Around the 2nd century BC, two predominant empires existed on planet Earth. They were the Western Han Dynasty in the East and the Roman Republic centered in the West.
In 53 B.C. an expeditionary force of Roman legionnaires under the leadership of Crassus was routed at the Battle of Carrae. 6,000 Roman survivors of this conflict on the Armenian Plain never returned to Rome. It seems as if they fell through the cracks of history. Where did they go? What happened to them after their military defeat?
Eighteen years after this historic defeat of Roman forces, evidence emerged of a county in China's Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD), which boasted a name strange to the local Chinese, a name that seemed to offer a clue to the fate of these missing soldiers from the First Legion. This place name was Liqian. How did such a strangely named county emerge? Who lived there? What was so different about this town?
More than 2,000 years later, Chinese natives with a European appearance were still being discovered in an ordinary village in this region of northwestern China. Strongly built, these people had a fair complexion, high foreheads, sunken eyes and curly reddish brown hair. Despite such un-Chinese like physical features, they spoke local Chinese dialect just like their neighbors. People outside village referred to them as the "Yellow Hair Tribe". All had been born as locals and their families had been living in this same place for many generations. So how was it possible that they displayed features so completely different from those of the other local people and so like people from lands many thousands of miles away.
