whole value of the trade and not only the coin. Either way the grievance was about money leaving, and not one of the Romans who bought the goods could have named a single man on the road. Two thousand years of improvement have lengthened the relay and put the cargo in a steel box. In March 2021 a container ship named Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal on the twenty-third and lay there until the twenty-ninth. More than four hundred vessels queued at either end, trade worth nearly ten billion dollars a day was held up, in a canal that carries about an eighth of what the world ships, and a flotilla of tugs and dredgers was needed to move her. On being refloated she was found to have raised a very old question. Her owner declared general average. The rule comes from the sea law of Rhodes, which is lost and survives in quotation, one of them by the Roman jurist Julius Paulus in the third century. The loss, he says, is made good by the assessment of all, which is made for the benefit of all. If a captain throws part of his cargo overboard to save the ship in a storm, everyone with a stake in the voyage pays a share of what went into the sea. Owners of the cargo aboard had done nothing to run her aground. Before their containers could be released they were asked to post a bond, and the shipowner could hold their goods under lien until the deposit was paid; the insured among them had their insurers give the guarantee. A stranger’s accident had made partners of people who had never heard of one another or of the ship, and the sum was reckoned on all of them by a principle that a Roman jurist was already quoting eighteen centuries earlier. Nanai-vandak’s partners in Samarkand never read his letter. They would have learned from it that Luoyang was no more and that Pesakk’s money was to stay sealed. It lay in the watch-tower for sixteen centuries in its wrapper of silk, correctly addressed, and the road was the one thing it lacked. * * * --- © 2026 Elveander Welfendorff. Quotation with attribution and a link to the source is welcome.