Liqian, China: Settlement Site of Rome’s Lost Legion? Theory, History and Myth

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Ancient history, Geography, International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Chinese accounts of antiquity from The Book of the Later Han record the first contact between the Chinese and Roman empires as taking place in AD 166 (an event corroborated by the Roman historian Publius Annius Florus). This initial diplomatic contact of the two empires resulted from a visit of a Roman emissary—authorised by Emperor Marcus Aurelius—to Emperor Huang and the Chinese Western Han Dynasty court. Trade links were subsequently established, Chinese silk for upper class Romans and Roman glassware and high-quality cloth for the Chinese.

Book of the Later Han

Communications blocked by Parthian rivalry: This initial encounter was an initiative on the part of the Romans but earlier than this the Han Chinese had tried, unsuccessfully, to make direct contact with Rome. In AD 97 the Han Chinese general, Ban Chao, despatched ambassador Kan (or Gan) Ying on a journey to Rome(α)…upon reaching Mesopotamia from where he intended to travel by sea to his ultimate destination, Kan Ying was dissuaded from continuing by the Parthians’ exaggerated advice that the sea voyage could take up to two years to complete. Parthia had a vested interest in thwarting the forging of a Sino-Roman mutually-beneficial nexus which might negatively impact Parthian profitability from the lucrative Silk Road [‘The First Contact Between Rome and China, www.silkroad.com].

The Silk Road: (source: MPI/Getty Images)

The Silk Road: The natural route for expansion, Rome eastward and China westward, was along the Silk Road…with Roman eyes obsessively coveting Chinese silk, the premier fabric of the ancient world, and China Han rulers also keen to exchange for Roman goods, the incentives were present, but direct contact between the two great ancient empires did not eventuate(Ⴆ). Standing in the way were a host of obstacles – the distance between them was vast and over inhospitable terrain; another hostile, competing empire, Parthia, occupied the middle space on the Silk Road. Roman-Chinese trade depended therefore on intermediaries, “the people of Central Asia—most notably the Sogdians, as well as the Parthians, and merchants from the Roman client states of Palmyra and Petra—act(ing) as the middlemen” [‘Ancient Rome and Ancient China: Did They Ignore Each Other?’, Vedran Bileta, The Collector, 08-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com].

Romani indu Sinae? In the 1940s and 50s there emerged one dissenting voice to the scholarly consensus that Romans never made it to ancient China. An American Sinologist Homer H Dubs, lecturing in Chinese at Oxford University, wrote a series of articles on the subject of Roman and Chinese contacts in the Han period, culminating in his controversial 1957 book, A Roman City in Ancient China, which made the startling claim that legionnaires not only reached China but established a Roman settlement on the western fringes of the Han empire.

Battle of Carrhae (source: wikio.org)

Dubs’ “lost Roman legion”:hypothesis: In 53 BC a Roman army under the powerful Marcus Licinius Crassus was on the receiving end of a crushing defeat in the Battle of Carrhae at the hands of Parthian heavy cavalry and archers led by Spahbed (commander) Surena in southern Turkey. The Roman legions lost massive numbers of men, either killed (including its leader Crassus) or captured, in one of the Roman Empire’s worst-ever military disasters. The Roman prisoners-of-war, numbering, according to Plutarch, 10,000, were apparently carted off to Central Asia where reportedly they were married off to local women(ƈ).

Dragon Blade, (2015) 🎥 starring Jackie Chan, a fictionalised movie very loosely based on the Roman legion story

This is where Dubs and his outlier theory comes in…the Oxford professor proposed that 100–145 of the Romans ended up fighting for the Xiongnu(ԃ) against a Chinese Han army in another battle some 17 years later. The Battle of Zhizhi (36 BC), in modern-day Kazakhstan, resulted a victory for the Han Chinese, with the Xiongnu chieftain Zhizhi Chanyu among the dead. Dubs contended that these 100-odd Roman legionnaires fought in the battle, his evidence of this was a Chinese source for the battle, Ban Gu, who referred to 100 or so foot-soldiers of the enemy who employed a strange, fish-scale formation in fighting, interpreted by Dubs as a reference to the Romans’ famous phalanx defence, the testudo (tortoise) formation of interlocking shields. Dubs speculated that the captured Roman soldiers found themselves POWs once again, this time of the Chinese who transported the 100 Roman captives back to the Chinese Empire where they were resettled in Li-jien(ҽ) (later called “Liqian”), located on the edge of the Gobi Desert in modern-day Gansu Province.

Roman testudo formation

Descendants of Roman legionnaires in a Gansu village? Gene testing: Professor Dubs’ controversial theory has drawn the attention of historians, researchers, archeologists, anthropologists and even geneticists over the years, but not widespread support. Detractors have generally debunked the theory, stressing the lack of tangible archeological or historical evidence for a Roman settlement in Liqian, no findings of habitation found, eg, no Roman coins or weapons.

Some residents of contemporary Liqian village (Yongchang), noted for their green or blue eyes, fair-coloured hair and non-Chinese facial features, underwent genetic testing in 2005 which gave some credence to the Roman link theory…a DNA finding of 56% Caucasian. Further DNA testing in 2007 deflated those hopes however, showing that 77% of the villagers’ ‘Y’ chromosomes were limited to east Asia. Researchers from nearby Lanzhou University have pointed out that it was standard practice for the Roman military to employ foreign mercenaries (Europeans and Africans) for their campaigns Moreover, the demonstration that a significant block of the Liqian respondents have foreign origins doesn’t prove that they were necessarily Roman. Professor Yang Dongle (Beijing Normal University) concurred with this view, noting that inter-racial marriage along the Silk Road was far from uncommon. Yang added that research has confirmed that Liqian County was settled a good seventy years earlier than the Roman POWs are supposed to have got there [Matthew Bossons, ‘The Vanished Roman Legion of Ancient China’, That’s, (Nov. 2018), www.thatsmag.com; ‘Finding the lost Roman legion in NW China’, New China TV (video), 2015].

Villager Cai Junnian (aka “Cai Luoma”) with his green eyes and atypical Chinese complexion has become something of a poster boy for the Liqian Roman ancestry claims (photo: Natalie Behring)

Endnote: Constructing a “Roman world” to exploit the rural legend The dubiousness of the connexion aside, the media attention generated by the DNA tests and the distinctive look of the Liqian Rong has prompted proactive locals to exploit the tourist angle for what it’s worth. There’s been a concerted effort to try to capitalise on the alleged Roman ancestry in Yongchang County – in a kind of “Disneyfication” elements of neoclassical architecture have popped up in the village, a Romanesque pavilion with Doric-style columns, public statues of ancient Romans, etc. Zhelaizhai (or Lou Zhuangzi) village, as Liqian was renamed, is now marketed by Chinese tourist operators as “Liqian Ancient City”.

Statues of Roman legionnaires at the Jinshan Temple visitors’ centre

(α) or as the Chinese called Roman Empire, Da Chi’en, also rendered as Daqin (“Great Qin”)

(Ⴆ) ancient Latin writers regularly referred to Roman travellers journeying east to a country they called Serica (ser = silk)…its thought that by this that they meant the Central Asian lands, possibly including northwestern China. The name Serica, to some Romans may alternately have been a collective description for a bunch of south and east Asian countries including China and even India

(ƈ ) though, according to Pliny the Elder, the legionnaires were stationed at Margiana on the Silk Road to guard Parthia’s eastern frontier

(ԃ) a nomadic tribal confederation of Hunnic peoples

(ҽ) Dubs postulates that this was the most ancient Chinese name for Rome [H.H.Dubs, ‘A Roman City in Ancient China’, Greece and Rome, Vol. 4, Issue 2, Oct. 1957, pp.139-148]

Italy’s Acute Case of Empire Envy in the Early 1900s

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Military history, Regional History

Invoking Italy’s heritage: the glory of Rome (photo: ISTOCK.COM/MUSTANG_79)

In the late 19th century the Kingdom of Italy was still in its infancy as a fully-fledged, unified state in Europe, nonetheless Italians were casting an envious eye over the smorgasbord of colonial possessions other European powers were snaffling up (seemingly effortlessly) in the free-for-all known as the “Scramble for Africa”. In a climate of burgeoning nationalist sentiments Italian politicians were quick to underscore the country’s historical association with Ancient Rome by way of its imperial credentials. By the turn of the century Italy had secured a minor foothold in Africa with two East African colonies, in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, but what it really wanted was a base in North Africa, a prerequisite for expanding its sway into the Mediterranean (mare nostrum – “our sea“𝟷̷). Real estate options in Africa had rapidly dried up however, France had already established colonies in Tunisia, Algeria and (shared with Spain) Morocco, and Egypt was a British “veiled protectorate”. The Italian focus turned to the one remaining Mediterranean territory in North Africa, Libya, then comprising several provinces, the principal ones being the Regency of Tripoli or Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica, both semi-autonomous vilayets of the Ottoman Empire.

Illustrated map of Italian campaign with fleet blockade of Libyan ports (source: Media Storehouse)

Italian imperialist designs: Search for a casus belli
Italian nationalists and imperialists, whipped up by the frenzy created by the jingoistic Italian press, started to agitate for Italy to annex Tripoli. The territory being in close proximity to the southern tip of Italy made it attractive as a base from which to control the central Mediterranean𝟸̷. As the groundswell for war in Italian society gathered momentum and pressured by war hawks in his own cabinet, Italian Prime Minister Gioltti sounded out the European powers, most of whom voiced no objections to Italy’s plan for occupation of Libya𝟹̷. The Italian government tried to provoke the Ottoman regime into war…drumming up pretexts for intervention, eg, the small Italian community in Libya was supposedly being mistreated (highly exaggerated!). On the strength of this Gioltti issued an ultimatum to the Ottomans to immediately cede Tripoli to Italy. The Ottoman government of the “Young Turks” vacillated before asking Rome to accept a Britain/Egypt style solution (the would-be coloniser assumes real power in the colony while the former coloniser retains nominal suzerainty over the colony). Italy refused this counter-offer point blank, declared war in September 1911 and commenced preparing its invasion force.

Port of Tripoli, ca.1910 (image: delcampe.net)

A settler-colonial society
Italy’s motives for acquiring a colony in Libya were not entirely about national pride and resurrecting the glory of the Roman Empire. The Italian state, post-unification, had serious social problems. The underdeveloped national economy was incapable of coping with the exponential growth in population, for which there was insufficient work and insufficient food for all the people. A new colony in North Africa just over the sea, the politicians surmised, would solve this dilemma, a receptacle to drain off surplus Italian population with the emigrants becoming small agricultural producers in Libya (‘The Italo-Turkish War’, Osprey Blog (Gabriele Esposito), 17-Sep-2020, www.ospreypublishing.com).

Italian troops in action, Libya 1911

Italian expectations, strategy and stalemate
When war was declared Italy’s superior navy was easily able to intercept and prevent attempts by Ottoman naval vessels to transport troops and equipment to Libya. Turkish commanders Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal and other army personnel had to resort to smuggling themselves into Libya, mainly via Egypt. Italian forces having landed in Tripoli quickly took control of the coastal regions of Libya necessitating the Ottoman military units and Arab Bedouin fighters to withdrew to the interior. Italy had expected a quick victory in the conflict and had counted on the native Arab population welcoming the Italian soldiers as liberators from the Turks, it was wrong on both counts. Arab and Bedouin tribesmen (Muslim Senussi clan), combined together with the Ottoman units to staunchly resist the invading Christians (the Arabs’ irregular forces (hamidiye) proved to be quite effective fighters). The invasion force also found itself fighting the Libyan conditions, harsh landscape, extreme heat, wind, etc described by one historian as scatolone di sabbia (a “box of sand”) (Charles Stephenson, Box of Sand: The Italo–Ottoman War, 1911-1912, (2014)). The Italians were further hampered by the utter inadequacy of its maps of the region (relying on old maps, some of which were from the Ancient Roman era!) The Italian military strategy was to try to draw the defenders into engaging in open, full-scale, conventional battles, the Ottoman and Arab resistance refused to oblige them, rather the defenders resorted to fighting a guerrilla war, a mode of fighting which the Italians failed abjectly to adapt to (‘Italy-Turkish War’, (documentary), The Great War series (2021)). A stalemate ensued…despite putting a force in the field in Libya of up to 100,000 soldiers (including Somali mercenaries), the Italians could not make any military headway inland and yet at the same time the desert-based defenders couldn’t expel the invaders from the country.

Mustafa Kemal with Senussi tribesmen, Tobruk 1911

Air, land and sea
With no progress in sight on the land front the Italians in 1912 opted for a new strategy, launching a naval campaign against the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman possessions in the Aegean Sea—the province of Rhodes and other islands in the Dodecanese chain—were attacked by gunboat and captured. The Italian navy heavily shelled the cities of Beirut and Smyrna in Asia Minor, blocked the Ottomans’ Red Sea ports and even made an unsuccessful assault by sea on the Dardanelles.

Ottoman surrender of Rhodes to Italians (source: La Domenica del Corriere, May-June 1912)

As the costly and increasingly unpopular war dragged on much longer than anticipated, the mounting concern of European states prompted them to initiate peace talks between the warring parties. After a few failures a peace agreement was eventually reached in October 1912 with the Treaty of Ouchy (AKA First Treaty of Lausanne) on terms favourable to Italy. The Constantinople government ceded Tripoli and Cyrenaica to Italy who promised to return the Dodecanese Islands to Turkey, however a turn of events in the region prevented this from ever happening.

Pax (source: Media Storehouse)

Fallout and Aftermath
The Italo-Turkish War’s biggest consequence was to contribute to the destabilisation of the Balkans. The impact of that was felt immediately – one day after the Treaty of Ouchy was signed Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire, with the other member-states of the Balkan League doing likewise a week later, setting in motion a war continuum that would lead to the catastrophic Great War in 1914 and further reversals for the Turks. The Ottoman Empire emerged from the 1911-1912 conflict with its reputation as the “Sick man of Europe” further tarnished. Italy, though the victor, must have had some mixed feelings about its decision to commit to the military adventure. The war dragged on for over a year, drained 1.3 bn lira from the Italian coffers and cost several thousand Italian lives either killed in action or from disease. Yes, it won itself a colony in the North Mediterranean but this in itself brought further headaches for Italy as Arab and Bedouin rebels in the Libyan hinterland doggedly continued their violent resistance to their new colonial masters for decades afterwards (‘The Great War’).

Footnote: A series of martial “firsts”
Despite the Italo-Ottoman War being one of the lesser known international conflicts in modern history, it is significant for a number of innovations in warfare. It was the first war to utilise aircraft in combat missions, and the first to practice aerial bombing of the enemy lines. The Turco-Italian War also marked the debut of armoured vehicles. And it was the first three-dimensional war, ie, fought on land, sea and air. The Italians’ use of airplanes in warfare however was not particularly effective militarily in flight missions. It’s much greater benefit was in their reconnaissance value – aerial photographs, and intelligence allowing the Italians to spy on ground troop movements, etc (‘The Great War’).

Italian airplane raiding Turkish-Arab ground troops (source: suttori.com)

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𝟷̷ Mare nostrum, deriving from Roman antiquity, was a concept “deployed to anchor Italian imperialism in Africa” at this time and during the later Fascist period, Agbamu, S. (2019). ‘Mare Nostrum: Italy and the Mediterranean of Ancient Rome in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’; Fascism 8(2), 250-274. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00802001.

𝟸̷ Mussolini would later describe Libya as impero italiano’s quarta sponda (“fourth shore”)

𝟹̷ Germany and Austria-Hungary were not so positive about the Italians’ move

🇮🇹 🇹🇷 🇱🇾

Juggling the Double-edged Sword of Late Antiquity Imperial Migration: The Roman Empire’s Mishandling of a 4th Century Gothic Refugee Crisis

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, Military history, Regional History

2015 was an apogean year for international refugee influx into Europe, the dislocation of war and the fear of persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea brought more asylum seekers to the continent than any time to that point since WWIIa.The sheer scale of the refugee movements, the tragedy of mass drownings, military interventions and border controls, the hostility of some governments towards the continuous tide of migration, the utter chaos and misery of the refugees’ plight, the whole humanitarian disaster all has echoes from distant history.

⍓ Clash between refugees and Hungarian police (Photo: www.rt.com)

The Huns, movers and shakers in the barbarian lands
The refugee crisis in Europe reminded some observers of a chapter in the declining days of imperial Rome. The catalyst for this Late Antiquity migration story was the emergence of the nomadic and war-like Huns. Leaving their homeland (not known for certain but possibly Kazakhstan in Central Asia) after AD 350, the Huns moved along the Black Sea, engaging and defeating the Vandals, the Alans, the Goths and other Germanic and Slavic peoples that they encountered on their path of destruction. By circa 370 the military success of the Hunnic hordes had forced many of the defeated peoples to migrate west toward the Roman Empire. As a consequence, in 376 a large group of Goths comprising perhaps 100,000 men, women and children from two tribes—the Thervingi and the Greuthungi—suddenly turned up on the banks of the lower Danube River, the boundary of Rome’s eastern imperial reach, fleeing from the Huns. The Goths pleaded with Valens, emperor of the east for sanctuary, pledging their allegiance to the empire. The absorption of ‘barbarians’ within the Empire was an established policy of assimilation practiced by Rome, an initial step on a process of transforming foreigners into Roman citizens, albeit with certain limitations on their rights [‘1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire’, Annalisa Merelli, Quartz, Upd. 09-May-2016, www.qz.com].

⍓ Valens’ numismatic likeness

Receptiob or denego?
After lengthy deliberation Valens made a momentous decision…allowing the Thervingi into the imperial territory in return for loyalty to Constantinople and that they provide infantry for the emperor’s armies. At the same time Valens denied permission to the second group of Goths, the Greuthungi, to enter Roman territory. According to the main source we have for this period, historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Valens thought he had secured himself a great deal, a cheap supply of foreign labour and a boost to the empire’s tax revenue [Dan Jones, Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (2021)].  

⍓ Moesia/Danube border, Roman Empire

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Roman border security
Traditionally, the Romans were very efficient at managing the flow of migration within the empire. Rarely using walls, they relied on natural barriers in the landscape such as rivers and mountains. To defuse any potential threats, the foreign tribes were customarily relieved of their weapons, broken up into smaller groupings and sent off to underpopulated regions. Unfortunately for this project, the traditional practices were not implemented. The operation, delegated to two venal Roman officials to coordinate, was a disaster. The two, Lupicinus and his deputy (dux) Maximus, were incompetent, corrupt and exploitative in their duties. The Thervingi were not made to hand over their weapons, nor were they divided into smaller numbers and dispersed to different regions. In their greed the Roman officials allowed too many of the Thervingi to cross the Danube at the same time, with the result that many Goths perished in the river. When it came to settling the Goths, the two officials committed a series of abuses against the new settlers including selling them the desperately needed supplies at massively inflated pricesc .  And to top off the snafu, Lupicinus and Maximus failed to prevent the barred Greuthungi from crossing the Danube illegally by their own means further downstream [‘Immigration: How ancient Rome dealt with the Barbarians at the gate’, Cavan W. Concannon, The Conversation, 13-Feb-2019, www.theconversation.com].

(Image: slidetodoc.com)

Spirally out of hand fast
From there things went from bad to worst between the Romans and the ever more aggrieved Thervingi. Valens tried to eliminate the Thervingi leadership which backfired spectacularly…a riot ensued and their chieftain Fritigern reneged on his allegiance to the emperor, and most dangerously allied with the Greuthungi against the Romans. Valens was faced with “a unified, massive Gothic army, loose and armed in Roman territory” (Concannon).  The increasingly formidable Goths launched a series of revolts and plundered wealthy Thracian villages and estates (Jones).

Blundering into a military catastrophe 
In 378 Emperor Valens, underestimating the strength of the enemy and imprudently declining to wait until reinforcements arrived from the western Roman emperor (his nephew Gratian), engaged a combined army of Goths and Alans (with cavalry) in the Battle of Adrianopled . The battle went badly for the Romans, Valens made tactical errors and the army was outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by the barbarians led by Fritigern, resulting in a crushing total defeate .This time Valens paid for his blunder with his life, along with that of roughly two-thirds of the Roman army. Reverberations from the debacle went deep, both Christian and pagan contemporaries saw it as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. For St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, it signified “the end of all humanity, the end of the world” [Lenski, Noel. “Initium Mali Romano Imperio: Contemporary Reactions to the Battle of Adrianople.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 127 (1997): 129–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/284390.]

⍓ Solidus depicting Emperor Theodosius

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The new emperor, Theodosius I, brokered a peace with the Goths in 382, the circumstances after Adrianople compelling him to accept the settlement of the semi-autonomous group of the Thervingi between the Danube River and the Balkan mountains. Within the Roman Empire, the Goths and other barbarians were granted the status of foederati (a federation of client peoples allied by treaty to Rome – in return for certain subsidies and benefits the barbarians were required to provide manpower for military service, eg, as auxiliary mercenary forces to guard the Empire’s frontiers, AKA līmitāneī). At best Theodosius’s pax Gothica was a holding operation, buying the declining Empire time only. The barbarians once inside the imperial borders evolved swiftly into an entrenched force and a growing threat, as the rise of the Visigoths (see note below) and their king, Alaric I, was to demonstrate in the 390s.

 

⍓ Delacroix’s painting of Attila the Hun

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Postscript: The Huns’ invasions of the lands to the south and west, a decisive push to expand its empire, stimulated  the “Great Migration” of peoples, successive waves of migration, raids and rebellions, which weakened the fabric of Roman civilisation, contributing to the eventual collapse of the Roman Empire (AD 410).The Hunnic empire reached its peak in the two decades from 434 when its most famous leader Attila attained power. Under Attila the Huns cut a swathe through Eastern Europe (even invading Gaul), forcing the eastern Roman emperor to agree to pay him an annual tribute of 2,100 pounds of gold in return for peace. Attila died in 453 and bereft of his cohesive and dynamic leadership the Hunnic empire collapsed within six years.

(Image: Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean)

Note: Visigoths vs Ostrogoths
Visigoths was the name ascribed to the western tribes of Germanic Goths, who are thought to have descended from the Thervingi tribe. In the 5th century their sphere of influence extended as far west as the Iberian Peninsula. Ostrogoths is the corresponding name for the eastern tribes of Goths, their antecedents coming from the Greuthungi tribe. From their base north of the Black Sea the Ostrogoths in the 5th century extended their influence into Italy.

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 a 1.3M, escalating rapidly thereafter, by the end of 2016 the numbers had reached 5.2M (‘Refugee crisis in Europe’, www.unrefugees.org

b receptio (Latin) was the Roman term for integrating external groups seeking asylum in the Empire

c even forcing the starving Goths to sell them their children for slavery in return for dog food!

d modern-day Edirne in Turkey

e Rome’s worst military reversal since Cannae and Hannibal (216 BC)