I am of the firm belief that humanity was robbed, on a dark day back around 110 CE-ish. You probably already know the status of the west: the Roman emperor Trajan had just completed his conquest of Mesopotamia, Dacia, and the reconquest of Judea. The Roman Empire just reached its territorial peak; and this was arguably the high point of the five good emperors and the empire as a whole. Meanwhile, in China, the Han Dynasty, allied with the Kushan Empire, crushed the rebels in Kashgar and extended the protectorate of the west, penetrating deep into central Asia, stretching as far as Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan. But the Indian emperor, after being denied a Han Princess to marry, betrayed China and attacked his former allies. (saaaaar, pls redeem Chinese Princess to show Bob & lasagna)The Indians were defeated, and as a result of their retreat behind their borders, the Han emperor, for the first time, was able to send an explorer named Gan Ying west through the Parthian Empire. His mission? Investigate where the silk road terminated, and whether the rumors of a fellow great empire (known as Da Qin, Qin because the Chinese named it after the founding Chinese dynasty it was that important, and Da means 'great' in Chinese, and only China called herself 'Da', again signifying the greatness of this unknown land) were true. Gan Ying had a perilous journey, but he seemed to have made it either to the Persian Gulf, the Caspian sea, or perhaps even the Black Sea; it's unclear. Upon seeing a great expanse of water, he asked the local Persian merchants if he could cross it to reach Rome. The Persians, rich from to their positions as middle men of the silk road, had no intention of allowing China and Rome to meet and thereby bypassing Parthia, lied to Gan Ying and told him he'd need several more years of travel, when in reality he may have been a few short months away from the Roman frontier.
Gan Ying turned back, but before he did, he wrote an account of Rome based on Persian stories:"Da Qin (the Roman Empire) is also called Lijian. As it is found to the west of the sea, it is also called the Kingdom of Haixi ("West of the Sea"). The territory extends for several thousands of li. It has more than four hundred walled towns. There are several tens of smaller dependent kingdoms. The walls of the towns are made of stone. They have established postal relays at intervals, which are all plastered and whitewashed. There are pines and cypresses, as well as trees and plants of all kinds.""Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously rejected and replaced. The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion, and is not angry."
"The people of this country are all tall and honest. They resemble the people of the Middle Kingdom and that is why this kingdom is called Da Qin [or 'Great China']. This country produces plenty of gold [and] silver, [and of] rare and precious [things] they have luminous jade, 'bright moon pearls,' Haiji rhinoceroses, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, whitish chalcedony, red cinnabar, green gemstones, goldthread embroideries, rugs woven with gold thread, delicate polychrome silks painted with gold, and asbestos cloth.""They also have a fine cloth which some people say is made from the down of 'water sheep,' but which is made, in fact, from the cocoons of wild silkworms. They blend all sorts of fragrances, and by boiling the juice, make a compound perfume. [They have] all the precious and rare things that come from the various foreign kingdoms. They make gold and silver coins. Ten silver coins are worth one gold coin. They trade with Anxi [Parthia] and Tianzhu [Northwest India] by sea. The profit margin is ten to one. ... The king of this country always wanted to send envoys to Han, but Anxi [Parthia], wishing to control the trade in multi-coloured Chinese silks, blocked the route to prevent [the Romans] getting through [to China]."
As a result of Persian meddling, Rome and China would never meet in antiquity, and although Roman merchants would occasionally visit China, the first documented Roman envoy to China would arrive in the 600s, during the time of the Byzantines and Tang dynasty. But by the point, the western empire had fallen, Islam swept up Arabia, Persia, Syria and Egypt like a wild fire, the geopolitical situation had totally changed, and Rome and China were no longer the undisputed powers of the world.My question to you is what if? What if instead of turning back, Gan Ying kept on going, arrived in Rome at around the year 100, just in time to see the golden eagles of the legionary standards raised above Dacia. As a foreign envoy, he would have surely been treated with the upmost respect, especially because we know Rome also knew about China. There's little doubt that Gan would have been sitting right next to the Emperor as a guest of honor, watching treasures and slaves looted from Dacia being paraded around Rome in the post conquest triumph.
And what next? What if Gan went back to China, told the emperor of his adventures and the friendliness of the Romans, and the two empires marched into Parthia, partitioning it, and sharing a common border somewhere in Persia? What if this alliance turned into a political union? What if it turned into a cultural union? What if these two peoples intermarried and syncretisized, and Romanization met Sinicization, and within a few generations they became one people? Can you imagine if this new race and culture went on to conquer the entire world? How long would that take, maybe 500 years at most? So we'd have the unification of earth at around the year 1000. Imagine what a unified world could accomplish given what we know of these two cultures and their perpensity towards science, innovation, administration, assimilation, statecraft and warfare? Imagine not just skipping the dark ages, but as a species never having to worry about politics ever again; we would have evolved past it, like a tailbone or appendix. All our resources and minds pooled into creating the next big thing. I have 0 doubts that if Rome and China had blanda upped, we'd be a type 2 civilization by now, having colonized our solar system, and from our forward base on Pluto called 'Nova Kashi' (the Roman-Chinese name of New Kashgar, the city that started this journey, the starting point of Gan Ying's fateful travels that changed human history), we'd begin to explore the galaxy.Tldr: blame the Persians for us not being in space right now. Thank you for listening to my Ted talk.Sources:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations?wprov=sfla1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO3senO4JZ0https://min.news/en/history/0b1c649395fd0dcd87a6accfda5656a5.html
Bonus story: for a thousand years, there were rumors that China and Rome met much earlier than 600. After the disaster of Carrhae in which Crassus of the first triumvurate was executed via molten gold by the Parthians, in 53 BCE, some 10,000 Roman legionaries were captured and sent to the far eastern corner of Persia. These soldiers then went onto fight the Chinese at the battle of Zhizhi, where Chinese historians noted strange looking mercenaries in odd armor, fighting in what was described as a "fish scale formation", in which soldiers would form a shield wall, then the back lines would hold their shields over their heads to protect from missiles. Sound familiar? Maybe the testeudo, perhaps? The mercenaries were taken to China, where they were allowed to settle in what is now modern Gansu, and although it's a tiny village nowadays, the residents who have lived there since ancient times look nothing like Han Chinese people: they have lighter, pale skin, and they are often blonde or brunette.Despite all that, modern DNA testing shows no trace of Roman DNA in the Liqian villagers, and despite their cjrjoir appearance, they seem to be just a subset of the Han Chinese. So unfortunately this theory has been all but disproven. But you gotta wonder, the name 'Liqian'; it's pronounced almost identically to the word 'legion'. Or perhaps 'Lijian', the ancient, alternative name for Rome. Again I ask: what if? And the answer to this particular what if is this: despite the veracity of the story, China recently turned the small village into a tourist attraction, where you can dress up in tacky Roman togas and legionary armor and take pics with the strange looking locals.
Bonus story #2: although the Chinese and Romans never met in antiquity, the Chinese certainly met the Greco portion of the Greco Roman people, and their story is arguably more interesting than a bunch of what ifs. The furthest point that Alexander the Great would reach would be a region called Bactria, in what is now primarily Afghanistan and Tajikistan in Central Asia. There he founded a city called Alexandria Eschate, or Alexandria the furthest. After Cassander assasiantes Alexander via poison (yeah, I said it, what u gonna do about it?) and the Alexandrian successor wars kick off, most of Persia comes under the rule of Seleucus, who's empire eventually crumbles from the rising Parthians and Romans, effectively cutting off Bactria from the rest of the Greek speaking world. There, they existed as a language island and the Greco Bactrian kingdom flourished. That kingdom goes on to influence much of the events of central Asia, including a interesting art form mixing Greek, Indian, and Buddhist art. As successors of Alexander, they were known for their horsemanship, and their horses were known far and wide to be much stronger and faster than the smaller pony sized horses of China. The Chinese emperor, preparing for a war against the Xiongnu, ordered the Bactrians to sell or give them horses, a request the Greeks refused. The Chinese launched a couple expeditions into Bactria, and eventually the Greeks rose up, killed their king, then offered a Chinese general the throne, along with the horses he wanted. Thus for a few years, Bactria became a tributary of China, and there was a Chinese ruled Greek state in Central Asia with an Indian/Central Asian underclass that primarily believed in Buddha, Zeus and the Greek pantheon, and probably some Chinese folk shit as well.
