A Roman Emperor in second-century China? July 16, 2010Posted by
Beachcombing in : Ancient , trackback Classicists and
Sinologists (experts on all things Chinese) spent much energy in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century demonstrating that
there had been contacts between the two greatest Empires of
antiquity, the Chinese and the Roman. They succeeded to their
own satisfaction and even came up with ‘evidence’ for a Roman
town in China and Chinese ambassadors in Europe! But recent
studies have been more circumspect, given the two thousand miles
of militarised Parthia that stood between these super-states.
Beachcombing would love nothing better than to have a swanky
Romulus walking through downtown Peking a couple of centuries
after Christ. And so he offers here some of the best evidence
available. In the fifth century, Fan Ye, the author of the Book
of the Later Han recorded, using sources from the second
century, the following story relating to a mysterious land in
the west. The country of Ta-ts’in is als