Daqin (; alternative transliterations include Tachin, Tai-Ch'in) is the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire or, depending on context, the Near East, especially Syria.[Foster, p. 3.] Its basic facets such as Roman law, Roman culture, dress, and Roman currency were explained in Chinese sources. Its medieval incarnation was described in histories during the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) onwards as Fulin (), which Friedrich Hirth and other scholars have identified as the Byzantine Empire.
Chinese sources describe several Ancient Rome 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 (now northern Vietnam). Archaeological evidence such as Roman currency points to the presence of Roman commerce 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 (1260–1294), Mongol Empire ruler of the Yuan dynasty in Khanbaliq (Beijing), while the Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–1398), founder of the Ming dynasty, sent a letter of correspondence to Byzantine emperor John V Palaiologos.
Etymology
Daqin
The term
Daqin (,
Middle Chinese: /dɑi
H d͡ziɪn/), meaning "Great Qin", is derived from
Qin 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.
[Lieu (2013), p. 126.] The
prefix da (大) or "great" signified that the Roman Empire was on par with the might of the Qin dynasty and was viewed as a
land located to the northwest of the
Parthian Empire.
The title
Daqin does not seem to have any phonetic derivation from
Latin language Rome or
Greek language Romaikē. On the other hand, it is possible that the Latin term used for China,
Serica (derived from Greek
Serikon, commonly understood as "Land of Silk", from Chinese
si , meaning
silk), originated from the name Qin using Early Middle Chinese pronunciation (with the final consonant pronounced with an
-r sound).
[Lieu (2013), p. 126 f.; the same character for "Qin" (i.e. 秦) was used by the Chinese of the Han dynasty to transcribe foreign words ending in an -r sound.]
Fulin
The term
Daqin was used from the
Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) onwards,
but by the beginning of the
Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) 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 case of
Konstantinoupolis, the Greek name of
Constantinople, or rather its paraphrase
hē Pólis ("the City"), giving (in the accusative)
(tḕn) Pólin.
[Lieu (2013), p. 227.] 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 language pronunciation for
Bethlehem.
[Hirth (1939) 1885, pp. 286-290.] 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 (
Middle Persian: ; Parthian: ;
Sogdian language: βr'wm-; Bactrian:
φρομο).
[Lieu (2013), p. 127 f.]
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(s) of the 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 Parthian Empire:
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 (–265), a text that is preserved in the
Records of the Three Kingdoms by
Pei Songzhi (published in 429), 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 (with
Wade-Giles spelling):
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 Iskandariya or Charax Spasinu ("Ala-san"), Nikephorium ("Lu-fen"), Palmyra ("Ch'ieh-lan"), Damascus ("Hsien-tu"), Emesa ("Si-fu"), and Al-Hirah ("Ho-lat").[Garthwaite, Gene Ralph (2005), The Persians, Oxford & Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., , p. 81.] The Weilüe provides the traveling directions and approximate distances between each of these cities, counted in ancient Chinese miles ( li), and along with the Book of Later Han even mentions the pontoon bridge ("flying bridge") across the Euphrates at the Roman city of Zeugma, Commagene (in modern-day Turkey).
Hirth and Arkenberg identified Si-fu (Chinese: 汜復) with Emesa. However, John E. Hill provides evidence that it was most likely Petra (in the Nabataean Kingdom), given the directions and distance from "Yuluo" (i.e. Al Karak) and the fact that it fell under Roman dominion in 106 AD when it was annexed by Trajan.
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 Tang dynasty 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 (i.e. Christianity) 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.
["Chinese notions of Daqin" in The Archaeology of Knowledge Traditions of the Indian Ocean World(2020), Himanshu Prabha Ray, India: Taylor & Francis.]
In Gan Ying's report the capital of Daqin is "An-tu", Antioch.[Foster, p. 4.] However, the Old Book of Tang and New Book of Tang, which identified Daqin and "Fulin" (拂菻; i.e. Primus, the Byzantine Empire) as the same countries, noted a different capital city (Constantinople), one that had walls of "enormous height" and was eventually besieged by the commander "Móyì" (Chinese language: 摩拽伐之; Pinyin: Móyì fá zhī) of the Da shi (大食; i.e. the Arabs).
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
looked like the
Han Chinese, they used
glass on the walls of their houses (considered a
Luxury goods in the
Tang dynasty), 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
Serica 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
Pacific Ocean, flanked by India to the south and the
Scythians of the
Eurasian Steppe, while the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330 – c. 400) 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 (i.e.
Malay Peninsula) 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.
[Granville Allen Mawer (2013), "The Riddle of Catigara" in Robert Nichols and Martin Woods (eds), Mapping Our World: Terra Incognita to Australia, 38-39, Canberra: National Library of Australia, , p. 38.]
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 (northern Vietnam), as would later embassies.[de Crespigny, Rafe. (2007). A Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms (23-220 AD). Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, p. 600, .][Yu Ying-shih. (1986). "Han Foreign Relations", in The Cambridge History of China: Volume I: the Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C. – A.D. 220, 377-462. Edited by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 460–461, .] 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 (r. 604–618) had desired to send an embassy to Daqin, this never came to fruition.[Warwick Ball (2016), Rome in the East: Transformation of an Empire, 2nd edition, London & New York: Routledge, , pp 152-153.] Instead, an embassy from a country that was now called Fulin (拂菻, i.e. the Byzantine Empire), 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 (波多力; i.e. Kōnstantinos Pogonatos, "Constantine the Bearded", the nickname of Constans II).
The Wenxian Tongkao written by Ma Duanlin (1245–1322) and the History of Song record that the Byzantine emperor Michael VII Parapinakēs Caesar ( Mie li sha ling kai sa 滅力沙靈改撒) of Fulin (i.e. Byzantium) sent an embassy to China that arrived in 1081, during the reign of Emperor Shenzong of Song (r. 1067–1085).[Jonathan D. Spence (1998). " The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds". The New York Times. . Accessed 15 September 2016.][Frances Wood (2002), The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia, University of California Press, pp 125-126, .][Stephen G. Haw (2006), Marco Polo's China: a Venetian in the Realm of Kublai Khan, London & New York: Routledge, p. 172, .] The History of Yuan recounts how a man of Fulin named Ai-sie (transliteration of either Joshua or Joseph), initially in the service of Güyük Khan, was well-versed in Western languages and had expertise in the fields of medicine and astronomy.[Bretschneider, Emil (1888), Medieval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources: Fragments Towards the Knowledge of the Geography and History of Central and Western Asia from the 13th to the 17th Century, Vol. 1, Abingdon: Routledge, reprinted 2000, p. 144.]
The History of Ming explains how the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Hongwu Emperor, sent a merchant of Fulin named "Nieh-ku-lun" (捏古倫) back to his home country with a letter announcing the founding of a new dynasty.
Currency and coinage
Although the
Ancient Rome imported Han Chinese silk while the Han-dynasty Chinese imported
as discovered in their tombs,
[Brosius, Maria (2006), The Persians: An Introduction, London & New York: Routledge, p. 122 f., .][An, Jiayao (2002), "When Glass Was Treasured in China", in Juliano, Annette L. and Judith A. Lerner, Silk Road Studies: Nomads, Traders, and Holy Men Along China's Silk Road, 7, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, pp. 79–94, .] Valerie Hansen (2012) claimed that no Roman coins from the
Roman Republic (507–27 BC) or the
Principate (27 BC–284 AD) era of the Roman Empire have been found in China.
[Hansen, Valerie (2012), The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 97, .] Yet this assumption has been overturned;
Warwick Ball (2016) notes the discovery of sixteen Roman coins found at Xi'an, China (site of the Han capital Chang'an) minted during the reign of various emperors from
Tiberius (14–37 AD) to
Aurelian (270–275 AD).
[Warwick Ball (2016), Rome in the East: Transformation of an Empire, 2nd edition, London & New York: Routledge, , p. 154.] The earliest gold
solidus coins from the Eastern Roman Empire found in China date to the reign of Byzantine emperor
Theodosius II (r. 408–450) and altogether only forty-eight of them have been found (compared to thirteen hundred silver coins) in
Xinjiang and the rest of China.
However, Roman golden
from the reign of
Antoninus Pius, and possibly his successor
Marcus Aurelius, have been discovered at Óc Eo in southern
Vietnam, which was then part of the Kingdom of Funan bordering the Chinese province of
Jiaozhi in northern Vietnam.
[For further information on Oc Eo, see Milton Osborne (2006), The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, revised edition, first published in 2000, , p. 24 f.] This was the same region where Chinese historical texts claim the Romans first landed before venturing further into China to conduct diplomacy.
[Gary K. Young (2001), Rome's Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BC - AD 305, London & New York: Routledge, , p. 29.]
Chinese histories offer descriptions of Byzantine coins. In discussing trade with India, the Parthian Empire and the Roman Empire, the Book of Jin, as well as the later Wenxian Tongkao, noted how ten ancient Roman silver coins were worth one Roman gold coin.[John Pike. (last modified 11 July 2011). " Roman Money". Globalsecurity.org. Accessed 15 September 2016.] The History of Song notes how the Byzantines made coins of either silver or gold, without holes in the middle yet with an inscription of the king's name.
Law and order
The
History of Song described forms of punishment in criminal law as they were carried out in
Daqin (
Roman Empire) and
Fulin (Byzantine Empire). It states that they made a distinction between minor and major offenses, with 200 strikes from a bamboo rod being reserved for major crimes.
It described their form of capital punishment as having the guilty person being stuffed into a "feather bag" and thrown into the sea.
This seems to correspond with the Romano-Byzantine punishment of
poena cullei (from
Latin language "punishment of the sack"), where those who committed parricide (i.e. murder of a father or mother) were sewn up into a sack, sometimes with wild animals, and thrown into either a river or sea.
[Richard A. Bauman (2005), Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome, London & New York: Routledge, reprint of 1996 edition, , p. 23.] The
History of Song also mentioned how it was forbidden by law to
counterfeit the coins minted by
Fulin.
These descriptions from the
History of Song are also found in the
Wenxian Tongkao.
Naming conventions
In the Chinese histories, the names of Romans and Byzantines were often
Transliteration into Chinese as they were heard, yet occasionally the
surname stemmed from their country of origin, Daqin (大秦). For instance, the Roman merchant Qin Lun (秦論), who visited the
Eastern Wu court of
Sun Quan in 226 AD, bears the surname derived from the name for his homeland, while having a
given name that is perhaps derived from the
Greek name Leon (e.g. Leon of Sparta).
In the Han-era stage of the spoken language intermediate between
Old Chinese and
Middle Chinese, the pronunciation for his given name "Lun" (論) would have sounded quite different from
Standard Chinese: K. 470b *li̯wən / li̯uĕn or *lwən / luən; EMC lwən or lwənh.
Granting Roman individuals the surname "Qin" followed a common Chinese naming convention for foreign peoples. For instance, people from the Parthian Empire of ancient Persia such as An Shigao were often given the surname "An" (安) derived from Anxi (安息), the Arsacid dynasty. The , an Eastern Iranian people from Central Asia, were also frequently given the surname "An" (e.g. Li Baoyu), especially those from Bukhara, while Sogdians from Samarkand were surnamed "Kang" (康; e.g. Kang Senghui), derived from Kangju, the Chinese term for Transoxiana.[Hansen, Valerie (2012), The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford University Press, p. 98, .][Galambos, Imre (2015), "She Association Circulars from Dunhuang", in Antje Richter, A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture, Brill: Leiden, Boston, p. 872.][Hill, John E. (2015) Through the Jade Gate - China to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes 1st to 2nd Centuries CE. CreateSpace, North Charleston, South Carolina. , note 2.17, p. 183.][For information on Kang Senghui, see: Tai Thu Nguyen (2008). The History of Buddhism in Vietnam. CRVP. pp. 36-. .] The name given for either Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius Antoninus in the Chinese histories was "An Dun" (安敦).[The surname "An" (安) used here for the surname of Marcus Aurelius is the same as the aforementioned surname used for and .]
See also
-
Christianity in China
-
Daqin Pagoda
-
Europeans in Medieval China
-
Foreign relations of imperial China
-
Michael Shen Fu-Tsung, Chinese visitor to Europe in the 17th century
-
Nestorian Stele (Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin)
-
History of the Han dynasty
-
Serica and Serica, Latin Roman words for Chinese and China, respectively; see also Sinae
-
Sino-Roman relations
-
Zhang Qian, Western-Han Chinese explorer of Central Asia during the 2nd century BC
Notes
Citations
Sources
-
Bauman, Richard A. (2005). Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome. London & New York: Routledge, reprint of 1996 edition, .
-
Ball, Warwick (2016). Rome in the East: Transformation of an Empire, 2nd edition, London & New York: Routledge. .
-
Bretschneider, Emil (2000) 1888. Medieval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources: Fragments Towards the Knowledge of the Geography and History of Central and Western Asia from the 13th to the 17th Century, Vol. 1, reprint edition. Abingdon: Routledge.
-
Brosius, Maria (2006). The Persians: An Introduction. London & New York: Routledge. .
-
Foster, John (1939). The Church in T'ang Dynasty. Great Britain: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
-
Galambos, Imre (2015). "She Association Circulars from Dunhuang", in Antje Richter, A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture. Leiden & Boston: Brill.
-
Garthwaite, Gene Ralph (2005). The Persians. Oxford & Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., .
-
Grant, R. G. (2005). Battle: A Visual Journey Through 5,000 Years of Combat. DK Publishers. .
-
Hansen, Valerie (2012). The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. .
-
Haw, Stephen G. (2006). Marco Polo's China: a Venetian in the Realm of Kublai Khan. London & New York: Routledge. .
-
Hill, John E. (2004). The Peoples of the West from the Weilue 魏略 by Yu Huan 魚豢 : A Third Century Chinese Account Composed between 239 and 265. Draft annotated English translation. [3]
-
-
-
Jenkins, Philip (2008). The Lost History of Christianity: the Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – and How It Died. New York: HarperCollins. .
-
Lieu, Samuel N.C. (2013). "The 'Romanitas' of the Xi'an Inscription," in Li Tang and Deitmer W. Winkler (eds), From the Oxus to the Chinese Shores: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia. Zürich & Berlin: Lit Verlag. .
-
Luttwak, Edward. (1 November 2009). The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Harvard University Press. .
-
Mawer, Granville Allen (2013). "The Riddle of Catigara" in Robert Nichols and Martin Woods (eds), Mapping Our World: Terra Incognita to Australia, 38–39. Canberra: National Library of Australia. .
-
Osborne, Milton (2006) 2000. The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, revised edition. .
-
Ostrovsky, Max (2007). Y = Arctg X: the Hyperbola of the World Order. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth: University Press of America. .
-
Sezgin, Fuat; Carl Ehrig-Eggert; Amawi Mazen; E. Neubauer (1996). نصوص ودراسات من مصادر صينية حول البلدان الاسلامية. Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften (Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University).
-
Wood, Frances(2002). The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia. University of California Press. .
-
Young, Gary K. (2001). Rome's Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BC - AD 305. London & New York: Routledge. .
-
Yü, Ying-shih. (1986). "Han Foreign Relations," in Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds), The Cambridge History of China: Volume I: the Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C. – A.D. 220, 377–462. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
-
Yule, Henry (1886). Cathay and the Way Thither. Downloaded 22/12/04 from: http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/toyobunko/III-2-F-b-2/V-1/ and http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/toyobunko/III-2-F-b-2/V-2/.
Further reading
-
Leslie, D. D., Gardiner, K. H. J.: "The Roman Empire in Chinese Sources", Studi Orientali, Vol. 15. Rome: Department of Oriental Studies, University of Rome, 1996
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Pulleyblank, Edwin G.: "The Roman Empire as Known to Han China", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 119, No. 1 (1999), pp. 71–79
External links
