The Silk Roads

In 138 BCE, a man named A Chinese diplomat and explorer sent west by Emperor Han Wudi around 138 BCE to forge an alliance against the Xiongnu nomads. Captured and held for ten years, he eventually reached Central Asia, returning with detailed knowledge of western lands. His reports opened the routes that would become the Silk Roads. left the Han capital of Chang'an with a hundred men, a diplomatic commission from Emperor Wu, and very little idea of what lay ahead. His mission was practical, even desperate: find the Yuezhi people, who had been driven west by the Xiongnu nomads, and convince them to form a military alliance against the Xiongnu threat on China's northern border.

The diplomacy failed. The journey did not.

Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu almost immediately. He spent ten years as a prisoner, married a Xiongnu woman, had children. He escaped, pressed on westward into the Ferghana Valley and Bactria, found the Yuezhi, who politely declined the alliance, and then spent another year as a Xiongnu captive on his return journey. Of the hundred men who left with him, only two made it back to Chang'an. The round trip took thirteen years.