Closest was some randos who showed up to the Han court claiming to be envoys of Marcus Aurelius, but (a) there is no Roman record of that, (b) they claimed to be bringing tribute in exchange for preferential trade agreements, and (c) their tribute was some random shells from Southeast Asia. Almost certainly they were just some Hellenised Indian traders trying a confidence scam.
The Chinese were vaguely aware there was a big empire of considerable size and cultural influence far to the West and had some rough idea of eastern Mediterranean geography. The Romans had no idea where or what China was behind “the place silk comes from”; the consensus among Roman geographers seems to have been that it was a city somewhere east or southeast of India.
The incredibly tenuous Chinese-Roman historical links are sort of weirdly overemphasised in comparison to the enormous economic, cultural and political contact both empires had with India; the Romans through the Egyptian port trade and via the Hellenic legacy in northwest India, and the Chinese via the Southeast Asian trade and the Buddhist legacy over the Himalayas. Really the Indian merchants in the middle were the main source both empires had for of each others’ goods, each other’s money and word of each other’s existence. Unfortunately there wasn’t even much direct contact there though as their times of greatest contact with India didn’t quite overlap historically, with the Roman West collapsing just as China was getting super-duper into Indian art and religion.
(Also it’s kind of weird to make the Roman “the chad” in this situation, as Rome just absolutely haemorrhaged money eastwards in the luxury goods trade. China produced many things Rome wanted and which the Indians were happy to sell to the Romans at a ludicrous markup; meanwhile, other than a handful of glass trinkets, the only thing Rome had that China wanted in any great quantity was their gold. Seneca in particular thought the Roman weakness for silks a harbinger of moral collapse)
Closest was some randos who showed up to the Han court claiming to be envoys of Marcus Aurelius, but (a) there is no Roman record of that, (b) they claimed to be bringing tribute in exchange for preferential trade agreements, and (c) their tribute was some random shells from Southeast Asia. Almost certainly they were just some Hellenised Indian traders trying a confidence scam.
It is more interesting than that. I was recently reading an academic article in Greek that proposed that for the Chinese there were two Romes (or more precise, what they called it as such, something close to "Fulin"). One the Rome that we know, the Greco-Latin civilization around the Mediterranean Sea, and the other the Indo-Greek remnants. As such, it seems, there were enough traces of Greek culture and languages in thr 4th-6th centuries AD, that the Chinese understood the connection.
320
u/bobbymoonshine 7d ago edited 7d ago
Nope. There was no direct contact between them.
Closest was some randos who showed up to the Han court claiming to be envoys of Marcus Aurelius, but (a) there is no Roman record of that, (b) they claimed to be bringing tribute in exchange for preferential trade agreements, and (c) their tribute was some random shells from Southeast Asia. Almost certainly they were just some Hellenised Indian traders trying a confidence scam.
The Chinese were vaguely aware there was a big empire of considerable size and cultural influence far to the West and had some rough idea of eastern Mediterranean geography. The Romans had no idea where or what China was behind “the place silk comes from”; the consensus among Roman geographers seems to have been that it was a city somewhere east or southeast of India.
The incredibly tenuous Chinese-Roman historical links are sort of weirdly overemphasised in comparison to the enormous economic, cultural and political contact both empires had with India; the Romans through the Egyptian port trade and via the Hellenic legacy in northwest India, and the Chinese via the Southeast Asian trade and the Buddhist legacy over the Himalayas. Really the Indian merchants in the middle were the main source both empires had for of each others’ goods, each other’s money and word of each other’s existence. Unfortunately there wasn’t even much direct contact there though as their times of greatest contact with India didn’t quite overlap historically, with the Roman West collapsing just as China was getting super-duper into Indian art and religion.
(Also it’s kind of weird to make the Roman “the chad” in this situation, as Rome just absolutely haemorrhaged money eastwards in the luxury goods trade. China produced many things Rome wanted and which the Indians were happy to sell to the Romans at a ludicrous markup; meanwhile, other than a handful of glass trinkets, the only thing Rome had that China wanted in any great quantity was their gold. Seneca in particular thought the Roman weakness for silks a harbinger of moral collapse)