ABSTRACT
At a time when the countries of the Far East are rapidly becoming future world powers, when China is surpassing Germany as the most important export nation in the world and India is vying to rise up from the level of a developing country, it is sometimes necessary to remind us of the paucity of information on this part of the world in the not so distant past. And while the travelogue of the Venetian Marco Polo stands out as the one account that became widely known in the Middle Ages as it chronicled the journeys of the members of Marco Polo’s family to the Middle Kingdom under Kublai Chan during their two separate voyages from 1260 to 1266 and anew from 1271 to 1295, there were rare earlier official contacts with this empire apart from trade relations that followed the silk routes: Chinese sources report of a Roman ‘mission’ that reached China in 166 A.D. There is a record in the Hou Hanshu (‘History of the Later Han Chinese Dynasty’) that a Roman delegation arrived at the Chinese capital Luoyang in 166 – during the reign of Marc Aurelius (161-180 A.D.) – and was greeted by Emperor Huan of the Han Dynasty. 1
