Recently, there was an article in the Smithsonian about the “Silk Road”–the network of land and sea trade routes that were the main connection between the Mediterranean and the Far East from about 250 B.C. to 1500 A.D. It led me to wonder how much economic and cultural contact there was between China and the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago. How much did they know about each other? Were there ever any Chinese merchants in ancient Rome or Roman merchants wandering around China?
Are there any historians out there who can answer this question?
Yes, there are chinese who went to Roman and vice versa.
But most trades are done by the people who live in between the two empires. There is no name that I came across, but simply stories. (so dunno how trustworthy)
As far as contact is concern, different cultural influences can be traced back to the bronze age between the Middle East and China. This is based off of bronze figurines and artifacts.
The Romans called China Seres. As nth says, most trade was not directly between China and Rome, but rather from China to its neighbors to their neighbors to (eventually) Rome. With the various geographical barriers between Rome and China and the relative unsophistication of Roman navigation on the seas (Romans sailors were most comfortable staying close to shore, an easy feat in the Mediterranean but not the Pacific), most knowledge was 3rd or 4th hand at best, at least on the Roman end. I personally am not aware of any known cases of ethnic Chinese residents in the Roman Empire (unsurprising) and I’ve never encountered much of a reference to Seres that went beyond “it’s distant, and they make a luxurious fabric.” Maybe Strabo’s Geography or something of that sort would have more than that. Another thing to keep in mind was that the Romans, like the Greeks before them, conceived of the world as centered around the Mediterranean, and so anything that distant from the Mediterranean may not have seemed particularly important to them, and almost certainly seemed incomprehensibly distant. Remember, when Alexander the Great conquered all the way to Eastern India, he had conquered, as far as the Mediterranean peoples were concerned, the whole world.
Aha! Here’s what Pausanias (a Hellenistic Greek) has to say about Seria. And according to Lucan, the people of Seres lived near the Nile and were Ethiopians. Not all of the less-read stuff that might have mentions is available online, so that’s all I have for now.
Not sure if this was what brought your question to mind or not but just this week China announced another Byzantine (circa 400AD) coin was found there this was the second. It was more significant for changing alternate routes of the silk road, but it shows that there was trade.
Pliny the Elder mentions the Chinese. I wish I had the reference in front of me, but IIRC he laments their “shyness” as a characteristic less than worthy of a great nation. He otherwise has good things to say about them.
Pliny is clearly aware of the Chinese, but seems unaware of the rest of Asia and its peoples.
There was an article in the NY Times in the past week about a port on the Red Sea and trade with China. The town was named Berenike and started trading in the third century BC.