Chinese village residents may be descended from ancient Romans: study

[Mihais]

FYI,Europeans were (and still are )a diverse group,unlike no other I may add.Also at the time a good deal of Roman armies was made of romanised N Italian Celts.Caesar also sent Crassus a force made of pure Gauls(although given the way they fought I doubt many survived to be deported in China).No Rus were in sight at the time.Not even in Sweden.

OOE&Xinhui,is it impossible for this folklore to be invented in more recent times?

[xinhui]

it could be. However, Turks and other Central Asia groups have long played an important role in Chinese history. While Romans were not turks, but my point is that the Chinese also employed non-Hans in its military.







Turkic and Western regions
Main articles: Protectorate General to Pacify the West, Protectorate General to Pacify the North, and Inner Asia during the Tang Dynasty
A Tang period gilt-silver jar, shaped in the style of northern nomad's leather bag[56] decorated with a horse dancing with a cup of wine in its mouth, as the horses of Emperor Xuanzong were trained to do.[56]

The Sui and Tang carried out very successful military campaigns against the steppe nomads. Chinese foreign policy to the north and west now had to deal with Turkic nomads, who were becoming the most dominant ethnic group in Central Asia.[57][58] To handle and avoid any threats posed by the Turks, the Sui government repaired fortifications and received their trade and tribute missions.[29] They sent royal princesses off to marry Turkic clan leaders, a total of four of them in 597, 599, 614, and 617. The Sui stirred trouble and conflict amongst ethnic groups against the Turks.[59][60] As early as the Sui Dynasty, the Turks had become a major militarized force employed by the Chinese. When the Khitans began raiding northeast China in 605, a Chinese general led 20,000 Turks against them, distributing Khitan livestock and women to the Turks as a reward.[2] On two occasions between 635 to 636, Tang royal princesses were married to Turk mercenaries or generals in Chinese service.[60] Throughout the Tang Dynasty until the end of 755, there were approximately ten Turkic generals serving under the Tang.[61][62] While most of the Tang army was made of fubing Chinese conscripts, the majority of the troops led by Turkic generals were of non-Chinese origin, campaigning largely in the western frontier where the presence of fubing troops was low.[63] Some "Turkic" troops were nomadisized Han Chinese, a desinicized people.[64]

Civil war in China was almost totally diminished by 626, along with the defeat in 628 of the Ordos Chinese warlord Liang Shidu; after these internal conflicts, the Tang began an offensive against the Turks.[65] In the year 630, Tang armies captured areas of the Ordos Desert, modern-day Inner Mongolia province, and southern Mongolia from the Turks.[2][66] After this military victory, Emperor Taizong won the title of Great Khan amongst the various Turks in the region who pledged their allegiance to him and the Chinese empire (with several thousand Turks traveling into China to live at Chang'an). On June 11, 631, Emperor Taizong also sent envoys to the Xueyantuo bearing gold and silk in order to persuade the release of enslaved Chinese prisoners who were captured during the transition from Sui to Tang from the northern frontier; this embassy succeeded in freeing 80,000 Chinese men and women who were then returned to China.[67][68]
A tomb guard (wushi yong), terracotta sculpture, Tang Dynasty, early 8th century

While the Turks were settled in the Ordos region (former territory of the Xiongnu), the Tang government took on the military policy of dominating the central steppe. Like the earlier Han Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty (along with Turkic allies) conquered and subdued Central Asia during the 640s and 650s.[29] During Emperor Taizong's reign alone, large campaigns were launched against not only the Göktürks, but also separate campaigns against the Tuyuhun, the Tufan, the Xiyu states, and the Xueyantuo.

The Tang Empire fought with the Tibetan Empire for control of areas in Inner and Central Asia, which was at times settled with marriage alliances such as the marrying of Princess Wencheng (d. 680) to Songtsän Gampo (d. 649).[69][70] It is held in Tibetan tradition that after Songtsen Gampo died in A.D. 650, the Tang dynasty attacked and captured Lhasa.[71][72][73][73] There was a long string of conflicts with Tibet over territories in the Tarim Basin between 670-692 and in 763 the Tibetans even captured the capital of China, Chang'an, for fifteen days during the An Shi Rebellion.[74][75] In fact, it was during this rebellion that the Tang withdrew its western garrisons stationed in what is now Gansu and Qinghai, which the Tibetans then occupied along with the territory of what is now Xinjiang.[76] Hostilities between the Tang and Tibet continued until they signed a formal peace treaty in 821.[77] The terms of this treaty, including the fixed borders between the two countries, are recorded in a bilingual inscription on a stone pillar outside the Jokhang temple in Lhasa.[78]

During the Islamic conquest of Persia (633-656), the son of the last ruler of the Sassanid Empire, Prince Pirooz, fled to Tang China.[48][79] According to the Book of Tang, Pirooz was made the head of a Governorate of Persia in what is now Zaranj, Afghanistan. During this conquest of Persia, the Islamic Caliph Uthman Ibn Affan (r. 644-656) sent an embassy to the Tang court at Chang'an.[62] By the 740s, the Arabs of Khurasan had established a presence in the Ferghana basin and in Sogdiana. At the Battle of Talas in 751, Qarluq mercenaries under the Chinese defected, which forced Tang commander Go Seonji (d. 756, also known as Gao Xianzhi, a general of Goguryeo descent) to retreat. Although the battle itself was not of the greatest significance militarily, this was a pivotal moment in history; it marks the spread of Chinese papermaking into regions west of China,[80][81] ultimately reaching Europe by the 12th century. Although they had fought at Talas, on June 11, 758, an Abbasid embassy arrived at Chang'an simultaneously with the Uyghur Turks in order to pay tribute.[82] From even further west, a tribute embassy came to the court of Taizong in 643 from the Patriarch of Antioch.[83] In 788-9 the Chinese concluded a military alliance with the Uighur Turks who twice defeated the Tibetans, in 789 near the town of Kuch'eng in Jungharia, and in 791 near Ning-hsia on the Yellow River.[84]

Tang Dynasty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Ironduke]

Chinese village residents may be descended from ancient Romans: study

Additional resource on the subject:
Romans in China?

Baffled peasants in a windswept village in Gansu province are being described by Chinese newspapers as blond-haired, blue-eyed descendants of Roman mercenaries who allegedly fought the Han Chinese 2,000 years ago. While no one in the modern town of Lou Zhuangzi is fair and there is no proof that the Romans ever set foot in Gansu before the Christian era, the reports have revived discussion over whether a group of Romans offered their services to the Hun warlord Jzh Jzh in 36 B.C. before settling in the Gansu village of Liqian, thought by some to be Lou Zhuangzi.

This idea was first proposed by Homer Hasenphlug Dubs, an Oxford University professor of Chinese history, who speculated in 1955 that some of the 10,000 Roman prisoners taken by the Parthians after the battle of Carrhae in southeastern Turkey in 53 B.C. made their way east to Uzbekistan to enlist with Jzh Jzh against the Han. Chinese accounts of the battle, in which Jzh Jzh was decapitated and his army defeated, note unusual military formations and the use of wooden fortifications foreign to the nomadic Huns. Dubs postulated that after the battle the Chinese employed the Roman mercenaries as border guards, settling them in Liqian, a short form of Alexandria used by the Chinese to denote Rome. While some Chinese scholars have been critical of Dubs' hypothesis, others went so far as to identify Lou Zhuangzi as the probable location of Liqian in the late 1980s.

Ten years later, still no academic papers have been published on the subject, and no archaeological investigation has been conducted in Lou Zhuangzi, but the media and local government remain unfazed. County officials, sensing potential tourist revenue, have erected a Doric pavilion in Lou Zhuangzi, while the county capital of Yongchang has decorated its main thoroughfare with enormous statues of a Roman soldier and a Roman woman flanking a Communist party official.

[Bigfella]

This idea was first proposed by Homer Hasenphlug Dubs, an Oxford University professor of Chinese history

Best academic name ever? I want it to be true for this reason alone.

[cr9527]

I think turks would be a far more likely scenario.

What people tend to not understand is that from Pakistan westwards(india too), majority of the people are Caucasians. That includes Arabs, Europeans, spanish, hispanic, indians, etc. (correct me if I'm wrong)

I saw a discovery channel documentary talking about Caucasians in China, and that these people could've been from the silk trades.

[astralis]

this deserves a ranking on the "world's weirdest statues":

while the county capital of Yongchang has decorated its main thoroughfare with enormous statues of a Roman soldier and a Roman woman flanking a Communist party official.