I read the entire article and it's a great read.
It's fascinating how much we romanticize about past cultures and how much if it is wrong. I love reading history and this almost always turns out to be the case. Digging into any topic reveals they are always far more complex and multilayered than the the common caricatures you find in media and in generalized accounts.
China's popular understanding of the Silk Road seems to be way off, which is inspiring bad policy descisions.
WW2 is another great example of this, no topic has had more books and films than WW2 yet the perception vs reality is incredibly wide in popular US culture.
Particularly with how Germany really lost the war to the Soviets in late 1942 when they failed to subdue Russia in the early invasion. The west (US/UK/Canada) largely just cleaned up the mess from 1943-45, as the Nazi's were fighting an impossible war after that point. Even then Russia did most of the work in terms of raw combat. But even when this is noted in history books Russia's success is largely dismissed as merely due to their fortunate geography and willingness to treat their soldiers like expendable fodder. But it was in fact largely due to Russia having better technology than Germany (specifically better tanks/armour [1]) and the geography was far less of an issue to the Nazi's in 1942, who unlike Napolean had highly mobile tanks, aircraft, trains, and Blitzkrieg tactics.
The silk road and China's alleged cultural dominance seems to be no different. Being of far less importance in actual trade volume and influence than is commonly understood.
[1] particularily the KV-1 tank, which grinded Operation Barbarossa to a halt https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kliment_Voroshilov_tank
> In certain situations, even a single KV-1 or KV-2 supported by infantry was capable of halting large German formations. German tank armament was too poor to deal with the "Russian Colossus".