The Ivory Road Caravans

The Ivory Road is the vast overland trade route that binds Grand Cathay to the distant Old World, the longest road in all the world, winding for thousands of miles across desert, steppe, and mountain from the caravan-cities of the west to the markets of Araby and the Border Princes. Along it flows the wealth of the east — silk, jade, tea, porcelain, and spice — carried in great caravans that are less trading convoys than travelling towns, hundreds of wagons and beasts strong, moving under their own banners and their own laws.

Such riches draw every predator between Cathay and the sunset, and so the caravans travel armed for war. Each is guarded by hired soldiers, mercenary companies, and the private armies of the merchant-princes who finance them, and a great caravan can field a host to rival a small kingdom's. The Ivory Road is a place of hard bargains and harder journeys, where Cathayan discipline meets the lawless wider world, and where fortunes are made and lost in a single crossing. To the men of the Old World, a Cathayan caravan cresting the horizon is a rare and wondrous sight — a fragment of an ancient and unimaginably distant empire, arrived at the very edge of the known world with wonders to sell.