Central Asia. Ten thousand Roman soldiers from Marcus Licinius Crassus’s legions, defeated in battle, were taken prisoner and taken as slaves to Antioch, now called Mary, in Turkmenistan. 145 of these legionaries would later end up with the Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, settling in China, 12 centuries before Marco Polo. This would explain the myth of the city of Liqian, registered by the Han Dynasty in 5 AD. Liqian is the name the Chinese used to refer to the Roman Empire. And the Chinese at the time used to name cities founded by refugees from other nations after their areas of origin. Using this clue, more recent attempts have been made to locate the city of Liqian in the village of Zhelaizhai, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, whose inhabitants still have lighter eyes than the Chinese and curly hair.
