But despite such attempts, silk moved across the planet with remarkable ease and was a vehicle of cultural creativity wherever it went. The English and French competed to restrict its markets. The Ottoman Turks and the Persians fought a war over it. The ancient Chinese guarded the secret of silk production for centuries. Given the Silk Road's symbolic meaning of sharing and exchange, it is somewhat paradoxical that the desire to control its namesake commodity, silk, was so strong. While largely commercial, the Silk Road provided the vehicle for all sorts of creative exchange between tremendously diverse peoples and cultures. Since the concept of ' Seidenstrassen' or 'Silk Roads' was first invented by the German geologist and explorer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877, the 'Silk Road' has been used as a metaphor of European and Asian cultural interchange. Yet because the goods and ideas were in great demand and commanded high prices, courtly rewards, or spiritual benefits, they were worth the trouble of transporting great distances. Those going by sea braved the uncertainties of weather, poorly constructed ships, and pirates. They had to face bandits and raiders, imprisonment, starvation, and other forms of deprivation. Travelers in caravans had to brave bleak deserts, high mountains, extreme heat and cold. The roads themselves were generally in poor condition. For millennia, highly valued silk, cotton, wool, glass, jade, lapis lazuli, gold, silver, salt, spices, tea, herbal medicines, foods, fruits, flowers, horses, musical instruments, and architectural, philosophical, and religious ideas traveled those routes. The Silk Road system has existed for over 2,000 years, with specific routes changing over time. A network of mostly land but also sea trading routes, the Silk Road stretched from China to Korea and Japan in the east, and connected China through Central Asia to India in the south and to Turkey and Italy in the west. The Silk Road spanned the Asian continent and represented a form of global economy when the known world was smaller but more difficult to traverse than nowadays.

Civ 5 connect island cities to capital