Did Ancient Rome and China Ever Meet? | Human Voiced, No Ads

The world of the second century. In the west, the Roman Empire spans the Mediterranean, boasting grand marble cities and disciplined legions in shining armor. Far over to the east, the Han Chinese Empire flourishes with walled capitals and silk-clad courtiers. Two superpowers, standing like book-ends to the Eurasian continent. Vast empires, unaware of each other's language, unaware of each other's faces, yet gradually bound by a whisper of commerce and a hint of curiosity. The question we have today is did Rome have contact with China? That is an interesting question, isn't it? And it's one that we're going to be looking into today, a journey through time, tracing that chronology of direct and indirect counters between Rome and China. And we'll see how goods, rumors, and people traveled along the silk roads and sea lanes, bringing these distant worlds into a fleeting contact. And don't worry, we'll have plenty of little goodies too, little details like Chinese silk causing panic among the Romans' morality, to a possible lost legion settling in Asia, to the recorded visits of actual Roman envoys to Chinese gods. We've got it all, and we're going to talk about it all over the next hour together. So how about you get nice and relaxed? We're going to chill out, learn something, and just have a great time. But first, let me welcome you to the channel. Once again, such a pleasure to have any newcomers here. And if you're into this kind of stuff, how about you click that subscribe button? Or anybody who's not clicked the subscribe button yet, I invite you to do so. This video is 100% ad free. We're funded by the audience here. Due to the generous contributions of those on YouTube memberships, Patreon, those who had a curiosity to check out the merch store and the occasional donation, you can enjoy it completely uninterrupted. So thanks to those who have taken the time to check out those links in the pinned comment or description. Now with all that out of the way, let's get to the topic at hand. We begin in the second century BCE. It was at this time when the Roman Republic and China's Han dynasty were rising giants, still separated by thousands of mountains, deserts, and all those little kingdoms in between. A long way to go, and direct contact was simply beyond reach. But indirect awareness began to show signs. The catalyst for this, of course, was trade. In 138 BCE, the Han Emperor Wu sent envoy Zhang Jian westward. Zhang Jian's journey opened China's eyes to these western regions, mainly Central Asia. Think about the modern day areas of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, this kind of thing. And so he returned to Chang'an. Nowadays we call that Xi'an in Shanxi province, after ten long years. And with him he brought reports on lands such as Dayuan and Kangju, along with Anxi and others. Now there's pretty much Fergana, Sogdiana, and Parthia respectively. Now most importantly, he sold Chinese goods like silk in foreign markets, evidence that products from China had already traveled far beyond the empire's bounds. Though Zhang Jian never reached as far as Rome, his expedition was certainly the beginning of the Silk Road, a network of trade routes that would eventually link the Mediterranean to China. The Han court learned of powerful kingdoms to the west too, and one of the names he reported was Li Jian, a term that later Chinese texts equated with the Roman Empire. So as you see, we certainly have the routes of contact all the way back in 138. Of course though, scholars do debate the origin of Li Jian. It is still a point of argument. Maybe it originally referred to a Hellenistic kingdom or a city, perhaps Alexandria in Egypt. But regardless, we know that by the first century AD, Chinese sources would use Da Qin alongside Li Jian to denote the far western empire of the Romans. At the same time in the Mediterranean world, the Romans were encountering the fruits of the east long before they understood where they came from. The most prized import was unsurprisingly silk. During the late Republic, that is the first century BCE, delicate silk fabric began appearing in Roman marketplaces carried by traders from the east, middlemen, Parthians, that kind of thing. Now the Romans knew that these exquisite textiles came from an enigmatic people called the Seires, literally silk people. But they only had the vaguest notion of who the Seires were. The geographer Strabo, writing under Augustus in 20 BCE, acknowledged the limits of Roman knowledge. Few Romans had travelled beyond India, and information about lands further east was basically based on hearsay and second-hand reports. No much to go on. But to the Greco-Roman imagination, the Seires lived at the extreme edge of the habitable world, a folk that existed in semi-legendary status. But despite the mystery of it all, Roman demand for silk simply kept growing and growing. By the first century BCE, silk garments had become fashionable among Rome's elite classes, but also a little controversial. Moralists had deplored the craze for its translucent attire. The philosopher Seneca the Younger famously rebuked Roman women for parading in diaphanous silks that, quote, do not even conceal their bodies, a sign of decadence in his view. And even the Emperor Tiberius at one point forbade men from wearing pure silk, lest it, quote, shame the male sex. Well, such admonitions did very little to dampen the desire. Gold flowed out of Rome in exchange for silk, alarming the more conservative commendators. And the most striking complaint actually came from Pliny the Elder, the naturalist and author of Natural History, which was written around the 70s CE. Pliny estimated that Rome was sending one hundred million sesterces annually to India, Arabia, and the Syries, that being China of course, for these luxury products, draining the treasury for nothing more than baubles and pleasures. The quote from his work went as followed, That is the price that our luxuries and womankind cost us. Pliny also repeated a fanciful account of how silk was made. According to his understanding, the Syries collected a woolly down from trees, and combed out fine threads. He was describing raw silk fibre, without realising that it came from silkworm cocoons on mulberry leaves. To Pliny it was astonishing that so much labour and distance were involved, for a matron to flaunt transparent raiment in public, as he put it. The Syries, he added, lived at peace in their distant land, shunning contact with other peoples, and letting the traders come to them. Perhaps he was not aware of the pretty constant warfare of ancient China. It was not the most peaceful place. By the end of the first century BCE, and into the early first century CE, indirect trade contact was firmly established. Silk travelled west in caravans that passed from one intermediary to another, Chinese merchants to Central Asian traders, to Parthian middlemen, to Greek or Nabataean merchants, and finally to Roman, Syrian, or Alexandrian traders. But in return, what went eastward? Chinese records and archaeological findings give us a few clues of that. The Han Chinese were eager for strong Central Asian horses, and also received new fruits, grapes, and glassware from the west. From the Roman world in particular, the most significant exports were precious metals—gold, silver bullion to pay for the silk, but also high-quality glass and glassware, and even fine textiles. In fact, Roman-made glass items have been discovered in tombs as far as South Korea, and the fragments of Roman glass cups have been unearthed in Chinese sites, indicating that these objects travelled quite astonishing distances. Roman bronze mirrors and coins, too, made their way along the trade routes. In fact, Chinese archaeologists have found Roman coins—mostly later Eastern Roman ones in China—supporting accounts of ancient exchange. And in the caravan city of Palmyra, a Roman client city in Syria, tombs contained Chinese silk textiles, and that's clear proof that silk had reached deep into the empire, and conversely that Roman serious merchants were handling goods from the Han Chinese. It is at this early stage, however, that all contact was indirect. Romans and Chinese knew each other only as mysterious legends. The Chinese spoke of the far-off land of Da Qin—literally Great Qin—suggesting that they regarded Rome as a powerful peer-civilization, almost a Great China of the Western world. The Romans spoke of the Ceres, or sometimes used the term Sine, from which the word China derives. We speak of things like the Sino-Chinese War. I say Sino. This is where the word comes from. They used these terms for people even beyond the Indian Ocean. But neither had yet sent envoys across the entire span of Eurasia. But that was about to change, as geopolitical interest and a little bit of curiosity pushed each empire closer and closer together. The first century CE saw the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty both at the height of their power, and with that, a curiosity to look beyond their borders. Trade along the Silk Road flourished under the Pax Romana and the Pax Sinica—those rare periods of relative stability when long-distance caravans could travel with somewhat safety. It is in this context that we see the first attempts at direct contact. Let's start with the Chinese side. On their side, a remarkable initiative came from General Ban Chao, the Han imperial protector of the Western regions, as roughly today's Xinjiang and Central Asia. Around 97 CE, Ban Chao had secured Chinese dominance as far west as the Tarim Basin. Eager to reach further and establish an alliance or contact with the reputed Great Empire of the Far West, Ban Chao dispatched an envoy named Gan Ying to journey all the way to Rome. Gan Ying set out through Central Asia and made it to the shores of the Persian Gulf. It was there, however, that his mission was unfortunately thwarted by the Parthians. An Iranian empire that sat between Rome and China. According to the Houhanshu, the Book of Later Han, the Parthians deliberately misled Gan Ying about the perils of the onward journey. They told him that to reach the Roman lands, he would face a vast and dangerous sea, taking months or even years to cross. But in reality, Roman-controlled Egypt laid just beyond the Arabian Sea, and Roman ships regularly sailed to India. But Parthia had a strong incentive to block direct liaison between Han China and Rome, since the Parthians, of course, profited immensely as middlemen in the silk trade. Poor old Gan Ying, daunted by the exaggerated tales of the ocean voyage, decided to turn back. He never really got to meet the Romans in person. But still, he did gather second-hand information about the Roman empire from traders in Mesopotamia, and upon returning to China in 101, he delivered the most detailed account of the Romans that the Han court had yet received. Gan Ying's report, preserved in Chinese chronicles, is quite fascinating. He described the Roman empire in remarkably favorable terms—almost a mirror image of the Chinese empire. According to the Chinese records, later compiled by Fan Ye in the Houhan Shuo, and by the third-century scholar Yu Huan, the Romans were tall and ruddy, honest in business, and like the Chinese in their civilized way of life. One passage notes, The common people are tall and virtuous like the Chinese, but wear western clothes. They say they originally came from China, but left it. Now this is a curious little remark, don't you think? It implies a legend that Romans were a lost offshoot of the Middle Kingdom itself, an early Chinese attempt to fit Rome into their own worldview. Now do remember that the Chinese called their country Middle Kingdom, Zhong Guo, Zhong being Middle, Guo being Country, Kingdom, kind of thing. So this just shows that they see themselves at the center of the world. And because of that, especially in ancient times, they kind of had to put things into their own perspective. Now Gan Ying described the Roman political system as well, stating that the Roman ruler was not hereditary and could be replaced if he misbehaved, with a virtuous man chosen in his stead. Now this is a good observation too, perhaps a garbled reference to the Roman Senate or the practice of deposing bad emperors. The account even noted that the Romans always wanted to communicate with China, but Parthia, jealous of profit, would not allow them through. In effect, Chinese scholars understood the Parthians were obstructing a direct China-Rome link to monopolize the lucrative silk trade. Gan Ying's report also praised Roman technology and infrastructure. It mentions multi-storied buildings, postal relays, and the use of glass for art and utensils in Roman lands. And indeed, one Chinese source claims the Romans, quote, have a postal system with relay stations just like our Middle Kingdom. Now that's a pretty good recognition of administrative sophistication, that's for sure. Although Gan Ying never saw Rome, his mission proved that interest in each other was very much a mutual fascination. In concept, if not yet in reality, the Chinese now had a mental image of the Roman world. On the Roman side, we see parallel developments in geographic knowledge. By the mid-first century CE, Roman merchants were pushing limits of navigating in the Indian Ocean. After Rome annexed Egypt, Greek-Egyptian sailors discovered the monsoon winds, a discovery credited to the navigator Hipparlus, one that allowed direct crossings of the Arabian Sea to India. Roman trading ships began to reach the west coast of India regularly during the reign of Augustus and thereafter. Some adventurous traders went beyond the Indian subcontinent too. A Greek travelogue from around 50 CE, the Periplus of the Eurythraean Sea, speaks of a distant land called Dinae, clearly China, described as a great inland city where silk came from. It couldn't be any other place, surely. It also notes that raw silk and processed silky yarn from Dinae were sold in Bactria and India eventually making their way to Roman ports. At the same time, Roman geographers were piercing together information. By about 150 CE, Claudius Ptolemy in Alexandria produced his work Geographia, the most advanced map of the world in antiquity. Ptolemy's coordinates show two eastern regions, Serica, land of the Ceres, in the interior of Asia beyond the Tarim basin, and Sinae, land of the Chinese, located at the eastern end of the Great Southern Sea. In other words, Ptolemy knew of China, both via overland and maritime reports. It reflects a growing, if still hazy, Roman awareness of their far-eastern counterparts. By the early second century, it was only a matter of time before Rome and China would actually meet face to face. And indeed, that breakthrough would come in the latter half of the century, facilitated by shifting politics and perhaps sheer coincidence. In 166, during the reign of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, known to the Chinese by the way as An Duan, a transcription of his name Antonius, an extraordinary event occurred. An embassy claiming to represent Rome arrived at the Chinese imperial court. The Hou Hanshu recalled that in the ninth year of Emperor Huan's reign, 166 CE, quote, the king of Daqin, An Duan, sent envoys from beyond the frontiers, through Runan, that is the south coast of Vietnam by the way, to offer elephant dusk, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell. These exotic items were presented as tribute gifts to the Han court. Chinese historians noted pointedly that this was the first time in history that there had been direct contact between the two empires. The news certainly would have caused a stir in Luoyang, the Han capital. After years of hearing only rumors, the Chinese would finally gaze upon the real visitors from the fabled far west. However, we have to hold our horses a bit. The circumstances of this Roman embassy were peculiar, to say the least. The Chinese account remarks that the gifts they bought were of little value, not the kind of rich treasures one would expect from such a great power, and this raised suspicions at the Han court that perhaps these emissaries were not officially dispatched by the Roman monarch at all, but rather private merchants tagging along eastern trade routes and masquerading as imperial envoys. Modern historians tend to agree with that too. It is likely that these men were Roman or Syriac merchants, perhaps from the Roman east, or from an entrepot like Egypt or Alexandria, who had made their way by the Indian Ocean to the southeast part of Asia, and then to the Han empire's frontier. They may have invoked the name of Emperor Marcus Aurelius to gain prestigious audiences with the Chinese authorities. Marcus Aurelius himself, embroiled in wars on the Danube and a deadly plague in 166, probably didn't know of or sponsor this mission. But even so, Chinese records treated it as an official Roman embassy. Emperor Huan of Han granted them an audience. Symbolically, at least, the east had finally met the west. The long-heralded desire to communicate with China, ascribed to Roman rulers, had finally been realized, albeit in modest form. But what route did these Romans take? The evidence that we have suggests a maritime one. By the mid-2nd century, direct sea travel from the Red Sea to southeast Asia was well and truly feasible. The envoys of 166 CE arrived via Runan, a Han province, on the coast of what is now Vietnam. This implies they sailed through the South China Sea. In fact, a Greco-Egyptian trader could have journeyed from the Roman port of Alexandria down the Red Sea across the Indian Ocean to the Malay Peninsula, and then up the coast of Vietnam, connecting to Chinese-controlled territory. Such a voyage is long, of course, but well within the capabilities of the time. Ships from Roman Egypt are known to have reached as far as the Malay Peninsula during this period, trading spices, exotic goods, etc. Thus, the envisage of 166 was most likely the result of the maritime silk road, as opposed to an arduous overland crossing. Still, that doesn't make it any less interesting. The Chinese chroniclers, while pleased by diplomatic overture, remained appropriately skeptical about the nature of the mission. They recorded the event, and the name of An Dun, identifying him with the king of Rome. And interestingly, the Chinese had been informed earlier, via Gan Ying's report and other intermediaries, that the Roman emperors were chosen for their virtue, and that they eagerly sought friendship with Han. The arrival of an envoy seemed to confirm these stories, yet the lack of lavish gifts meant the event went down in history as a curious footnote, not some start of a sustained exchange between the two cultures. After delivering their tribute, and receiving some gifts or trading opportunities, the Romans of 166 likely returned home, or continued their mercantile circuits. No Chinese embassy was sent in return. The vast distance, and the political barriers, made a two-way exchange not impossible, but impractical, I suppose. The Parthian Empire, notably, had not been able to prevent this seaborne contact. By 166, Parthia was itself reeling from wars with Rome. Emperor Lucius Verus had recently fought the Parthians, sacking their capital, Ctesiphon, in 165. Perhaps a weakened Parthian control of overland routes and sea routes, emerging allowed a brief window for this direct meeting. But any hope of regular diplomatic relations was dashed by the turbulent events. Soon after, the Roman world plunged into the Antonine Plague, a pandemic some suspect may have been exacerbated by the intercontinental contact, and then into the crisis of the third century. While in China, the Han dynasty gave way by 220 to fragmentation and civil war. Nevertheless, there were a few follow-up encounters, noted in the Chinese records. One occurred during the Three Kingdoms period in China, which coincided with the late third century Roman world. The Wei Lue, a third-century Chinese text by Yu Huan, recounts that in 226, in the time of the Eastern Wu Kingdom, a merchant of Daqin named Qin Lun arrived at Zhaozhi, that is, northern Vietnam. The local prefect was so intrigued that he sent Qin Lun on to Sun Quan, the king of Eastern Wu. Sun Quan, ruling from Nanjing, was effectively the Chinese emperor of that southeastern realm. The account, preserved in the Book of Liao, and quoted by later historians, is quite colourful Sun Quan eagerly questioned Qin Lun about his distant homeland. Qin Lun described the Roman lands and people to Wu's court quite curiously. At that very time, Sun Quan happened to have a collection of dwarfs, individuals of unusually short stature. They came from a southern tribe, and he kept them as curiosities for the court. When the Roman merchant Qin Lun saw these dwarfs, he remarked that Daqin, well, in Daqin rather, such a small statured people were rarely seen. Sun Quan then hit upon the idea of sending a return gift to the Roman lands. He ordered that ten male and ten female dwarfs be entrusted to Qin Lun for travel, along with a Chinese officer to accompany them. Now this makes for a pretty interesting anecdote, don't you think? The Chinese monarch essentially tried to send exotic humans as gifts to impress the Roman ruler. One imagines Sun Quan thinking this would delight the distant western king. The expedition, however, never reached Rome. The Chinese officer Liu Xuan died en route. And Qin Lun gave up the mission and went back to his own country. That's a shame, don't you think? I wonder what happened to the poor dwarfs. Anyway, we do not know what become of them, but presumably they didn't complete the journey either. We just have to use our imagination. Either way, this illustrates both the enthusiasm but the pitfalls of such long-distance contact, but is also a reminder that private traders, not official diplomats, were usually the real connectors of east and west. Qin Lun was a merchant, and his voyage back to China was likely driven by trade. His audience with Sun Quan, well, that was just a lucky bonus, resulting from local authorities' fascination with a foreign visitor. Chinese histories further record an embassy from Da Qin in 284 AD, during the Western Jin Dynasty, the successor state that is, that reunified China briefly after the Three Kingdoms. Very briefly. The Book of Jin mentions that in 284, an envoy from Da Qin arrived at the court of Emperor Wu of Jin. The details are scant, but it likely was another group of Roman eastern subjects. Maybe Syrians, maybe Greeks. They arrived by the maritime route, as overland travel was perilous in that area. By 284, the Roman world had just emerged from its crisis under the new emperor Diocletian. It's conceivable that renewed stability and the flourishing trade in the Red Sea under later 3rd century Roman emperors allowed another mission to reach China. If the 166th embassy had been a one-off thing, the 226th visit of Qin Lun and the 284th embassy suggest a pattern that once every few decades intrepid travelers made it to Han and post-Han In any case, each time, we're lucky enough that the Chinese recorded these visits with wonder, but also each time continuous relations failed to materialize. Throughout these centuries of admittedly tenuous contact, there's been a number of myths and legends that have sprung up, showing how each side's imagination kind of filled the gaps in knowledge. One famous, though controversial, story is the tale of a lost Roman legion in China. Believe it or not, the background begins in 53 BCE, when the Roman general Crassus was defeated by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae. Thousands of Roman soldiers were captured. Fast forward a few years, in 36 BCE, the Han Chinese were fighting nomadic Xiongnu forces in Central Asia. A Chinese army, led by General Chen Tang, confronted the forces of a Xiongnu chieftain, Zhizhi, at a city in present-day Kazakhstan. The Chinese records of this battle mention that the defenders employed unusual formation of soldiers described as a fish-scale formation. Modern scholars have noticed that this sounds somewhat reminiscent of a Roman testudo formation, where soldiers align shields in a scaled pattern, like a turtle, basically. In the mid-20th century, Professor Homer Dubbs hypothesized that some Roman prisoners of wars from Carrhae ended up as mercenaries in Central Asia, possibly sold to the Yuezhi or Hun tribes, and that these men were fighting for the Xiongnu and Zhizhi's fortress. When Chen Tang won, the story goes, he captured these foreign soldiers. Dubbs further speculated the Han Chinese might have resettled these mysterious warriors in a frontier town in Gansu. Intriguingly, there was indeed a Chinese town founded around that time which is thematically similar to the Lijian, one of the old names for Rome. So could it be that Lijian was actually populated by the descendants of Roman legionnaires? This idea captured public imagination for sure. Still does. In modern times, villagers in the region of Lijian were found to have somewhat atypical features. Some had light hair or eyes, spurring sensational claims of Roman DNA in China. But, hold your horses, most historians remain pretty skeptical of it. Thus far, no archaeological evidence, no Roman weapons, armor, coins has been unearthed in Lijian to confirm a Roman presence, and genetic studies in 2007 did not find any clear links to Mediterranean ancestry beyond what could occur from any other historical mixing. It's also likely that the fish-scale formation described by the Chinese sources could refer to a common shield-wall tactic, and that wasn't unique to Rome by any stretch of the imagination. Lijian, etymologically, might relate to a different toponym. One theory is that Lijian originally meant Hyrcania in Central Asia, not Rome. So in short, while the image of stranded legionnaires carving out a life in Han China is pretty cool, it still remains an unproven myth. Still, it's a reflection of how eagerly, I suppose, we want to believe in an epic East-West encounter. But the story does underscore a real point. Roman and Chinese spheres nearly touched in Central Asia. If not Roman legionnaires, certainly Roman goods and people from Rome's client states traversed the Asian interior. For instance, Roman artisans or merchants might have lived in Parthian cities that the Chinese visited. The world of the Kushan Empire, in today's Pakistan-Afghanistan, to the 1st and 3rd century AD, was just another crossroads. Kushan rulers had ties with both Rome and China. They received Roman medallions and goods, and they were part of the Buddhist transmission to the Han too. The Silk Road caravans passing through Kushan domains would have mixed with Greeks, Indians, Persians, and maybe a rare Roman subject or two in the convoys. But that's if you're lucky. Still, the whole thing about legion, let's not pass it off completely. You never know what they're going to find. Perhaps there's still something under the ground waiting to be digged up, and then all of those modern observers will have to rethink their stances. There is another legend, though, that arose from later misunderstandings. By late antiquity, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Xandium, became known to the Chinese under a new name—Fu Lin—probably from Frank or a transliteration of something like Rome through Arabic. When the Tang Dynasty in China bloomed in the 7th century, it finally established direct diplomatic contact with Byzantium, an empire it saw as the heir of Da Qin. In 643, a Byzantine embassy, likely sent by Emperor Constans II, arrived at the Tang capital, bearing red glass and green gems. Chinese histories noted this came from Fu Lin, which they regarded as the same as Da Qin, but just under a different dynasty. And indeed, the concept of Rome evolved. The Romans of old were remembered as Da Qin, while medieval Byzantines were called Fu Lin. The Tang received several such embassies, and even learned of Christianity through Nestorian missionaries from the Roman West. These later contacts, however, lie outside our Roman Empire time frame, but they still are quite interesting, I think, showing that Sino-Roman relations experienced a renaissance in medieval times, once Islam and other forces shifted the political landscape. All in all, despite the scarcity of meetings, both Romans and Chinese left us with rich written testaments of their perceptions of one another. We've already discussed the Chinese portrayals of Rome from Gan Ying's report, and the Wei Lue, an empire of law and virtue, with big cities of stone, multi-storey buildings, and even proto-democratic duchies in their governance. The Chinese were clearly impressed by what they heard. They even credited Rome with certain marvels, such as pillars of glass in their palaces, and teams of coordinators, perhaps a distorted echo of the Roman Senate or the administrative councils. Well, the Romans, for their part, sort of had two parallel images of China. One was the land of silk and riches, an almost mythical paradise of peace and prosperity. The other was the distant, unreachable nation beyond the frontier of the known world. A striking example of the Roman view comes from Ammianus Marcellinus, a 4th century Roman historian. Writing around 400 CE, long after any known direct contact, Ammianus described these series in idealized terms. Remember, that term, series, Chinese. Quote from the text of Ammianus Marcellinus goes as follows. The series themselves live a peaceful life, forever unacquainted with arms and warfare. They're troubled by no one, and they incline to justice. The forests in their land produce a fine downy substance, which they comb out and draw into silk threads. He went on to relate the famous tale that the series conduct trade in a particular way. They bring their goods to a river bank, and withdraw, allowing the foreign merchants to leave gold in exchange, all without ever meeting face to face. A kind of silent barter across the river. Well, it's a pretty fanciful account, but it shows both admiration, i.e. the Chinese are gentle, ethical, civilized, but also a sense of mystery, i.e. they avoid direct contact with outsiders. It does echo earlier stereotypes, too, and probably does not reflect reality. In fact, Chinese traders were quite willing to trade and haggle in person, but it crystallized the Roman imagination of a gentle and reclusive people, living somewhere at the end of the earth. But one of the most poetic notions in Roman literature is the idea that the world's great nations almost met in the middle. The Roman poet Florus, of the second century CE, mused that the peoples of the Far East, Indians, Scythians, Ceres, spontaneously sent embassies to the first Roman emperor Augustus, having heard of Rome's greatness. And in fact, we know Indian envoys did reach the court of Augustus. Suetonius confirms that Indians and Scythians, nations only known by report, sent embassies seeking friendship with Rome. But Chinese envoys did not, at least as far as records show. Nonetheless, the idea that Rome's fame extended to the eastern extremities was a point of pride. The satirist Lucian joked about silk from the Cerescens being unravelled by Roman ladies, showing how every day, and yet exotic, that connection really was. So let's wheel back to the original question. Did Rome have contact with China? Well, the answer is a qualified yes. Over the centuries of the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty, and of course their successors, the two great civilizations never fought a war, never signed a formal alliance, never exchanged resident ambassadors. Yet they knew of each other, dimly, but enough to be curious. And they certainly traded indirectly, on a significant scale. Chinese silk became the adornment of the Roman aristocracy, while Roman glass, precious metals, and coinage found their ways into Chinese and Central Asian hands. The Silk Road was aptly named after the primary product that linked the two worlds. Through the vicissitudes of middlemen and intermediate empires, Kushans, Sogdians, Parthians, goods and information flowed in both directions freely. By the second century A.D., each empire had at least a rudimentary awareness of the other's existence. Rome knew of a distant civilization that made silk, and China knew of a far-off empire that rivaled itself in power and wealth. Direct contact, while extraordinarily rare, did happen, and are recorded in quite a bit of detail, luckily by those Chinese historians, and all but unnoticed by Roman writers, interestingly, likely because to Rome an embassy from China would have been a few foreign traders among many arriving in busy ports like The embassies of 166, 226, and 284 stand as milestones of a kind of proto-globalization, moments when human beings bridged the largest distance on earth at the time to shake hands, exchange gifts, and to just simply marvel at each other. The fact that one side carefully documented these exchanges, while the other side barely even remarked on them, is quite telling of their differing world views. China, viewing itself as the middle kingdom, saw the arrival of Romans as a significant tribute event, confirming China's central place in the world order, but Rome, for its part, saw itself as the universal empire. Any far travelers were simply just new participants in the vast trading network, not existential equals to be recorded in state annals. So we shouldn't interpret the lack of Roman mention as absence of contact, but rather as Romans not fully grasping how extraordinary the China connection actually was. The evidence for Sino-Roman contact comes primarily from those Chinese primary sources, of course corroborated by archaeological finds and a few notices in the Greco-Roman texts, but critical thinking really does demand that we legendary claims, like the lost legion of Li Chen, with caution. The credible accounts suggest that while neither civilization made a sustained effort to reach the other—no Roman legions ever marched to China, no Chinese armies ever appeared on the Euphrates—they gradually became aware of one another through commerce. The Silk Road functioned less as a single road than as a chain of many small interactions—a caravan master here, a ship captain there, each carrying information a bit further. It took centuries, but by the time of Marcus Aurelius, Rome and China were no longer strangers in absolute terms. The contacts that did occur were indirect, but certainly impactful. Trade led to cultural influences. The Roman love of silk spurred critiques of luxury and possibly even technological transfer. By the sixth century, Byzantine agents learned the secret of silk production—smuggling silkworm eggs out of China. A caper beyond our error, but certainly a direct result of the desire to break the monopoly. Chinese records of Da Qin provided later historians with invaluable data about the Roman world. And in turn, Roman geographers' inclusion of China on their maps was an early Western awareness of East Asia that would lie dormant until the age of exploration. So to conclude our time together today, the story of Rome and China's contact is one of The tale of two great empires, reaching out across the void through intermediaries. They never formed a political alliance or fought a grand duel, but they did influence each other in subtle ways. A piece of silk here, a rumor of a mighty emperor there. Each empire served as a mirror of prestige for the other—the Chinese calling Rome Great Qin in implicit respect, and the Romans being so awed by silk they were willing to empty their treasuries for it. When we think of globalization today, we often have figures like Columbus or Marco Polo come to mind. But truly that first thread of globalization was spun by the Chinese silkworms, and woven into the dresses of the Roman aristocracy. And that's where we end it for today. I hope you've enjoyed it, and you've learned something. And I really hope that they find something in Li Jian as well. You better believe if they do, I'll be the first one there. Just get on a plane, and then a train, and then a car. It's actually quite hard to get to Li Jian, but, you know, it would be worth it. Now let me, as is custom, thank my top dear Patrons. Thank you so much for listening. If you have anything to add to the conversation, then put something down in the comments. It's good to talk about these sorts of things. But for now, that's it for me. I wish you all a good rest, a good night, or perhaps a good day, whatever time you're listening. As always, lots of love to you all, farewell for now, and I will see you when you feel inclined to return. You know where I'll be. Good night.