The Roman road was straight, ruthless and capable of cutting through any obstacle in its path.
The Via Egnatia retains its allure as a symbol of prosperity and hope even today. The Via Egnatia Foundation was set up recently with the mission ‘to inspire this old road with new life’ and to stimulate cultural and economic interest in the region by bringing together the different communities through which the road passes. The road, that was once used by ‘by soldiers and later by crusaders, preachers, bandits, merchants and peasant caravans loaded with skins, wines, wood and sulphur’, served ‘economic and social functions for more than two millennia’.
So this great road is still with us. In the middle of the busy Greek city of Thessalonica the ruined Arch of Galerius, built at the end of the third century AD, stands across its route. Surrounded by cars, shops and the rest of the paraphernalia of modern city life it is a permanent reminder of an ancient empire and one of the great highways that carried its wealth.
In the middle of the seventh century AD, the largest city in the world was Chang’an on the Guanzhong Plain in central China. Standing at the end of the Silk Route that brought traders from all over Asia, it was rich, civilised, and home to a population of about a million people.
China has the oldest surviving civilisation in the world. Its modern population can trace its ancestry back to the Shang dynasty that ruled from about 1700 BC. An earlier dynasty, the Xia, seems to have existed from about 1900 BC, but evidence of its activities remains slight. There were other civilisations living in other parts of the world before this date but they have since died out. China has enjoyed a continuous development, growing from a fragmented rural culture into a great, united world power.
In the West, our knowledge of this process has been remarkably limited, not least because China has often preferred to shield itself from foreign intrusion and investigation. Until the early part of the nineteenth century it was, to most Western eyes, an enormous secret world, whose wealth and attainments were glimpsed only sporadically. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imports of Chinese ceramics as a by-product of the tea trade promoted a fad for ‘chinoiserie’ as Western artists imitated what they believed to be Chinese styles in art and design. In 1793 a British diplomat, Earl Macartney, paid a visit to the Chinese Emperor on behalf of George III to try to win concessions for British trade in Chinese ports. Having agonised over the protocol of how to kneel in front of the imperial presence – his lordship would not ‘kowtow’ and prostrate himself, but agreed to go down on one knee as he would before his own king – Macartney presented a list of requests. But the Chinese were not interested. ‘I set no value on objects strange and ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures,’ was the Emperor’s haughty response. ‘Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance … there is no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.’ The British came home empty-handed.
From the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, the centre of the world lay in the East.
The Emperor who dismissed the British expedition with such disdain was Qianlong. He was a member of the Manchu or Qing dynasty that ruled China from the middle of the seventeenth century until the end of imperial rule in 1911. China was first united under a dynasty that existed nearly 2,000 years earlier, the Qin (pronounced ‘Chin’) from whom the name ‘China’ originally derives. The last emperor in this line went to his grave in 210 BC surrounded by the famous terracotta army, one of the world’s most exciting archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Although the Qin emperors only held power for fifteen years, the unification of the country under one government was an enormous,