Yi Fan Over 2,100 years ago in Chang’an — capital of China’s Han Dynasty — court official Zhang Qian was packing. He had just been sent on a mission to bring the emperor’s goodwill to the region west of China. “This will be a hard and long trek,” he thought to himself. But little did he know that it would be way more than that. His treacherous 13-year odyssey, as it turned out, was the precursor of the Silk Road and ushered in centuries of vibrant exchanges between the Chinese and the people in Central Asia...

First 100 BILLION cubic meters of Russian gas delivered to China via 'Power of Siberia' gas pipeline