On the Silk Road

The Silk Road, a ancient network of trade routes between the East and the West, has over thousands of years crossed Afghanistan. Uncounted numbers of traders covered parts of the route, passing on items from one trader to the other, adding value at each stop. The route sprang into life in the first century BC, when China established embassies with Parthia in modern Iran and Ferghana in central Asia.

Afghanistan has both been producer and trader along the route. The desire among Romans to get silk was so huge and the textile so expensive that the Roman Senate even tried to ban it, on moral as well as economic grounds. As the Chinese guarded the secret of silk production, the textile was only produced in the Far East, and remained an expression of luxury and wealth for centuries. Over the coming centuries, other items such as paper, porcelain and tea, gold, horses and ivory were traded along the road as well. The road was also a highway for ideas, and it was the Kushans who send Buddhist ideas from Afghanistan to China and Buddhist Art to India.

The road reached its peak in the first and second century AD. It was the collapse of the roman empire and the Han Chinese empire some centuries later that caused the collapse of the trade network, while the rise of Islam further changed to balance of the trade in the region. Discovery of the sea routes marked the final decline of the road.

Afghanistan has been one of the witnesses of the surge and decline of the Silk Road, hosting both producers and processors. Today, not much is left from this ancient trade. My current task, to develop a proposal on SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) development for a rural silk enterprise gave me a chance to visit and interact with actors along the silk value chain. On a sunny morning we traveled out to Zandajan district in Western Afghanistan, past the Hari Rud river. Along the river, the landscape is green, but behind the first elevation up from the river bed, the fields are dry. I heard predictions for both floods and droughts that are supposed to hit Afghanistan this year – looking at these landscapes, drought looks more likely. The landscape is only interrupted by clay villages and herds of cashmere goats, bushy as they haven’t been combed yet. Once we entered the village, I felt somehow thrown back in history. Wouldn’t there have been a power line that supplies power from nearby Iran, and the occasional car and mobile phone, I would have been unable to say which century we are in. I wouldn’t idealize it – life in these villages is for certain not easy. But they do have a special charm, comparable to forgotten and abandoned villages in rural Italy, where only the old are left, enjoying a unspectacular life day in day out. With the difference that staying in such remote villages is not a luxury in Afghanistan, but business as usual.

As I had never seen silk production before, I was captured by the humid and warm air in the semi dark room where dried cocoons are boiled to unravel the silk. A silent surren filled the second room, where the silk thread is spun, and the third room where thick silk thread for carpets is produced. Once I had been shown the thread production, we sat down and discussed the opportunities and threats that the silk industry is facing nowadays in Zandajan. Though it still gives part time employment to a considerable number of households in the district, the demand for silk has experienced a decline over the last years. On one side, men are not obliged anymore to wear silk turbans as they were under the Taliban; on the other side, many items that were previously made out of silk are now made out of cheaper, synthetic products. I wonder if a heavily supported rural enterprise will save the industry from decline. Though I would love to spend time out in these districts and villages (its just so much better than hanging out in Kabul), I have my doubts about the potential of success.