The Ambassador’s Road is a series of connected roads that crisscross over main- land China to the east coast and all the way to Burma. The Ambassador’s Road brought traders of various ethnicities to China to trade commodities such as cotton, spices, and other goods for silk, rice, jade, and other Chinese goods. The trade route stretched all the way to Korea, Beijing, Canton, Vietnam, and Burma.
The Ambassador’s Road started out as unpaved dirt paths that Chinese peasants had created millennia ago to connect with other villages. Around 200 B.C. the Yellow Emperor Huang Ti united China to form the Chin Dynasty.[1] Huang Ti realized that having a large empire could be problematic because his orders would not reach the edge of the empire for weeks. The time it took for messages to be relayed from the Emperor to the rest of his people and for an acknowledgement to come back could sometimes mean the difference between life and death. If the empire were to be attacked from the south, the Emperor had to know quickly of the attack and had to be able to summon troops from the west in order to keep the invaders from taking the capital. The quickest communication at this point in history was by horseback. Roads had to be built and adequately maintained in order for messengers to travel as quickly as possible.
Sources:
[1] Frank, Irene M. and David M. Brownstone. 1984 To the Ends of the Earth: The Great Travel and Trade Routes of Human History. New York:Facts On File Pub. (p. 5).
[2] Ibid., 7.
[3] Ibid., 9.
[4] Ibid.,10.
[5] Polo, Marco. 1961 The Travels of Marco Polo. New York: New American Library of World Literature (p.156)
[6] Frank, Irene M. and David M. Brownstone. 1984 To the Ends of the Earth: The Great Travel and Trade Routes of Human History. New York: Facts On File Pub. (p. 12).
Written by Alex Boyce, 2003