How a historic Pacific trade route can foster better China-Latin America ties

President Xi Jinping's "one belt, one road" initiative - a hugely ambitious attempt to link all of Eurasia via trade and transport infrastructure and procedures - has consolidated, among others things, the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. References to the Silk Road are not coincidental: they evoke a time that predates Western - first Spanish and Portuguese, then Anglo-Saxon - dominance of business, finance and trade, an arrangement that China, with reason, feels it is in its interest to recreate.

But China's central role in international trade did not come to an end with the demise of the Silk Road that came with the fall of the Yuan dynasty. There was a successor trade route, initiated soon after, in 1565, that spanned the Pacific from Mexico to China and Asia, with Manila as a major entrepôt. So-called "Manila Galleons" carried silk, porcelain, tea and other Chinese and Asian goods to the New World and thence to Europe, while carrying back silver from the mines of Nueva España - New Spain, which became Mexico - silver that provided the money supply to fuel the Chinese economy.

So central was silver to this trade that, rather than considering it a latter-day Silk Road, we might instead call it "La Ruta de la Plata", or "The Silver Way". It was, however, very much a continuation of international trade, albeit in the opposite direction.

This year is in fact the bicentennial of the last sailing of the Manila Galleons or Nao de China and Nao de Acapulco as they were also known. But the trade did not end in 1815: this period coincided with the Mexican War of Independence. Following the establishment of the Mexican Republic, silver began to flow again in the form of the familiar Mexican "eagle" silver dollar until well into the 20th century.

The globalisation that is so much a feature of our world today - and the crucial underpinning of China's recent re-emergence as a world power - dates from this period. The Silver Way was the Pacific leg of the first global trade route, extending to Mexico and thence to Spain and Europe; the crews were largely from Fujian . Goods and people from all corners of the globe were for the first time connected in a single global exchange.

The Spanish dollar, those so-called "pieces of eight", beloved of traders as much as pirates, was succeeded by the Mexican eagle dollar: this was the world's first global currency, the greenback of its day, accepted everywhere, and especially for trade within Asia and beyond. The yen, yuan and Hong Kong dollar were all based and modelled on the Mexican dollar.

Like the earlier Silk Road, places along the Ruta de la Plata prospered and added value. Manila was a key entrepôt (the famous Spanish shawls known as manton de Manila actually originated in Guangdong) and Mexico City was the period's New York: the place where Europe, Africa, the New World and Asia all met and mingled - not just in trade goods, but also a melting pot of peoples - the first "world city" in fact.