Before it was a dispensary on Jamaica Ave, the Silk Road was the greatest trade network the world had seen: thousands of miles of routes linking China, Central Asia, Persia, India, Arabia and the Mediterranean for roughly fifteen centuries. Merchants, camels and caravanserais moved silk, spices, paper, glass, horses, ideas and, yes, cannabis across a continent. That history is why the camel is on our sign.
🛒 Shop Menu How Delivery WorksBactrian, two humps, ~400 lb loads
c. 130 BCE to 1453
Yanghai, Xinjiang, ~2,500 years
166-30 Jamaica Ave, since 2024
The network took shape after 130 BCE, when the Han dynasty envoy Zhang Qian returned from Central Asia and China opened official trade to the west. It ran in pieces rather than as one road: from Chang'an through the Gansu corridor, around the Taklamakan Desert by the northern or southern oases, over the Pamirs into Samarkand and Bukhara, then on through Persia to Antioch and the Mediterranean, with sea routes joining India and Arabia. The German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen gave it the name Seidenstrasse, the Silk Road, in 1877. Overland trade faded after the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 and Europe turned to the sea.
Few traders crossed the whole distance. Goods changed hands in stages: Sogdian merchants from Samarkand dominated the middle stretches for centuries, Persians and Arabs carried trade west, Chinese and Uyghur traders worked the eastern oases. Caravanserais, walled inns spaced a day's travel apart, gave caravans water, stables, storage and a market. A merchant's reputation was his license: you traded with people whose word had held on the last trip.
The Bactrian camel, two-humped and built for cold, high deserts, was the truck of the Silk Road. A loaded camel carried roughly 400 pounds, went days without water and could sense a coming sandstorm before the drivers could. Caravans of dozens to hundreds of camels moved together for safety. Our camel mark is a nod to that animal: the one that actually did the carrying.
Cannabis is one of the oldest cargoes on these routes. Archaeologists have recovered cannabis from 2,500-year-old burials at Yanghai in the Turpan basin of Xinjiang, and a 2019 study of the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamir Mountains found wooden braziers with THC residue, some of the earliest physical evidence of people burning cannabis for its effect. Hemp cloth, rope and seed traveled the same roads as silk. The plant was part of the trade long before any modern law touched it.
Sohan Bashar is Bengali-American, raised in Queens, and Bengal sat on the southern branches of these routes, where Indian Ocean trade met the overland roads. When New York opened licensed adult-use cannabis, he applied through the CAURD program, won one of the early licenses, and opened Silk Road NYC at 166-30 Jamaica Ave on February 23, 2024 as the 75th licensed dispensary in the state and the first owned by a Bengali-American. Jamaica Ave is itself an old trade street, a market corridor for over a century. A merchant's road, a camel, and a licensed shop on a market street: that is the name.
The name has a second, modern chapter too: the 2011 online marketplace that borrowed it, and what a licensed dispensary has to do with that history. Short answer: nothing, and everything.
In October 2025 Roc Marciano and Errol Holden released the album Roc Marciano Presents: Mulberry Silk Road. We had nothing to do with it and claim no connection; we mention it because it shows the name still carries weight in the culture we serve, and because Roc is a New York artist and this is a store that hosts New York artists. Benny the Butcher filmed Summer '25 here.
For the ancient trade network that carried silk, spices, paper and cannabis across Asia for about 1,500 years. The founder is Bengali-American, and Bengal sat on the southern branches of those routes. The camel on the sign is the Bactrian camel that did the carrying.
Yes. Cannabis has been recovered from 2,500-year-old burials at Yanghai in Xinjiang, and braziers with THC residue were found at the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamirs.
No. Silk Road NYC is a New York State licensed adult-use dispensary, OCM-CAURD-24-000062, opened in 2024. The 2011 website was an illegal market shut down in 2013. We cover that history on its own page.