> My funniest "Romans trading with China" story comes from Nigel Sitwell's
> excellent book "Outside the Empire: the world the Romans knew" (highly
> recommended), and goes like this:
Well, here's the original version. From "Outside the Empire: the World the Romans Knew," by Nigel Sitwell (1984):
... We do know that by the second century AD some [traders] were coming all the way from the Roman Empire. This is revealed in a note in the Chinese annals:
"In the ninth year of the Yen-hsi period [AD 166], in the reign of Emperor Huan, king An-Tun of Ta-ch'in sent an embassy. From the frontier of Jih-nan this offered ivory, rhinoceros horn and tortoiseshell; from that time began direct trade relations with this country -- but their tribute contained no jewels whatever..."
['An-tun' was the Emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (AD 161-180); 'Ta-ch'in' was the standard Chinese name for the Roman Empire. Jih-nan was the most southerly of China's possessions, in what is now the middle part of Vietnam...]
Whether the so-called embassy set out with the official backing of 'An-tun' is doubtful. It could well have been a private trading enterprise rather than a true embassy, bringing in the name of the Roman emperor "to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Emperor Huan, at all events, was unimpressed by the gifts; ivory, rhinoceros-horn and tortoiseshell were substances which he knew perfectly well already. The givers had made the elementary mistake of assuming that what seemed exotic to them must also seem exotic to the recipient. A present of Baltic amber, Phoenician glass, Mediterranean coral or Roman cameos would at least have had the advantage of novelty; but these too might well have failed to arouse the Emperor's enthusiasm. Much later, when Western merchants really did have valuable and useful things to sell, the Chinese continued to infuriate them by taking precisely the same attitude that their ancestors had taken. As emperor Ch'ien Lung explained to Lord Macartney at the end of the eighteenth century:
"Our Celestial Empire produces everything that the human race could possibly require, in profuse abundance. We therefore have no need to purchase the goods of barbarians, however interesting and curious these may be."
Cheers, Nick
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