Salvete Omnis, Laos Lomancamere here, you listen to the China History Podcast, my deepest

thanks for tuning in. Other than the one on Empress Jiangsun and a little bit of the

Hai Nan Renan History episodes, we haven't really gone this far back since the San Xing Duai

episodes from June of 2021. For today's CHP offering, we'll examine the legends and near misses

surrounding the relations between the Roman Empire and China. In this part one of two episodes,

the focus will be on the events during the later Han in Imperial Rome. But before we get to that,

let me offer some background to set everything up. Rome's traditional founding by Romulus

is Pagdat April 21st, 753 BC, the early years of the Spring and Autumn period in China.

509 BC, the Roman Republic was founded, Confucius was in his early 40s, traveling around Eastern

Zhou, China, and the history of the Roman Republic and Civil War would span the decades in China

from the warring states, the Qin Dynasty, and the Han up to 31 BC. The period of the Roman Empire

from Caesar Augustus up to the partition of 395 AD, spanned China's history from Wang Meng's

usurpation, cleared through to the Eastern Han, three kingdoms, and Eastern Jin, and the miserable

final decades of the Western Roman Empire, 395 to 476, and weren't so great in China either.

End of the Eastern Jin, the 16 kingdoms, and the Liu Song. So that's the big picture from higher

up than even Felix Baumgartner ever rose. That's the backdrop, and now we'll examine

how was it that these two greatest empires in the world, one on the eastern side and one on the

western side, tried and failed to reach out to one another and establish direct diplomatic relations.

A Roman map from 20 AD shows China, the land of series, in the farthest possible distance from

Roman Europe. Tollamy's map from 150 AD, again, showed China on the easternmost edge of the map,

far from Rome. This shows that Romans were at least fully aware that China existed,

and it was in a place far, far away. The moon and Mars are closer to us in our day than China was

...