Chinese in Roman Britain

[Michael Kerr]

 I think a lot of the slaves, from these Northern Black Sea City states were bought by the local land owners to work their landholdings whose grain was exported to firstly Greece and then Rome but some slaves with certain skill sets found employment as translators or scribes and perhaps some were used for prostitution. 

  Another avenue into the empire for either businessmen or slaves would have been sea travel via the Indian Ocean. The Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt built numerous Red Sea ports which were used by Roman and Greek seamen for trade with India and the Kushans and goods transported to Alexandria and then through the Mediterranean to Rome. Foreign traders more than likely would base themselves in Roman Egypt near the Red Sea ports. There is evidence that there were many foreign traders, mainly Arabian and Indian merchants present at Alexandria as Dio Chrysostom mentions in his discourses.

For I behold among you, not merely Greeks and Italians and people from neighbouring Syria, Libya, Cilicia, nor yet Ethiopians and Arabs from more distant regions, but even Bactrians and Scythians and Persians and a few Indians, and all these help to make up the audience in your theatre and sit beside you on each occasion.

 One traveller that possibly did make its way to Rome from China was the pandemic known as the Antonine Plague. The Hou Hanshu records the arrival of a virulent pandemic that swept through northern China in 162AD and wiped out or debilitated over a third of the Han army stationed on China’s northern border. 

 In 165AD Roman troops captured Seleucia after invading Parthia and occupied Babylonia but an unknown disease broke out among the troops during the winter months and the lethal illness soon reached high levels of infection forcing the Roman army to abandon the war and retreat back to Syria. The returning troops spread the disease in the main cities of the empire. Whether they are separate outbreaks (supposedly smallpox) or whether this pandemic travelled east overland from Northern China through Central Asia via the land route on the silk caravans or whether it was spread by sailors or goods travelling the Indian Ocean on the seasonal monsoon winds, it could have spread not only via Egypt but also the Persian Gulf ports like Charax and then Seleucia, we don’t know, probably both.

Regards

Michael Kerr