ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews textual, cartographic, and material evidence for contact between China and Byzantium from the fifth to the mid-eighth century. Objects from ‘Fulin’ found in tombs indicate that Byzantine goods, especially gold coins, reached China via Turkic and Sogdian intermediaries, where they inspired imitations. They seem to have been valued not only for their material but also for their positive associations with the West, associated with immortality and divinity. Evidence for transcultural flow westward is more limited and later in date, but ties with faraway China support the conclusion that Byzantium was a ‘global’ civilisation in the early Byzantine centuries.
