Drawing on the latest research and scholarship, this newly revised and updated edition of Religions of the Silk Road explores the majestically fabled cities and exotic peoples that make up the romantic notions of the colonial era. Foltz examines how cultural traditions, especially in the form of religious ideas, accompanied merchants along the overland Asian trade routes in premodern times, characterizing the Silk Road as more than just a conduit along which Western religions hitched rides East, but a formative and transformative rite of passage. No religion emerged unchanged at the end of this journey.