Quote Originally Posted by Cimon View Post
Well, I checked Shadow of the Silk Road and the following is the story that Thubron relates. The story is that the remnants of Crassus legions, captured at Carrhae, were sent by the Parthians to guard the Eastern frontier. When Rome requested that the soldiers be repatriated in 20 BC, they apparently could not be found. (I believe this comes from Plutarch).

Thubron relates that, according to an Oxford Sinologist named Homer Dubs (for whom I neither can nor cannot vouch, as I know nothing about him. Can anyone evaluate Dubs for us?) discovered an account of the Han dynasty military attacking a "Hunnish chief" where some elite soldiers guarded the stockade in a "fish-scale" formation, which Dubs took to be the testudo. After the Chinese victory, the soldiers were, according to Dubs, captured and resettled in the Gansu corridor. Apparently, it was Chinese practice to name settlements after those who were settled there. At that time, in Han dynasty records, there appears in the Gansu corridor a settlement named "Lijian" (which I have also seen written as Liqian). Lijian is the Chinese corrupt translation of Alexandria, which was synonymous in China with the Roman empire. Very soon afterward, Lijian was briefly renamed "Jielu," which means "Captives from the Storming."

In 1993, some archaeologists digging near the village of Zhelaizhai in Yongchang county (Gansu corridor) identified Roman-era (although not necessarily Roman) walls. The people in Zhelaizhai do appear to have fairer features, including a higher incidence of lighter hair and eyes, as well as curly hair. Thubron meets the caretaker of the Yongchang museum, who is known among the locals as "the redhead." A Beijin geneticist took blood and urine samples from 200 local inhabitants, and forty of the people showed some trace of Indo-European ancestry.

None of this is definitive of course. First of all, nothing here specifically screams "ROMAN." Second, Thubron's book is a singular source, and not even an academic one at that. Third, I would like to know how Dubs is thought of in the academic community. Fourth, even Thubron himself (again, not a scholar, but his opinion still means something since he was there), while finding the idea intriguing, eventually decides that there is probably not enough evidence to be Roman, and, as he writes it, "Little by little, in my sad imagination, Wang's [a person he meets with hazel-green eyes and curly cinnamon-colored hair with Western facial structure] Roman helmet was being dislodged by a Sogdian peaked hat or a Persian cap."

The locals, however, certainly believe it: in Yongchang, there is a statue (recently erected) of a Chinese mandarin flanked by a Roman soldier and Roman matron. Probably not true (or at least unprovable), but a fun story nonetheless.
We had a thread here discussing this episode a while back. Basically, the identification of the troops as Romans is tenuous in the extreme and would require a small group of captured soldiers being moved thousands of miles in order for it to have happened. The claim by Zhelaizhai pops up every once in a while and is baseless. There were plenty of peoples in Central Asia who had (and still have) light skin and fair hair, and they are much more likely candidates for these traces of Indo-European ancestry than Romans. These claims, like the one made that the Tarim mummies are long lost relatives of the Celts because they were tall, fair, and wore clothing with plaid patterns, are almost totally speculative and only really gain any sort of acceptance because they are parroted by those in the media looking for a sensational story whenever they do emerge.