The Origins of Roman Li-chien
By Ethan Gruber
Published Online
Introduction: In the West, children are generally taught that the first European to arrive in China is Marco Polo, who spent nearly two decades traveling throughout the East in the latter half of the thirteenth century. Contrary to this popular belief, Polo is only one in a long line of European merchants to take either sea or overland routes via the Silk Road. In A.D. 226, a Roman merchant is reported to have arrived in South China. Sixty years prior, a traveler arrived in the court of the Han Dynasty from the land the Chinese called Ta-ts’in—The Roman Empire. This traveler claimed to have been an embassy sent from its king, An-dun, which is the transliteration of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. The “ambassador’s” claim of official imperial representation is of dubious authenticity; most modern scholars consider him to be an enterprising merchant, claiming a direct connection with Marcus Aurelius to further his own economic goals in the Han Court. Nonetheless, this is the earliest literary record of Romans arriving in the Far East according to the History of the Later Han Dynasty, the Han’s official annals from this era. While the Chinese unsuccessfully sent a diplomatic envoy to Rome in A.D. 97, the contacts initiated by the Romans were exclusively of commercial interest. In both classical and eastern sources, there is no mention of a direct military contact between the two distant, but greatly influential ancient superpowers. There is, however, considerable circumstantial evidence that Roman legionaries may have arrived in Western China nearly two centuries prior to the arrival of the Roman merchant in the Han Court in 166. In 1957, Oxford sinologist Homer H. Dubs published A Roman City in Ancient China, a meticulously researched paper that had been based on a lecture delivered to The China Society in 1955. In its final form, A Roman City in Ancient China represented a culmination of more than a decade of research by the eminent historian, who also had a strong background in the classics. Highly controversial in its day, the conclusion of Dubs’ research is corroborated with the traditions of the inhabitants of Zhelai, a small village in the western Chinese province of Gansu. The inhabitants are not ethnically Chinese and go so far as to claim direct lineage to Rome. It is believed that the ancient name for this village is Li-chien, which is not only a foreign name, but a word that the Chinese used for the most ancient name of the Roman Empire. In his research, Dubs charts a course in the development of Li-chien as a Roman city.
Click here to read this article from the University of Virginia
