A Silk Road exhibition held in Xi'an last year. [Photo by Li Yibo/Xinhua/Roy Liu/For China Daily]

High-society ladies routinely put imported fragrance powder inside their delicate shoes. But of course more went on their carefully painted faces. The glass bottles for the fragrance, coming all the way from Rome and exuding their alluring greenish blue color, were treasures in their own right. After use, the bottles were often donated by their owners to Buddhist temples, in whose underground storage some have been found in modern times."

Another famous import to China is grape wine, from the traditional grape-planting regions of the Mediterranean. With the wine came the Grecian wine god Dionysus whose image adorns the rucksack on the back of a pottery camel unearthed in Chang'an (now Xi'an), the Tang Dynasty capital.

Rong Xinjiang, a professor of history at Peking University who is one of China's leading experts on the ancient Silk Road, says he believes the adoption of the spice and grape wine cultures are just two signs of the open attitude of Chinese society at a time when it was brimming with confidence.