Sino-Roman relations

• 1. Introduction

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  Sino-Roman relations is the name historians give to the contacts between two empires that never quite managed to meet face to face. At their closest, the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty of China were separated by a belt of powerful middlemen whose livelihoods depended on keeping the two apart. In 97 AD, a Chinese general named Ban Chao sent his envoy Gan Ying westward with explicit orders to reach Rome. Gan made it as far as the Persian Gulf. There, Parthian sailors told him the sea crossing was dangerous and could take two years. He turned back.

  That single failed journey captures something essential about the relationship. For centuries, the Romans and the Han Chinese knew of each other only through rumour, merchandise, and the garbled accounts of third parties. The silk that Roman senators tried to ban and Roman moralists condemned passed through the hands of Parthians, Kushans, Sogdians, and Indian merchants before it ever reached the Mediterranean. Chinese historians imagined Rome as a mystical mirror-image of their own empire at the far end of the known world. Roman geographers sketched the coastline of Southeast Asia with surprising accuracy in some places and bewildering confusion in others.

  What did these two civilisations actually know about each other? How did their goods travel when their people could not? And what happened when a handful of travellers, merchants, and ambassadors finally did cross the distance between them? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Geography of Rumour

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  Beginning in the 1st century BC, Roman writers including Virgil, Horace, and Strabo offered only vague accounts of the silk-producing Seres people of the Far East. The geographer Pomponius Mela, writing in the 1st century AD, placed the Seres at the centre of a great eastern ocean, flanked by India to the south and Scythians to the north. The historian Florus, writing in the 2nd century AD, seems to have confused the Seres with peoples of India, noting that their skin complexions proved they lived beneath a different sky than the Romans.

  Ammianus Marcellinus, writing around 330 AD, described the land of the Seres as enclosed by lofty walls near a river he called Bautis, which scholars now read as a reference to the Yellow River. Roman cartographers placed two distinct Far Eastern lands on their maps: Serica, the Land of Silk, at the end of the overland Silk Road; and the land of the Sinae, reached by sea, whose chief port, Cattigara, scholars now identify most likely with Óc Eo in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.

  Ptolemy's 2nd-century AD Geography stands apart from earlier Roman scholarship. Unlike Strabo and Pliny the Elder, who were slow to incorporate the accounts of merchants and seemed prejudiced against them, Ptolemy was openly receptive. Without the testimony of traders, he could not have charted the Bay of Bengal as accurately as he did. His understanding still had limits: he and his predecessor Marinus of Tyre believed the Indian Ocean was an inland sea, which caused them to bend the Cambodian coastline south beyond the equator before swinging it west to join Africa.

  For its part, a 1st-century AD Greek-language merchant handbook, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written by an anonymous merchant of Roman Egypt, described eastern trade cities with such vividness that scholars are confident the author had visited many of them personally. The Periplus mentions a great inland city called Thinae in a country perhaps stretching as far as the Caspian, where silk was produced and sent overland to Bactria and down the Ganges into India.

  The Greek sailor Alexandros, almost certainly a merchant, gave Marinus and Ptolemy their most detailed route to Cattigara. He named a Burmese city called Tamala on the Malay Peninsula as the main terminus for Roman traders, where Indian merchants crossed the Kra Isthmus to reach the Gulf of Thailand. From there, Alexandros said, it took twenty days to sail to a port in southern Vietnam before continuing on to Cattigara. The Byzantine monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th-century AD former merchant from Alexandria, was more precise still: his Christian Topography of around 550 AD was the first Roman text to name China clearly, calling it the country of Tzinista and explaining that cloves came from that direction to Sri Lanka for trade.

• 3. China Imagines Rome

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  The Shiji of Sima Qian, written around 145-86 BC, first described Central and West Asian countries for Chinese readers. Its descriptions of Rome's precursor states grew significantly more detailed in the Book of Han, co-authored by Ban Gu and his sister Ban Zhao, younger siblings of the very general who would later send Gan Ying westward.

  By the time of the Han dynasty, the Romans came to be known in Chinese records as Daqin, meaning Great Qin. Historical linguist Edwin G. Pulleyblank explains that Chinese historians conceived of Daqin as a kind of counter-China located at the opposite end of their known world. According to scholar Krisztina Hoppál, the Chinese regarded Rome as a distant and therefore mystical country.

  Gan Ying's failed embassy left behind a detailed written account of western countries that became the foundation for Chinese geographical knowledge of the Roman world. The Book of the Later Han, compiled by Fan Ye between 398 and 445 AD, drew heavily on his reports. Its description of Roman Egypt, which the Chinese called Haixi, or west of the sea, described a land with more than four hundred walled towns, postal relays plastered and whitewashed at intervals, pines and cypresses, and a political system in which kings were not permanent but chosen by merit and deposed without complaint when calamity struck. Yule noted that although this picture of Roman governance was garbled, the same source offered an accurate depiction of the Mediterranean coral fisheries, which were a genuine Han luxury import.

  The Weilüe, written by Yu Huan around 239-265 AD and preserved in annotations to the Records of the Three Kingdoms, went further. It described the Mediterranean Sea, gave the location of Alexandria, detailed the tripartite division of the Nile Delta, Heptanomis, and Thebaid, and noted what it considered the most important dependent vassal states of Rome along with travel distances between them measured in Chinese miles, li. The Song-era customs inspector Zhao Rugua, writing between 1170 and 1228 AD, described the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria in his Zhu Fan Zhi. Both the Book of the Later Han and the Weilüe mentioned the flying pontoon bridge over the Euphrates at Zeugma in Roman Anatolia.

  The Byzantines acquired a new name in Chinese records during the Tang dynasty: Fulin, a term identified by Friedrich Hirth and others with the Eastern Roman Empire. The 7th-century Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta wrote of China's reunification under the Sui dynasty from 581 to 618 AD. Chinese sources returned the favour, recording Byzantine accounts of the siege of Constantinople by Muawiyah I in 674-678 AD, and describing Constantinople itself as a city with strong granite walls and a water clock mounted with a golden statue of a man.

• 4. Envoys and Merchants

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  Gan Ying's westward journey in 97 AD was preceded by decades of Han military expansion into Central Asia. The Eastern Han general Ban Chao, who lived from 32 to 102 AD, had by that point defeated the Da Yuezhi in 90 AD and the Northern Xiongnu in 91 AD, and forced the submission of city-states including Kucha, Turfan, Khotan, Kashgar, and finally Karasahr in 94 AD. A Parthian embassy arrived at the Han court in 89 AD; another came in 101 AD, bringing ostriches as gifts. It was in this context that Ban Chao chose to probe further west.

  Gan reached Parthia and the Persian Gulf. His written account, which drew on secondary sources from sailors in the ports he visited, formed the basis for the Book of the Later Han's description of Rome. The Parthians, the source confirms, had deliberately blocked Roman contact with China in order to control the silk trade.

  The first group claiming to be Roman ambassadors reached China in 166 AD. The Book of the Later Han records their arrival at the court of Emperor Huan, claiming to come from a ruler named Andun, king of Daqin. The name Andun corresponds to Antoninus, a name shared by both Emperor Antoninus Pius, who died in 161 AD, and his adoptive son Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. The mission entered China from the south, through the frontier of Rinan in present-day Vietnam, and brought gifts of rhinoceros horn, ivory, and tortoise shell, probably acquired in Southern Asia. Chinese sources considered the gifts modest and suspected the visitors of withholding more precious goods. Historians Rafe de Crespigny, Peter Fibiger Bang, and Warwick Ball believe these visitors were most likely Roman merchants rather than official diplomats.

  In 226 AD the Weilüe and Book of Liang record the arrival in Chinese-controlled northern Vietnam of a merchant from Rome named Qin Lun. The local prefect sent him to the court of Sun Zhongmou, ruler of Eastern Wu, in Nanjing, where Sun asked him to report on his native country. An expedition was mounted to return Qin Lun home together with ten female and ten male black-complexioned dwarfs he had requested as a curiosity, along with a Chinese officer named Liu Xian of Huiji, who died en route. A further embassy from Rome brought tributary gifts to the Jin Empire in 284 AD during the reign of Emperor Wu of Jin; this was presumably sent by Emperor Carus, whose brief reign from 282 to 283 AD was dominated by war with Sasanian Persia.

  The first recorded Byzantine embassy to China took place in 643 AD, during the reigns of Constans II and Emperor Taizong of Tang, bearing gifts of red glass and green gemstones. Scholar S. A. M. Adshead lists four official diplomatic contacts with Fulin in the Old Book of Tang: in 643, 667, 701, and 719 AD. The 719 AD embassy, ostensibly from Leo III the Isaurian to Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, brought lions and antelopes, two of each, and was followed months later by priests of great virtue. The last recorded contact came in 1091 AD, during the reign of Alexios I Komnenos, mentioned only in passing in the History of Song.

• 5. Silk, Glass, and Gold

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  Chinese silk reached Roman consumers by the 1st century BC, though during that early period it was still rare. By the 1st century AD it had become much more widely available. In his Natural History, written between 77 and 79 AD, Pliny the Elder estimated that Rome's appetite for silk, along with other luxury goods from India, Arabia, and the Far East, drained roughly 100 million sesterces per year from the Roman economy. In 14 AD the Roman Senate issued an edict prohibiting men from wearing silk, but it continued to flow into the Roman world regardless.

  Seneca the Elder condemned silk clothes as garments that did not hide the body, produced by wretched flocks of maids so that an adulteress could be visible through her thin dress. Warwick Ball argues that the import of spices from India in fact had a greater impact on the Roman economy than silk, despite Pliny's emphasis on the latter.

  Roman glassware travelled in the opposite direction. The first Roman glassware found in China is a blue soda-lime glass bowl dating to the early 1st century BC, excavated from a Western Han tomb in Guangzhou, which likely arrived via the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. A mosaic-glass bowl was found in a prince's tomb near Nanjing dated to 67 AD; a glass bottle with opaque white streaks turned up in an Eastern Han tomb at Luoyang. Roman and Persian glassware has also been found in a 5th-century AD tomb in Gyeongju, Korea, and Roman glass beads have been discovered in the 5th-century AD Kofun-era Utsukushi burial mound near Kyoto, Japan.

  Roman coins tell a complicated story. Valerie Hansen wrote in 2012 that no Roman coins from the Republic or Principate era have been found in China proper. Warwick Ball, however, cites two studies from 1978 summarising the discovery at Xi'an of sixteen Roman coins from the reigns of Tiberius through Aurelian. Roman golden medallions from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were found at Óc Eo in Vietnam. A coin of Maximian, who ruled from 286 to 305 AD, was found in Tonkin. The total count of Eastern Roman gold solidus coins found across Xinjiang and the rest of China amounts to only forty-eight, compared to 1,300 silver coins. Hansen notes that these Eastern Roman coins were almost always found alongside Sasanian Persian silver coins and were used more as ceremonial objects or talismans than as currency.

  The Byzantine silk industry itself was built on an act of industrial espionage. Nestorian monks smuggled silkworm eggs out of China for the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, who reigned from 527 to 565 AD. By producing their own silk, the Byzantines hoped to bypass their chief rivals, the Sasanian Empire, who dominated the trade. Yet even after Byzantine silk production began in the 6th century AD, Chinese varieties were still considered superior. A Byzantine solidus minted during the reign of Justin II, found in a Sui-dynasty tomb in Shanxi province in 1953, attests to the ongoing reach of these commercial connections.

• 6. Objects Left Behind

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  The physical traces of Sino-Roman contact range from the compelling to the contested. At Óc Eo in the Mekong Delta, which may be Ptolemy's Cattigara, the French archaeologist Louis Malleret excavated Roman coins and other goods during the 1940s. Native jewellery imitating Antonine Roman coins was also found there. Granville Allen Mawer notes that Ptolemy's Cattigara seems to correspond with the latitude of modern Óc Eo. Warwick Ball, however, cautions that Roman and Roman-inspired goods found across Southeast Asia, including a coin of Maximian in Tonkin and a Roman bronze lamp at P'ong Tuk in the Mekong Delta, are not conclusive proof that Romans visited the region. They could equally have been introduced by Indian merchants operating within the broader Indian Ocean trade network.

  Archaeological excavations at Chatalka in modern-day Bulgaria uncovered several Han Dynasty style swords and scabbards with nephrite-jade scabbard slides adorned with Chinese dragon motifs, buried inside Roman-era tombs. At the burial site of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who reigned from 221 to 210 BC, excavations have suggested that ancient Greeks may have influenced some of the artworks found there, including portions of the famous Terracotta Army. A 4th-century BC tomb in Gansu province belonging to the state of Qin yielded Western items including glass beads and a blue-glazed beaker of Mediterranean origin. A Roman gilded silver plate dated to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD, found in Jingyuan County in Gansu, bears a raised relief depicting the Greco-Roman god Dionysus resting on a feline creature.

  Human remains complicate the picture further. A 2010 mitochondrial DNA study of a partial skeleton found in a Roman cemetery from the 1st or 2nd century AD in Vagnari, Italy, identified East Asian ancestry on the maternal side, though researchers concluded the individual was of Paleo-Siberian rather than Chinese descent. A 2016 analysis of skeletal remains from Southwark in London, site of the ancient Roman city of Londinium, suggested that two or three of twenty-two skeletons dating to the 2nd-4th centuries AD may be of Asian and possibly Chinese descent. The assessment was based on skeletal facial features; no DNA analysis has been done, and the skull and tooth samples offer only fragmentary evidence.

  The most disputed contact theory is historian Homer H. Dubs's 1941 proposal that Roman prisoners of war captured at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, where a Roman army under Marcus Licinius Crassus was decisively defeated, may eventually have clashed with Han forces. Dubs pointed to a Chinese account of roughly a hundred men who fought in a fish-scale formation at the Battle of Zhizhi in 36 BC, which he identified as the Roman testudo formation, and proposed they later founded the village of Liqian in Yongchang County. A DNA analysis of more than two hundred male residents of the village in 2007 showed close genetic relation to the Han Chinese populace and great deviation from the Western Eurasian gene pool. Dubs's hypothesis has not found acceptance among historians, who regard it as highly speculative.