Sino-Roman relations comprised the mostly indirect contact, flow of trade goods, information, and occasional travellers. Mutual awareness remained low, and firm knowledge about each other was limited. Intermediate empires such as the Parthians and Kushans inhibited direct contact between these two Eurasian powers.
About Sino-Roman relations in brief
Sino-Roman relations comprised the mostly indirect contact, flow of trade goods, information, and occasional travellers. Mutual awareness remained low, and firm knowledge about each other was limited. Intermediate empires such as the Parthians and Kushans inhibited direct contact between these two Eurasian powers. The indirect exchange of goods on land along the Silk Road and sea routes included Chinese silk, Roman glassware and high-quality cloth. Roman coins minted from the 1st century AD onwards have been found in China, as well as a coin of Maximian and medallions from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius in Jiaozhi in modern Vietnam. Chinese sources describe several embassies of Fulin arriving in China during the Tang dynasty and mention the siege of Constantinople by the forces of Muawiyah I in 674–678 AD. The 7th-century AD Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta wrote of the contemporary reunification of northern and southern China, which he treated as separate nations recently at war. This mirrors both the conquest of Chen by Emperor Wen of Sui and the names Cathay and Mangi used by later medieval Europeans in China during the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty and Han-Chinese Southern Song dynasty. In Chinese records, the Roman Empire came to be known as Daqin or Great Qin. In classical sources, the problem of identifying references to ancient China is exacerbated by the interpretation of the Latin term Seres, whose meaning fluctuated and could refer to several Asian peoples in a wide arc from India over Central Asia to China.
Ptolemy provided a rough sketch of the eastern Indian Ocean, including the Malay Peninsula and beyond this the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea. Their chief chief port, Cattigara, seems to have been in the lower Mekong Delta, which served as a combined Gulf of China and South Thailand. The Sinae are placed on the northern shore of the Great Sea, on the shore of northern China. The Great Sea is thought to have served as the combined Gulf and South Sea of China, combined as a Great Gulf and Great Sea of Thailand, and the combined Great Sea and Great Gulf of Guangdong. The Sino-Chinese border between the land and sea at the end of the Land of Silk Road over the end of the Qin period was called the Sinae and Sinae were placed by sea on the north shore of the Great River of China. In the 2nd century AD, Roman authors generally seem to have confused 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 historian Ammianus Marcellus wrote that the land of the Sere was enclosed by the Yellow River, possibly around a river called Bautis, possibly in either Central Asia or in either the Golden Peninsula or the Red River. The Roman cartographers of the 1th century AD were less certain of their understanding of China but their understanding was less certain.
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This page is based on the article Sino-Roman relations published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
