One Belt One Road or 一带一路 or OBOR or Silk Route 2.0 – Many of you have probably heard one of these terms in recent days. The project started by China’s President Xi Jinping in 2013 is now worth almost US$1 trillion. Xi looks back to the golden era of China’s economy, a time when luxury goods such as silk, gold and gems were transported from China through Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean. Only this time, the new route will be built with monster cranes and modern technology, trains and ships to replace horses, camels and elephants. The impact, MASSIVE! Imagine the opportunities that will be created from this – more businesses leading to more jobs to more trades between east and west, exchange of cultures, languages, customs and religions. In short, a much better economy for Asia as a whole. How now could you as an individual benefit from all this?

“While it’s hard to quantify the total number of projects and amount of financing, the China Development Bank alone has reserved US$890 billion (S$1.24 trillion) for over 900 projects, highlighting the magnitude of this undertaking,” says Oxford Economics’ He Tianjie and Louis Kuijs in a research briefing on April 27.

But before we delve into the new silk route, I believe it is of utmost importance to understand what happened in the past, the vast beauty of the old silk route that was started by little worms producing silk on a tree in Chang’an (now called Xi’an). This will give us a perspective of what to expect in the future.