- Yongchang County
Yongchang County (永昌县) is a county located in the province of
Gansu in China. It belongs to the prefecture ofJinchang . The ancientNorth Silk Road passes through Yongchang County; numerous Han envoys were sent west along this trackway, some parties exceeding 100 members late in the first millennium BC. TheHan Dynasty sent one mission to Parthia, which was reciprocated at around 100 BC: Roman emissaries were captured by the Chinese in 30 BC along the Silk Road at Yongchang. [ [http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=18006 C. Michael Hogan, "Silk Road, North China", The Megalithic Portal, ed. Andy Burnham] ]Liqian
During recent years, the county has entered the sight of media because many of the inhabitants of Liqian village (骊靬) are thought to be descendants of a
Roman legion . The history records of the town indicate that it was founded by captured combatants of theBattle of Zhizhi during 36 BC. In a geography book of the eastern Han Dynasty it is recorded that "Local people call the ancestorsof the Roman prisoners-of-war "Lijian" the word "Lijian" being the Chinese name for something or someone of Greco-Roman origin. [Beijing Review, Vol. 47, no. 21 (May 27, 2004)] A number of the town's inhabitants still bear some features of Europeans. ADNA test is being conducted in early 2007 in the attempt to findgenetic evidence supporting this claim. [ [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/02/wroman02.xml Roman descendants found in China? ] ]The result of this specific study is negative. The study concludes: "Overall, a Roman mercenary origin could not be accepted as true according to paternal genetic variation, and the current Liqian population is more likely to be a subgroup of the Chinese majority Han". [J. Human Genetics, Vol. 52, No. 7. (2007) pp. 584-591]
ee also
Sino-Roman relations References
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