At the edge of the Gobi in Gansu province, in Yongchang County, sits a village called Zhelaizhai, now usually referred to as Liqian. Some of its residents have strikingly Western-looking features, and for decades the village has been described in newspapers and documentaries as home to the descendants of a lost Roman army. The county leaned into the story: a statue at the entrance to Yongchang shows a Roman legionary beside a Confucian scholar and a Muslim woman, and the village gained a pillared Roman-style portico for visitors.
What happened
The story begins with a real Roman disaster. In 53 BC Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, led an army into Mesopotamia and was crushed by Parthian horse archers at Carrhae, in what is now southeastern Turkey. Crassus was killed and about ten thousand of his men were taken prisoner. Roman writers had only scraps about their fate. Pliny the Elder said the captives were marched some 1,500 miles east to Margiana, near Merv in modern Turkmenistan, to guard the Parthian frontier, and the poet Horace imagined them marrying local women and serving their captors.
Seventeen years later, and far to the east, the Han general Chen Tang attacked the stronghold of Zhizhi, a breakaway Xiongnu ruler who had established himself in Central Asia. The official History of the Former Han describes the battle in some detail. It mentions more than a hundred foot soldiers drilling on either side of the gate in a “fish-scale formation” and a double wooden palisade outside the earthen wall. After the town fell the Chinese counted their captives, and 145 men were listed as taken alive, apart from more than a thousand who surrendered.
The investigation
In the 1940s and 1950s the Oxford sinologist Homer H. Dubs linked these episodes. In a lecture to the China Society in 1955, published in 1957 as A Roman City in Ancient China, he argued that the fish-scale formation was the Roman shield wall known as the testudo, that the double palisade was a Roman style of fortification, and that the drilling soldiers were survivors of Carrhae who had drifted east as mercenaries. He identified them with the 145 prisoners and proposed that the Han settled them on the western frontier in a county called Li-chien, now written Liqian, a name the Chinese also used for the distant Hellenistic and Roman west. Dubs noted that Li-chien was one of very few towns in a Han register of the year AD 5 named for a foreign land.
The theory was revived in China in the 1990s, after reports that the remains of an old fortification near the village resembled Roman defensive works. By the mid-2000s scientists had taken blood samples from 93 people in and around Liqian to test whether their ancestry was European, and the village became a minor tourist attraction.
The explanations
Every link in Dubs’s chain has been challenged. In a detailed 2006 critique, Ethan Gruber points out that a close-packed formation of overlapping shields could just as easily have been a Hellenistic phalanx learned from the Greek kingdoms of Bactria, and that double palisades were neither unique to nor common in Roman fortification, while steppe peoples are known to have built them. Earlier critics noted that scholars could not agree what Li-chien originally referred to, with Egyptian Alexandria, Petra and Hyrcania all proposed; that Romans would hardly name a town after Alexander; and that Carrhae veterans would have been in their fifties by 36 BC. Chinese records never say where the 145 captives came from. No Roman coins, weapons or other artifacts have been found at the village.
Genetics delivered the clearest answer. In 2007 a team publishing in the Journal of Human Genetics analyzed the Y chromosomes of 227 men from Liqian and three comparison populations. About 77 percent of the Liqian men carried paternal lineages restricted to East Asia, and the group as a whole clustered closely with Han Chinese rather than with Central Asian or European populations. The authors concluded that a Roman mercenary origin could not be supported by the paternal evidence. Chinese scientists quoted in the press have also pointed out that the area lay on the Silk Road, where centuries of trade and intermarriage could explain occasional Western features without any legion.
Where it stands
The battle of Carrhae, the lost captives and the siege of Zhizhi are all historical. The bridge between them is not: nothing in the Chinese or Roman record places Crassus’s men at Zhizhi, and the people of Liqian are genetically close to their Han neighbors. The idea persists because it is a good story and a useful one for local tourism, and a Lanzhou University research center opened in 2010 to look for further evidence. The lost legion of China is best understood as a twentieth-century scholarly hypothesis that became a local legend.