netball. Outside stood a Ming dynasty bell tower, complete on a crossroad. But at the town’s southern end, heralding the rumours which had drawn me here, was the statue of a mandarin flanked by a Roman soldier and a Roman matron. They were chunky and weirdly characterless. The Romans had Chinese eyes, half Chinese dress. Only an inscription identified them.
They disclosed a strange story. In 53 BC , when Rome was ruled by the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and the Chinese empire was expanding under the Han dynasty, the boorish and avaricious Crassus, hunting for the military glory of his peers, marched an army of forty-five thousand against the West’s ancestral enemy, the Persian empire. But Persia no longer fielded the cumbrous phalanxes of its past. It had been overrun by a half-nomadic Parthian dynasty, whose elusive horsemen could fire a tempest of heavy arrows at full gallop. As the Romans started across the desert beyond the Euphrates, they were surrounded by a haze of cavalry. In an unnerving moment, while the air shook with a terrible reverberation of leather drums strung with bells, the Parthians unfurled banners of blinding gold-embroidered silk–astuff the Romans had never seen. Although the legionaries formed their traditional ‘tortoise’, converting themselves to a moving shell of locked shields and spears, the Parthian bolts pierced clean through their armour, sometimes nailing their arms to their shields, their feet to the ground. Through three long, hot days twenty thousand Romans died without getting to grips with the enemy. Others escaped back over the Euphrates. Crassus was killed–the Parthian king would fill his skull with gold–and the last exhausted ten thousand men surrendered.
According to Plutarch, these shattered soldiers were marched away to guard the eastern frontiers of Parthia as mercenaries. There they vanished. In 20 BC , when Rome made peace and requested their repatriation, not a remnant could be found.
Two thousand years later they re-emerged in the imagination of an Oxford Sinologist, Homer Dubs. In Han dynasty annals he discovered the account of a Chinese battle against a Hunnish chief, seventeen years after the Roman disaster. The Chinese recorded in astonishment how a corps of elite soldiers had defended the gates of the Huns’ stockade with their shields locked in a curious fish-scale formation. After the Chinese victory, Dubs believed, these soldiers–the leftover veterans of Crassus–were among the handful captured; and around this time there appeared in Han records a little settlement named Lijian in the Gansu corridor. It was common practice for settlements to be named after those transferred there, and Lijian–a Chinese corruption of Alexandria, perhaps–was synonymous with the Roman empire. Soon afterwards, in mounting oddity, the place was briefly renamed Jielu, ‘Captives from the Storming’.
For years the notion was lost in the corridors of academe, then resurfaced for a moment in the enthusiasm of a Chinese scholar who died with his work unpublished. In 1993 some archaeologists, digging near Yongchang in the village of Zhelaizhai, the supposed site of Lijian, identified Roman-era walls. Stories began appearing in the local Chinese press. The people of Zhelaizhai were rumoured to have blond hair and blue eyes. They were very tall. They practised bull-worship. Two professors at Lanchou University argued the contending cases. Then the story faded again.
I found the tiny museum of Yongchang indefinitely closed; but someone went to fetch a caretaker they called ‘the redhead’, while I waited on the pavement in stirring apprehension. A few minutes later Song Guorong was shambling towards me along the street. He was instantly strange. A knee injury tilted his six-foot frame into a gangling limp and his hair curled to his shoulders in fox-red strands. His eyes were light almonds. When I shook his hand I saw that it was pale and reddish, like mine.
They disclosed a strange story. In 53 BC , when Rome was ruled by the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and the Chinese empire was expanding under the Han dynasty, the boorish and avaricious Crassus, hunting for the military glory of his peers, marched an army of forty-five thousand against the West’s ancestral enemy, the Persian empire. But Persia no longer fielded the cumbrous phalanxes of its past. It had been overrun by a half-nomadic Parthian dynasty, whose elusive horsemen could fire a tempest of heavy arrows at full gallop. As the Romans started across the desert beyond the Euphrates, they were surrounded by a haze of cavalry. In an unnerving moment, while the air shook with a terrible reverberation of leather drums strung with bells, the Parthians unfurled banners of blinding gold-embroidered silk–astuff the Romans had never seen. Although the legionaries formed their traditional ‘tortoise’, converting themselves to a moving shell of locked shields and spears, the Parthian bolts pierced clean through their armour, sometimes nailing their arms to their shields, their feet to the ground. Through three long, hot days twenty thousand Romans died without getting to grips with the enemy. Others escaped back over the Euphrates. Crassus was killed–the Parthian king would fill his skull with gold–and the last exhausted ten thousand men surrendered.
According to Plutarch, these shattered soldiers were marched away to guard the eastern frontiers of Parthia as mercenaries. There they vanished. In 20 BC , when Rome made peace and requested their repatriation, not a remnant could be found.
Two thousand years later they re-emerged in the imagination of an Oxford Sinologist, Homer Dubs. In Han dynasty annals he discovered the account of a Chinese battle against a Hunnish chief, seventeen years after the Roman disaster. The Chinese recorded in astonishment how a corps of elite soldiers had defended the gates of the Huns’ stockade with their shields locked in a curious fish-scale formation. After the Chinese victory, Dubs believed, these soldiers–the leftover veterans of Crassus–were among the handful captured; and around this time there appeared in Han records a little settlement named Lijian in the Gansu corridor. It was common practice for settlements to be named after those transferred there, and Lijian–a Chinese corruption of Alexandria, perhaps–was synonymous with the Roman empire. Soon afterwards, in mounting oddity, the place was briefly renamed Jielu, ‘Captives from the Storming’.
For years the notion was lost in the corridors of academe, then resurfaced for a moment in the enthusiasm of a Chinese scholar who died with his work unpublished. In 1993 some archaeologists, digging near Yongchang in the village of Zhelaizhai, the supposed site of Lijian, identified Roman-era walls. Stories began appearing in the local Chinese press. The people of Zhelaizhai were rumoured to have blond hair and blue eyes. They were very tall. They practised bull-worship. Two professors at Lanchou University argued the contending cases. Then the story faded again.
I found the tiny museum of Yongchang indefinitely closed; but someone went to fetch a caretaker they called ‘the redhead’, while I waited on the pavement in stirring apprehension. A few minutes later Song Guorong was shambling towards me along the street. He was instantly strange. A knee injury tilted his six-foot frame into a gangling limp and his hair curled to his shoulders in fox-red strands. His eyes were light almonds. When I shook his hand I saw that it was pale and reddish, like mine.
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