Daqin
Daqin is the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire or, depending on context, the Near East, especially Syria. It literally means "Great Qin"; Qin being the name of the founding dynasty of the Chinese Empire. Historian John Foster defined it as "the Roman Empire, or rather that part of it which alone was known to the Chinese, Syria". Its basic facets such as laws, customs, dress, and currency were explained in Chinese sources. Its medieval incarnation was described in histories during the Tang dynasty onwards as Fulin, which Friedrich Hirth and other scholars have identified as the Byzantine Empire. Daqin was also commonly associated with the Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christians who lived in China during the Tang dynasty.
Chinese sources describe several ancient Roman embassies arriving in China, beginning in 166 AD and lasting into the 3rd century. These early embassies were said to arrive by a maritime route via the South China Sea in the Chinese province of Jiaozhi. Archaeological evidence such as Roman coins points to the presence of Roman commercial activity in Southeast Asia. Later recorded embassies arriving from the Byzantine Empire, lasting from the 7th to 11th centuries, ostensibly took an overland route following the Silk Road, alongside other Europeans in Medieval China. Byzantine Greeks are recorded as being present in the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of the Yuan dynasty in Khanbaliq, while the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming dynasty, sent a letter of correspondence to Byzantine emperor John V Palaiologos.
Etymology
Daqin
The term Daqin, meaning "Great Qin", is derived from the dynasty founded by Qin Shi Huang, ruler of the State of Qin and China's first emperor who unified China's Warring States by 221 BC. The prefix da or "great" signified that the Roman Empire was on par with the might of the Qin dynasty and was viewed as a utopian land located to the northwest of the Parthian Empire. The title Daqin does not seem to have any phonetic derivation from Latin Roma or Greek Romaikē.Fulin
The term Daqin was used from the Han dynasty onwards, but by the beginning of the Tang dynasty a new name emerged in Chinese historical records for distinguishing the Eastern Roman Empire: Fulin. Friedrich Hirth surmised that Fulin may have been based on the accusative form of Konstantinoupolis, the Greek name of Constantinople, or rather its paraphrase hē Pólis, giving Pólin. Using historical phonetic pronunciations of Cantonese and Japanese, Hirth also speculated that Fulin in Middle Chinese was pronounced Butlim or Butlam and thus might have also come from the Syriac pronunciation for Bethlehem. While some scholars of the 20th century believed that Fulin was a transliteration of Ephraim, a reference to the Biblical Northern Kingdom, Samuel N. C. Lieu highlights how more recent scholarship has deduced that Fulin is most likely derived from the Persianate word for the Roman Empire shared by several contemporaneous Iranian languages.History
Early descriptions by Gan Ying
Following the opening of the Silk Road in the 2nd century BC, the Chinese thought of the Roman Empire as a civilized counterpart to the Chinese Empire. The Romans occupied one extreme position on the trade route, with the Chinese located on the other.China never managed to reach the Roman Empire directly in antiquity, although general Ban Chao sent Gan Ying as an envoy to "Daqin" in 97 AD. Gan Ying did not reach Daqin: he stopped at the coast of a large sea, because "sailor of the Parthian west border" told him that the voyage to cross the sea might take a long time and be dangerous. Gan Ying left a detailed account of the Roman Empire, but it is generally considered to have been based on second-hand information from Parthians:
File:Ménade danzante, Casa del Naviglio, Pompeya.jpg|thumb|Roman fresco from Pompeii showing a Maenad in silk dress, Naples National Archaeological Museum
File:Dahuting tomb mural detail of women wearing hanfu, Eastern Han period.jpg|thumb|Detail of a mural showing two women wearing hanfu silk robes, from the Dahuting Tomb of the late Eastern Han dynasty, located in Zhengzhou, Henan, China
Gan Ying gives a very idealistic view of Roman governance which is likely the result of some story he was told while visiting the Persian Gulf in 97 AD. He also described, less fancifully, Roman products:
Geographical descriptions in the Weilüe
In the Weilüe written by Yu Huan, a text that is preserved in the Records of the Three Kingdoms by Pei Songzhi, a more detailed description of the Eastern portion of the Roman Empire is given, particularly the province of Roman Egypt. The 19th-century sinologist Friedrich Hirth translated the passages and identified the places named in them, which have been edited by Jerome S. Arkenberg in 2000 :File:Green glass Roman cup unearthed at Eastern Han tomb, Guixian, China.jpg|thumb|Green Roman glass cup unearthed from an Eastern Han dynasty tomb, Guangxi, China
The Weilüe also noted that the Daqin had small "dependent" vassal states, too many to list as the text claims, yet it mentions some as being the Alexandria-Euphrates or Charax Spasinu, Nikephorium, Palmyra, Damascus, Emesa, and Hira. Perhaps some of these are in reference to certain states that were temporarily conquered during the Roman–Parthian Wars when, for instance, the army of Roman Emperor Trajan reached the Persian Gulf and captured Characene, the capital of which was Charax Spasinu. The Weilüe provides the traveling directions and approximate distances between each of these cities, counted in ancient Chinese miles, and along with the Book of Later Han even mentions the pontoon bridge across the Euphrates at the Roman city of Zeugma, Commagene.
Hirth and Arkenberg identified Si-fu with Emesa. However, John E. Hill provides evidence that it was most likely Petra, given the directions and distance from "Yuluo" and the fact that it fell under Roman dominion in 106 AD when it was annexed by Trajan. Even more convincing for Hill is the fact that Si-fu in Chinese means "an arm of a river which rejoins the main stream" or more aptly "rejoined water courses". He believes this is directly related to the reservoir and cistern flood-control system harnessing the many streams running through the settlement and nearby canyons, or wadis, such as the Wadi Musa.
Christianity
In later eras, starting in AD 550, as Syriac Christians settled along the Silk Road and founded mission churches, Daqin or Tai-Ch'in is also used to refer to these Christian populations rather than to Rome or the Roman church. So, for example, when the Taoist Emperor Wuzong of Tang closed Christian monasteries in the mid-9th century, the imperial edict commanded:The name "Daqin" for Rome was used on Chinese maps as late as the 16th century, such as the Sihai Huayi Zongtu. The identification of "Daqin" with the Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire, or the Church of the East varies with the era and context of the document. The Nestorian Stele erected in 781 in the Tang capital Chang'an contains an inscription that briefly summarizes the knowledge about Daqin in the Chinese histories written up to that point and notes how only the "luminous" religion was practiced there.
Capital cities
In the Hou Hanshu and the Weilüe, the chief city of Daqin is said to be more than 100 li around. It is described as being located near a river and having five palaces, with the king travelling to one of these palaces each day. Some scholars have identified in this description the city of Rome, the Tiber river and the Imperial residences of the Palatine hill. However, other scholars, including Hirth and Hoppál, identify it with Antioch. It has also been suggested that the capital of Daqin described in those works is a conflation of multiple cities, chiefly Rome, Antioch and Alexandria.In Gan Ying's report the capital of Daqin is "An-tu", Antioch. However, the Old Book of Tang and New Book of Tang, which identified Daqin and "Fulin" as the same countries, noted a different capital city, one that had walls of "enormous height" and was eventually besieged by the commander "Móyì" of the Da shi. Friedrich Hirth identifies this commander as Mu'awiyah I, who was first governor of Syria before becoming caliph and founder of the Umayyad Caliphate.
Characteristics attributed from the Book of Jin to the Romans
The encyclopedic part of the Book of Jin classified the appearance of the Romans as being genuinely Xirong, a barbaric people who lived west of the Zhou dynasty, however, the characteristics attributed to Daqin tend to be more positive than the others, saying that their people when they reached adulthood looked like the Chinese, they used glass on the walls of their houses, their tiles were covered with coral, their "king" had 5 palaces, all huge, and all far from each other, just as what was heard in one palace took time to reach another and so on.Embassies
Starting in the 1st century BC with Virgil, Horace, and Strabo, Roman histories offer only vague accounts of China and the silk-producing Seres of the distant east. The 2nd-century historian Florus seems to have conflated the Seres with peoples of India, or at least noted that their skin complexions proved that they both lived "beneath another sky" than the Romans. The 1st-century geographer Pomponius Mela noted that their lands formed the center of the coast of an eastern ocean, flanked by India to the south and the Scythians of the northern steppe, while the historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that the land of the Seres was enclosed by great natural walls around a river called Bautis, perhaps the Yellow River. In his Geography, Ptolemy also provided a rough sketch of the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea, with a port city called Cattigara lying beyond the Golden Chersonese visited by a Greek sailor named Alexander. Among the proposed sites for Ptolemy's Cattigara are Oc Eo, Vietnam, where Roman artefacts have been found.File:Marc'aurelio da probalinthos, 161 dc. circa.JPG|thumb|Bust of Marcus Aurelius from Probalinthos, Attica
In contrast, Chinese histories offer an abundance of source material about their interactions with alleged Roman embassies and descriptions of their country. The first of these embassies is recorded in the Book of Later Han as having arrived by sea in 166 AD and came by way of Jiaozhou, later known as Annam, as would later embassies. Its members claimed to be representatives of the Daqin ruler "Andun", either Antoninus Pius or more likely his co-emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and offered gifts to the court of Emperor Huan of Han. Other embassies arrived sporadically afterwards. The Book of Liang mentions a Daqin embassy to Sun Quan of Eastern Wu in 226, while the Book of Jin records a Daqin embassy to Emperor Wu of Jin in 284.
Although Emperor Yang of Sui had desired to send an embassy to Daqin, this never came to fruition. Instead, an embassy from a country that was now called Fulin, which the Old Book of Tang and New Book of Tang identified as being the same as Daqin, arrived in 643 at the court of Emperor Taizong of Tang and claimed to represent their king Bo duoli. Several other Fulin embassies during the Tang dynasty are mentioned for the years 667, 701, and 719.
The Wenxian Tongkao written by Ma Duanlin and the History of Song record that the Byzantine emperor Michael VII Parapinakēs Caesar of Fulin sent an embassy to China that arrived in 1081, during the reign of Emperor Shenzong of Song. During the subsequent Yuan dynasty, an unprecedented number of Europeans started to visit and live in China, such as Marco Polo and Katarina Vilioni, and papal missionaries such as John of Montecorvino and Giovanni de Marignolli. The History of Yuan recounts how a man of Fulin named Ai-sie, initially in the service of Güyük Khan, was well-versed in Western languages and had expertise in the fields of medicine and astronomy. This convinced Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan dynasty, to offer him a position as the director of medical and astronomical boards, eventually honoring him with the title of Prince of Fulin. His biography in the History of Yuan lists his children by their Chinese names, which are similar to the Christian names Elias, Luke, and Antony, with a daughter named A-na-si-sz.
The History of Ming explains how the founder of the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor, sent a merchant of Fulin named "Nieh-ku-lun" back to his home country with a letter announcing the founding of a new dynasty. It is speculated that this "merchant" was actually a former bishop of Khanbaliq named Nicolaus de Bentra. The History of Ming goes on to explain that contacts between China and Fulin ceased thereafter, whereas an envoy of the great western sea did not arrive again until the 16th century, with the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci.