East meets West: China and Rome in the ISAW Library

By Junli Diao and David M. Ratzan
11/11/2014

In The Book of Later Han (后汉书), a history of the first two centuries of the Han Dynasty and one of the canonical Twenty-Four Histories (二十四史), there is a brief account of the victory which General Chen Tang (陈汤,?-6 BCE) won in 36 BCE in the West Region against a group of unknown soldiers who carried heavy shields and fought in “fish-scale” formations. Homer Dubs, a gifted but eccentric American polymath who was then Professor of Chinese in Oxford University, summed up years of research in the late 1950s by provocatively identifying these soldiers with some of the Roman legionaries who had disappeared nearly two decades earlier after the Battle of Carrhae against the Parthians (the fishy military formation was, of course, none other than the famous Roman testudo!). Accordingly to Dubs, the Roman soldiers had been settled in Northwest China at Liqian, a name seemingly related to the ancient Chinese name for Alexandria. (H. H. Dubs, A Roman City in Ancient China. China Society Sinological Series 5. London, 1957.)

Dubs' thesis was roundly rejected decades ago (e.g, Yu Ying-shih, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967: 89-91); but that has not stopped it from being revived periodically in the popular press since the late 1990s, in no small part because of the distinctly caucasian features of many of the villagers in that part of China (e.g., E. Hoh, Far Eastern Economic Review 162.2 (Jan. 1999): 60-62; P. Lambert, "A Lost Roman Legion ... in China?", Heritage Daily (Sept. 14, 2011)). Recent DNA tests have thus far been somewhat equivocal (e.g., "Hunt for Roman Legion Reaches China," China Daily (Nov. 20, 2010); Zhou, An, Wang, et al., "Testing the hypothesis of an ancient Roman soldier origin of the Liqian people in northwest China: a Y-chromosome perspective," Journal of Human Genetics 52 (2007): 584-91), but none of these tests show a direct genetic connection to Western Europe, much less Italy, nor have any archaeological finds ever been discovered suggestive of such a cultural heritage.

While we should doubt that a colony of Roman legionary soldiers was ever established somewhere in the Gansu Province, we have every reason to believe in the very real historical connections, direct and indirect, linking the ancient Roman and the Chinese worlds. Indeed, these connections, and the comparative histories of these two ancient empires, have recently been the objects of renewed interest in the Western academy (see, e.g., Walter Scheidel (ed.), Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Perhaps less well known is the parallel interest growing in China and the cooperative ventures that have begun to emerge in the writing of this new comparative history—from an Eastern perspective—of China and Rome.

Several new acquisitions in the ISAW Library attest to this trend:

秦漢-羅馬文明展/ 中国国家文物局, 意大利文化遗产与艺术活动部编 (= “Qin-Han and Roman Civilizations”; 2009; OVERSIZE N7343.23 .Q25 2009). The catalog of a 2009 exhibition in Beijing co-sponsored by China’s State Administration of Culture Heritage and Italy’s Ministero per Beni e le Attività Culturali. The exhibition aimed to present a comparative perspective on the archaeology of the two ancient worlds, East and West, and the catalog is divided into six thematic chapters (translated): “Prologue: Two Great Civilizations”; “The Establishment of the Empires”; “Material Culture”; “Daily Life”; “The Spiritual World”; and “Epilogue: An Integrated World.”

罗马道路与罗马社会 (= “Roman roads and Roman society”; 2012; SMALL DG28.F46 2012) by 冯定雄 (Feng Dingxiong). A study of the social, cultural, economic, and political impact Roman roads had on the Empire and its subjects. In chapter 2, “Lives on Roman Roads,” the author includes a specific discussion of houses, hotels, inns, and postal stations of the Han Empire and how they compared to those of the Roman Empire. Sponsored by China’s National Social Science Fund, this book is the first publication from mainland China which attempts a systematic investigation of Roman roads and their impact on Roman society. The ISAW Library is currently one of only two US institutions to hold the volume.

孔子与苏格拉底 :第一, 二, 三届中国希腊哲学研讨会论文汇编 (= "Confucius-Socrates : Proceedings of Three Conferences on Chinese and Greek Philosophy"), edited by Chen Haosu, Elena Avramidou, Stavros Nikolakopoulos; co-organized by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign countries and the Institute for the Advancement of Euro-Chinese Relations; 2011; SMALL B128.C8 C65 2011). This volume is a model of modern and ancient cross-cultural discussion about two great Chinese and Greek philosophers and their philosophic traditions. Written in both English and Chinese, this book offers 28 articles on many different aspects of Confucius and Socrates, such as their autobiographies, philosophical and moral doctrines, and their innovative approaches to traditional concepts in their respective cultures—all in a pointedly comparative vein.