Daqin

• 1. Introduction

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  Daqin is the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire, and it carries within those two characters a world of meaning. The name literally translates as "Great Qin" - placing the Romans on equal footing with the dynasty that first unified China. For centuries, scholars on the eastern end of the Silk Road tried to piece together what this distant empire was like, mostly from rumor, hearsay, and the accounts of travelers who never quite made it there. What they imagined was a place of luminous jade, bright moon pearls, coral, and asbestos cloth. A land where kings were elected by merit and peacefully dismissed when calamities struck. A civilization that somehow mirrored their own.

  How did two empires at opposite ends of the ancient world come to know - and misunderstand - each other? What did Chinese historians actually record about Roman governance, law, and coinage? And how did the name Daqin shift and stretch over a thousand years to describe not just Rome, but Byzantium, Syria, and even the Christians who followed the Silk Road east?

• 2. The Name and Its Origins

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  Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified China, gave his name to more than just his dynasty. When Chinese scholars looked west and found a civilization that seemed to rival their own, they reached for that same name. The prefix da, meaning "great", signaled that the Roman Empire was viewed as a peer - placed on par with the might of the Qin dynasty and described as a utopian land to the northwest of the Parthian Empire.

  The name Daqin carries no phonetic trace of Latin Roma or Greek Romaikē. It is a statement of equivalence, not a transliteration. And by the time the Tang dynasty rose in 618 AD, a second name had entered the record: Fulin. Friedrich Hirth, the 19th-century sinologist, suggested Fulin might derive from the accusative form of Konstantinoupolis, the Greek name for Constantinople, or its shortened form hē Pólis - "the City." Using historical phonetic pronunciations of Cantonese and Japanese, Hirth also proposed that Fulin in Middle Chinese was pronounced Butlim or Butlam, possibly linking it to the Syriac word for Bethlehem. More recent scholarship points to a Persianate origin, tracing Fulin to words for Rome used across contemporaneous Iranian languages - Middle Persian hrwm, Parthian frwm, Sogdian βr'wm-, and Bactrian φρομο.

• 3. Gan Ying's Journey

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  In 97 AD, General Ban Chao sent an envoy named Gan Ying on an ambitious mission to reach Daqin directly. Gan Ying got farther than any Chinese envoy before him - all the way to the shore of a large sea. There, sailors from the Parthian western border warned him that crossing could take a very long time and be dangerous. He turned back.

  What Gan Ying left behind was a detailed written account, though one built almost entirely on second-hand information from Parthian sources. In it, he described a Roman kingdom of more than four hundred walled towns, with stone city walls and postal relay stations plastered and whitewashed between them. His account of Roman governance was notably idealistic: kings, he wrote, were not hereditary but chosen for their virtue. When calamities struck - extraordinary winds or rains - the king was removed and replaced, and the dismissed ruler accepted his demotion without anger. Gan Ying also catalogued the goods that flowed from this distant empire: gold, silver, luminous jade, bright moon pearls, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, red cinnabar, gold-thread embroideries, and asbestos cloth. He noted a fine cloth that some claimed was made from the down of water sheep but was in fact woven from wild silkworm cocoons. The profit margin on trade with Rome, he reported, ran ten to one. He also recorded a political frustration: the Roman king had long wished to send envoys directly to the Han court, but the Parthians blocked the route because they wished to control the lucrative silk trade themselves.

• 4. The Geography of a Dream

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  Yu Huan's Weilüe, written around 239-265 AD and preserved in the Records of the Three Kingdoms published in 429, went further than Gan Ying. It attempted to map Roman territory with a precision that was partly accurate and partly wishful. The 19th-century sinologist Friedrich Hirth translated its passages, and Jerome S. Arkenberg edited them in 2000.

  The Weilüe identified a string of named cities as Daqin's vassal states, including what scholars have matched to Charax Spasinu, Nikephorium, Palmyra, Damascus, Emesa, and Hira. It provided traveling directions and approximate distances between them in ancient Chinese miles. It even noted the pontoon bridge - called a "flying bridge" - across the Euphrates at the Roman city of Zeugma in what is now Turkey. Among the disputed identifications is the city of Si-fu. Hirth matched it to Emesa, but John E. Hill argued it was more likely Petra, based on the traveling directions from a city called Yuluo and on the Chinese meaning of Si-fu itself: "an arm of a river which rejoins the main stream." Hill connected this to Petra's elaborate system of reservoirs and cisterns that harnessed streams through surrounding canyons, including the Wadi Musa, the Valley of Moses. Petra had come under Roman dominion in 106 AD when Emperor Trajan annexed the Nabataean Kingdom.

  The Weilüe also noted that Daqin had no permanent rulers, a detail echoing Gan Ying's account - and observed that the people called their own country another "Middle Kingdom," possibly derived from "Mediterranean" or "Middle of the Land." Chinese readers would have found this detail striking. The same term, Zhongguo, is what the Chinese called their own civilization.

• 5. Embassies Across the Silk Road

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  The first embassy from Daqin recorded in Chinese histories arrived by sea in 166 AD, entering through Jiaozhou, the Chinese province that is now northern Vietnam. Its members claimed to represent the Daqin ruler "Andun" - identified as either Antoninus Pius or, more likely, his co-emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus - and presented gifts to the court of Emperor Huan of Han. Further embassies followed sporadically. The Book of Liang records a Daqin embassy to Sun Quan of Eastern Wu in 226. The Book of Jin notes another to Emperor Wu of Jin in 284.

  By the Tang dynasty, the embassies came under the name Fulin rather than Daqin. In 643, an embassy arrived at the court of Emperor Taizong of Tang, claiming to represent their king Bo duoli - identified as Constans II, whose nickname "the Bearded" was rendered in Chinese as Kōnstantinos Pogonatos. Further Fulin embassies are recorded for 667, 701, and 719. Then, in 1081, during the reign of Emperor Shenzong of Song, an embassy arrived from the Byzantine emperor Michael VII Parapinakēs Caesar, named in the Chinese record as Mie li sha ling kai sa.

  During the Yuan dynasty, Europeans arrived in unprecedented numbers. A man of Fulin named Ai-sie - a transliteration of either Joshua or Joseph - had served Güyük Khan and was skilled in Western languages, medicine, and astronomy. Kublai Khan appointed him director of medical and astronomical boards and eventually honored him with the title Prince of Fulin. His biography in the History of Yuan lists his children by Chinese names corresponding to Elias, Luke, Antony, and a daughter named A-na-si-sz. When the Ming dynasty founder, the Hongwu Emperor, sent a merchant of Fulin named Nieh-ku-lun back to his home country with a letter announcing the new dynasty, it is speculated that this merchant was actually a former bishop of Khanbaliq named Nicolaus de Bentra. Contacts between China and Fulin ceased after that, until the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in the 16th century.

• 6. Coins, Law, and Daily Life

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  Archaeological evidence has complicated and enriched the written record. Valerie Hansen in 2012 claimed that no Roman coins from the Republican or Principate periods had been found in China. Warwick Ball, writing in 2016, overturned that claim: sixteen Roman coins were discovered at Xi'an, the site of the Han capital Chang'an, minted during the reigns of emperors from Tiberius (14-37 AD) to Aurelian (270-275 AD). The earliest gold solidus coins from the Eastern Roman Empire found in China date to the reign of Byzantine emperor Theodosius II, who ruled from 408 to 450. Altogether only forty-eight such coins have been found in Xinjiang and the rest of China, compared to thirteen hundred silver coins.

  In southern Vietnam, at Oc Eo - then part of the Kingdom of Funan bordering the Chinese province of Jiaozhi - Roman gold medallions from the reign of Antoninus Pius, and possibly Marcus Aurelius, have been discovered. This was the same coastal region where Chinese texts say the first Roman embassies landed before travelling further into China.

  Chinese histories recorded how Roman currency worked: ten silver coins to one gold coin, a ratio echoed in the Book of Jin and the Wenxian Tongkao. The actual Roman golden aureus was worth about twenty-five silver denarii, so the ratio described was approximate. The History of Song added that Byzantine coins bore inscriptions of the king's name and had no holes in the middle - a notable detail given that Chinese coins were traditionally minted with square holes at their center.

  On matters of law, the History of Song described a system that distinguished minor from major offenses, with two hundred strikes from a bamboo rod reserved for serious crimes. Capital punishment, it said, involved stuffing the condemned into a feather bag and throwing them into the sea. This corresponds closely to the Roman and Byzantine poena cullei - punishment of the sack - in which those convicted of parricide were sewn into a sack, sometimes with wild animals, and cast into a river or sea. The History of Song also noted that counterfeiting the coins of Fulin was forbidden by law.

• 7. Christianity and the Shifting Name

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  Starting around 550 AD, Syriac Christians spread along the Silk Road and founded mission churches in the east. As they did, the name Daqin began to attach itself to these communities rather than to Rome itself. When the Taoist Emperor Wuzong of Tang ordered the closure of Christian monasteries in the mid-9th century, his imperial edict named the Tai-Ch'in, meaning Syrian Christians, alongside the Muh-hu, meaning Zoroastrians, as heresies to be suppressed alongside Buddhism.

  The Nestorian Stele, erected in 781 in the Tang capital Chang'an, offers a monument to this fusion of identities. Its inscription briefly summarizes the accumulated Chinese knowledge about Daqin and notes that only the "luminous" religion - Christianity - was practiced there. The name Daqin for Rome persisted on Chinese maps as late as the 16th century, appearing in works such as the Sihai Huayi Zongtu. The Roman merchant Qin Lun, who visited the Eastern Wu court of Sun Quan in 226 AD, bore a Chinese surname derived from Daqin itself - a convention applied to foreigners more broadly. People from the Parthian Empire were given the surname An, from Anxi, the Arsacid dynasty. Sogdians from Bukhara shared the same surname An, while those from Samarkand were surnamed Kang, derived from Kangju, the Chinese term for Transoxiana. The same pattern gave Marcus Aurelius the Chinese name An Dun - a name shaped not by his own tongue but by the conventions of the civilization that had spent centuries trying to understand his world from a very great distance.