Hi
A recent TV program I saw showed Roman emissaries in Liaoning and Beijing (not known as Beijing during the Roman empire in search of the origins of silk, meeting with the emperor and leaving without obtaining the secret to making silk.
There is absolutely no evidence for this as far as I know. Does anyone have information pointing to any contact between Roman and Chinese in north-eastern China, especially the capital city?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
“Sino-Roman relations were essentially indirect throughout the existence of both empires. The Roman Empire and Han China progressively inched closer in the course of the Roman expansion into the Ancient Near East and simultaneous Chinese military incursions into Central Asia. However, powerful intermediate empires such as the Parthians and Kushans kept the two Eurasian flanking powers permanently apart and mutual awareness remained low and knowledge fuzzy.”
I’ll leave to other to find better sources. But, yeah, there was almost certainly some direct contact in the form of Roman embassies to China. There is, as far as I know, no mention of any Chinese going in the other direction. Nothing much seems to have ever come of it. Both parties seem weirdly uninterested in the whole thing, although that’s just my personal opinion.
Maybe. There is an argument that Roman traders/adventurers tended to claim ambassadorial status, because a.) it enhanced their personal status and safety and b.) who is going to say otherwise? The distances were so vast and intervening polities so frequently hostile it is actually not surprising contacts were few and far between. We don’t seem to have any records of formal discourse between states recorded for both courts stemming from any one mission. Just anecdotes along the lines of “so and so arrived claiming to be an ambassador of some other state.”
We can dismiss presumed Byzantine period contacts because silk was apparently acquired via smuggling in the 5th century under Justinian. And even under the Wei the capital was never Jicheng ( modern site of Beijing ), but more usually Luoyang.
I had forgotten that Beijing didn’t become a capital until the 13th century under Mongol rule. At the time of the Roman Empire the capital was in central China (Luoyang in Henan to be exact where Emperor Huan of Han (Liu Zhi) resided.
Emperor Huan of Han(Liu Zhi) (Chinese: 漢桓帝; pinyin: Hàn Húan Dì; Wade–Giles: Han Huan-ti; 132–168) was an emperor of the Chinese Han Dynasty. He was a great-grandson of Emperor Zhang.
The first group of people claiming to be an ambassadorial mission of Romans to China was recorded in CE 166 by the Hou Hanshu. The embassy came to Emperor Huan of Han China “from Andun (Chinese: 安敦; Emperor Antoninus Pius), king of Daqin (Rome)”.